Sometimes I've wondered if the vision of Khan Academy executed to its fullest would be to have a Stack Overflow-like up-/down-voting system for user-submitted videos. Khan Academy is amazing (note: I'll be interning with them this summer, and I'm SUPER excited), but it's never going to be accessible for _everyone_ as long as it's just one teacher. I think Khan is a great teacher, but there are always going to be at least a couple people who are confused by wording in an unforeseen way. If everyone posts videos, and the best teachers' videos get pushed up to the top, then it's bound to round out the experience and help people who might not like Khan's personal style. This idea sounds good in theory (kind of), but it would never work in practice since videos are much more time-consuming to make and watch, and so could not easily be digested and voted on by the masses. Sure, there's the potential that if you open up the teaching to the masses that some really excellent material could rise to the top, but it would also be drowned out in the noise of countless sub-par teachers. With Khan producing all the videos, everything is guaranteed to be high quality.
Sidebar aside, the site does have a place for users to ask/answer questions below each video. What I realized while briefly mentioning Stack Overflow above is that it would be _amazing_ if that kind of rapid-answer community could be built up around these questions.
I've wanted to create such a site for many years now. My focus is on community college level mathematics. My goal is to make it topic based.
My college's administration is a bit conservative when it comes to new ideas. I think you are wrong about not having enough videos though. More and more college faculty are creating their own videos. What is lacking is a central storage location for these videos. I think people would be willing to upload their videos and make them publicly available.
I could, over time, what evolves is a book. In math this would work because at the beginning levels the knowledge is static. How to factor trinomials is not ever going to change. I think a Stackoverflow site would work for lecture videos.
Interesting idea. However, the voting metaphor is incorrect here, (as I think you even said). The only thing it really solves is that it determines what learning style is dominant.
If there existed an easy or common way of determining most favored learning style, then people with these alternative dominant learning styles could filter by those. I'd love that.
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Sometimes I've wondered if the vision of Khan Academy executed to its fullest would be to have a Stack Overflow-like up-/down-voting system for user-submitted videos. Khan Academy is amazing (note: I'll be interning with them this summer, and I'm SUPER excited), but it's never going to be accessible for _everyone_ as long as it's just one teacher. I think Khan is a great teacher, but there are always going to be at least a couple people who are confused by wording in an unforeseen way. If everyone posts videos, and the best teachers' videos get pushed up to the top, then it's bound to round out the experience and help people who might not like Khan's personal style. This idea sounds good in theory (kind of), but it would never work in practice since videos are much more time-consuming to make and watch, and so could not easily be digested and voted on by the masses. Sure, there's the potential that if you open up the teaching to the masses that some really excellent material could rise to the top, but it would also be drowned out in the noise of countless sub-par teachers. With Khan producing all the videos, everything is guaranteed to be high quality.
Sidebar aside, the site does have a place for users to ask/answer questions below each video. What I realized while briefly mentioning Stack Overflow above is that it would be _amazing_ if that kind of rapid-answer community could be built up around these questions.
I've wanted to create such a site for many years now. My focus is on community college level mathematics. My goal is to make it topic based.
My college's administration is a bit conservative when it comes to new ideas. I think you are wrong about not having enough videos though. More and more college faculty are creating their own videos. What is lacking is a central storage location for these videos. I think people would be willing to upload their videos and make them publicly available.
I could, over time, what evolves is a book. In math this would work because at the beginning levels the knowledge is static. How to factor trinomials is not ever going to change. I think a Stackoverflow site would work for lecture videos.
Interesting idea. However, the voting metaphor is incorrect here, (as I think you even said). The only thing it really solves is that it determines what learning style is dominant.
If there existed an easy or common way of determining most favored learning style, then people with these alternative dominant learning styles could filter by those. I'd love that.
guaranteach is a video based teaching site, that matches videos to each student preferred style of learning. Here's a nice demo: http://www.guaranteach.com/community/exploring