He shows someone video not produced by us. Then does a small interview of a handful of people who watched those non-Khan Academy videos. Then he uses their lack of understanding to impugn Khan Academy. The person who made this video clearly cares more about their agenda than real science.

The irony is also thick with him using a video to try to explain that videos can't explain things.

Wait ... what? Did you even watch the whole video?

First of all, he says all kinds of positive things about the work you're doing. "Impugn Khan Academy"? Really?

Second, he is explaining physics education research that he himself did for his Ph.D thesis. He's using examples from his own work to make comparisons in technique to what worked and what didn't work in his own, actually objectively tested research. This is not "a small interview of a handful of people".

Third, he's not saying videos can't explain things - he's saying that they often fail to make students question their own pre-existing misconceptions.

I hope you actually watch the whole video and catch the research context? I mean I am handing you a research-tested science education technique that you could easily incorporate into your own videos if you actually wanted.

Working for the Khan Academy, I've seen the link to this video a bunch of times. Naturally, I was really curious about the voracity of the claims, so I did some research. It's actually worth reading the thesis as it's pretty interesting stuff. It's here: http://www.physics.usyd.edu.au/pdfs/research/super/PhD(Mulle...

The study was, as best I can tell after reading through much of it (a lot not relevant to this discussion), quite limited. The largest number of students considered for any of the experiments: 370. All from one school. Most of the other experiments included far fewer students (fewer than 100).

Chapter 9 (additional experiments in chapter 10), and the section on Participants and Design has most of the relevant information. I was particularly fascinated by the decision to remove students from the final result for "watching more than one multimedia treatment." I mean I understand why it's important to control for this, but part of the point of KA is to provide additional treatments of information.

I am not saying that this in any way invalidates the research, but I also don't think it's fair to say that this is somehow a surefire tested solution that is being handed over. In addition, because the research hasn't been repeated outside of the original setting -- at least I couldn't find it, please correct me here if I'm wrong -- it makes the claim that "because introducing misconceptions was effective in this study means it must be effective in all science videos" a pretty serious stretch.

I'm all for research. We're doing a lot of it right now with our pilot students/classrooms and existing users. But just because something has been research-tested doesn't mean it's automatically the right thing to implement for KA or its students.

Haha-- clearly this is an example of the ineffectiveness of videos. Khan's preconceived ideas have prevented him from learning what was presented!

On a more serious note, however, as a science educator, I appreciate the Khan Academy's work to make these very clear educational resources available to all. They definitely can be useful in many ways. Now if only my district would un-block YouTube...

However, I have to agree with many points Frank and others bring up. I have taught for 5 years--my first 4, I worked relentlessly to provide thorough and clear explanations for all the science concepts I taught. And I was baffled when I graded my final exams and found that my students learned little to nothing from 9 months of clear explanations and practice. Last summer, I learned about Modeling Physics (http://modeling.asu.edu/) and implemented it in my physics and chemistry classes this year. Now, my students have rocked their final exams and shown huge improvements from pre- to post-test on standardized instruments. This is simply my experience, but there really is significant physics education research which points to the same conclusions.

Educators are not trying to belittle or denigrate anyone. However, we have to protest when so many resources and media attention are being given to a method of instruction that has been shown to be rather ineffective, particularly in science, when incredible alternatives are available but are, unfortunately, largely being ignored and unfunded.

My goodness, I think you are missing the point entirely. Or perhaps you mean to. If you watch the video, he says that videos CAN be effective. You sound so defensive here, it's starting to make me doubt your sincerity.

Definitely interesting insight regarding how people can hold a particular perception and how those perceptions need to be addressed. And although the focus is on science, it can equally be applied to any subject: English, history, math, etc.

With respect to the Khan Academy, it would be interesting to see tools that provide a kind of interactive exchange of preconceived ideas and then helping to break them down. Having tests after the exchange would then help provide great metrics on the retention and understanding of the subject.

In any case, 1veritasium has at least provided an thoughtful response to the Khan Academy. He recognizes a good thing but provide some nice constructive criticism that could certainly improve what the Khan Academy already could offer. So as someone who enjoys Sal's videos, this idea gets a +1 from me... You know, as just some random person on the Internet ;-).