This is a great idea. Dan Meyer and Justin Reich are sponsoring the MTT2K Prize. In short, this idea was inspired by John Golden and David Coffeey's Mystery Teacher Theater 2000 in which they make a video of them watching one of the Khan Academy videos. Dan and Justin's plan is to award a cash prizes to the best video critiques of Khan Academy videos. It's that simple. To participate, just create a video critique and upload to youtube with the tag #mtt2k.
Why Is This a Good Idea?
First, I think there is much room for improvement in Khan's videos. As I have pointed out before, most of the Khan videos seem to take the approach of "this is how you get the answer to this problem" rather than to aim for deeper understanding. I suspect this is part of the reason that the Khan videos are so popular with students. They are stuck on a homework problem and in their mind the goal is to get the answer. Surely you have seen students take all sorts of crazy approaches to solving homework problems. Approaches that avoid addressing the real meaning.
This solution to problem solving would be like Mr. Miyagi (you know, for The Karate Kid) telling Daniel to paint the fence with up and down strokes. What if Daniel googled "how to paint a fence" and decided to rent a spray paint machine. That way the fence could be painted quicker - right? Wrong. Mr. Miyagi would be disappointed and Daniel would get destroyed at the karate tournament by Cobra Kai. The point isn't the painting of the fence, the point is learning to block attacks. If you have no idea what I am talking about, go watch the original Karate Kid.
There is another good reason to critique videos (not just the Khan Academy videos). What better way to assess someone's true understanding than to have that person evaluate a Khan Academy video? You really have to know your stuff to see any problems in these. I could make the final exam in physics an evaluation of these videos. It would be awesome. Or maybe you could make this a group activity. Find a KA video and critique it. Next, make your own version. That would be win-win. The true learning comes not from watching a KA video, but by being actively engaged in something. Maybe this was Khan's plan all along. Maybe he puts errors in the videos so that they can be used for the real learning.
My Critique
If Dan and Justin start a game, I can't sit out can I? So, here is my video critique of a Khan Video. I mostly picked one at random (from the physics videos). The MTT2K style of critique is really nice, but I didn't have a partner or an easy way to set it up. Also, the audio is suckier that it should be - sorry about that. I would remade the video, but I am a blogger - not an actor. I can't just re-say what I have already said. It wouldn't feel authentic.
Here is my critique. The Khan Video is a problem to determine how fast a ball would be moving if dropped off a cliff.
If I had to focus on one main problem it would be Khan's lack of respect for vectors. In particular he sets a vector quantity (the velocity) equal to the scalar value of zero. Yes, this may seem like nit picking, but isn't a critique supposed to be about nit picking? It does matter though. The equal sign means the thing on the left and the thing on the right are equivalent. Can a person be equivalent to a car? No. They are different things.
The other big error Khan makes is to say that a velocity going down would be a negative vector. He wants to say something is negative, but it isn't the vector. A vector velocity in the downward direction would have a negative y-component, but you wouldn't call the whole thing negative. Really, Khan is trying to do a one dimensional kinematics problem. In this case, you don't even need to include the vector idea.
"If Khan's video is so terrible, why don't you make your own?" Of course Frank Noschese (@fnoschese) already addressed this common question.
However, I will still make my own - because it is fun.
Again, sorry for the audio. I know what I did wrong with this one but I am terrible at redoing a video.
Final Thoughts
I don't think I would accept the prize if I won - although I am sure there will be submissions better than mine. Really, I just wanted to play the game.
The other point I want to make is this: you sort of need to be an expert to teach something. There is this idea that if you just get the presentation tools down, you can teach anything. Instead, I think in order to teach kinematics a teacher should have more advanced mechanics classes. I know this might disagree with some of the teacher education programs out there - but look at all of Khan's videos. If you get an expert to look at video in the same field, I suspect errors will be found. I don't think I could make great videos in the subject of history (although it would be fun to try).
But wait! I said you have to be a content expert to "teach". I didn't say you need to be an expert to be a learning facilitator. Really, it depends on the goals of the class. If the idea is to show students THESE particular ideas (like kinematics) then the instructor has to understand much more than kinematics. However, if the goal is for students to build and create ideas then I don't think the instructor needs to know all the answers. As an example: Shawn Cornally teaches biology. I could be wrong, but I am pretty sure he didn't get a degree in biology. The class seemed to turn out fine though.
Ok. Now go out and make your own Khan Academy video critique. I would love to see the awesome stuff people come up with. Don't forget to put the #mtt2k tag in there. Also, it is too bad that youtube no longer has 1.5 and 2 times speed playback modes. That could make the video critiques shorter than the actual KA videos.
