The data presented in this article is extremely suspect. The methodology for both the collection of shipment information and the extrapolation to revenue are secret (or at least not reported here -- see the update at the bottom of the story). As a community that is concerned with accuracy and precision, I think we should be bothered by this. Instead it's a launchpad for arguments based on conjecture and personal anecdote.
Mountain View, CA - full-time designers and mobile devs
Khan Academy's mission is to provide a free world-class education for anyone anywhere. Over 1 billion math problems have been done on our site and 2 million more are done each day. Here's some stuff we've been working on lately:
* creating adaptive assessments to accurately measure student knowledge
* running new A/B tests every week to learn how best to teach students and grow our userbase
* building infrastructure to allow us to scale up our content creation efforts
* internationalizing our entire website to enable pilot implementations in Mexico and Brazil
If this sounds interesting to you, we'd love to hear from you. Right now, we're focusing on hiring product designers and mobile developers. Come build with us:
Yes! KA is looking for two types of design interns: product design interns, and visual design interns. We strongly recommend that product design interns be in (or have just completed) an HCI-like program[1] or have relevant real-world experience. Visual design interns can help with everything from making cool stuff around the office, to creating assets (like avatars) for the site, so digital art skills are a must.
The design team is much smaller than the dev team so we will likely only be taking one or two interns this year.
I'm currently enrolled in a masters HCI-like program, do you have a way I can get in touch with you? My email is in my profile if you would like to reply that way.
This is a survey by the NHES, a government organization - do you think there is some reason for selection bias?
Here is the survey's remark on their estimation methodology:
"When applied to survey data, weights allow for the generation
of national estimates from a sample of respondents. They also
adjust for characteristics of the survey design, nonresponse,
and noncoverage. However, biases may exist in the data if
weighting procedures have not adequately adjusted for these
issues. A large-scale bias study was conducted in conjunction
with the 2007 data collection. Readers interested in the
findings of the bias study, as well as detailed information on
NHES survey methods, weighting, and response rates, can
refer to the Data File User’s Manuals published online at
http://nces.ed.gov/nhes ."
I think that the fact that the survey was conducted by a government organization and that the targets of the survey were families who had decided not to participate in government-run education, for one reason or another, makes a certain selection bias seem likely.
I'd expect a measure of homeschooling families to want nothing to do with the federal department of education.
This is something I've been thinking a lot about recently, and while all of these approaches solve some problems I think the requirement for maintainable CSS is a fundamentally different approach to the purpose of CSS. Once you make the mental switch from "CSS is the stuff that I do to make the things that I build look right" to "CSS is a component of everything I build" it becomes easier to see what I mean. It's not about "I need to be able to reuse this font size" as much as it is "I want to reuse this widget when I am display text in this way on any page".
In other words, if you want to build something maintainable, start thinking about all the ways you can help people not write custom CSS at all.
Also, LESS and SASS at their core do little to help with this problem, and can even hurt you with unintentional specificity (due to nesting) that hurts reusability. Mixins help you think "reusability" but they can really easily be misused in ways similar to how people are misusing CSS right now. This is by no means an attack on LESS/SASS, which I love. It is just a reaction to working on a large project that is making the switch and seeing the fallout.
I'm not sure I follow. Are you advocating writing "classless" CSS? Could you elaborate as to what you mean by "not write custom CSS"? I don't mean to be pedantic but CSS of any kind is "custom". I think you are advocating OOCSS techniques but trying to call them something else. (No offense)
I am saying that you can follow OOCSS coding practices and still wind up with a ton of really great abstracted styles that you don't reuse. That is because most people look at OOCSS and only see the "this is how you write proper CSS" and don't realize that most of the work is around planning and communicating. How many of the folks using OOCSS have a style guide of some kind that they are sharing to let people know what exactly is available to be reused?
This article focused on the first part and even compares different approaches, but misses the point that OOCSS is advocating a process overhaul, not just a change to the way that you write CSS.
When I say help people not write custom CSS, I am referring to reuse. Writing the code the right way is of course a pre-requisite, but from experience, not nearly enough.
Loving the thoughtfulness here, and I have a few more resources I need to read now.
Re: Quick and Correct badges -
It is important in many cases to be able to recall math facts quickly. Automatic recall has also been correlated with understanding of more difficult concepts (for example: [1]). I am by no means saying that we've gotten the reward system perfectly right, but we were thoughtful when creating it.
I certainly did not mean to indicate I didn't think you guys had not put a lot of thought into things. If anything, my point was that all of these things are really hard, and I certainly don't count myself among the handful of people in the world who I would trust to get it right. I also have zero pedagogical chops, so don't take my word for anything!
My gut says that, if asked, I would probably recommend that the automatic recall goal is better placed as part of individual, fun "quickfire" lessons "Get these five right before the timer runs out". This would help to ensure you limit the behavior to a place where you want it, rather than somewhere where you might prefer the students to slow down and absorb what they're doing.
You could offer an informational badge showing the student completed a quickfire lesson, and I think you'd then be closer to kosher on my read of the psych literature.
Simply stating it is not a ponzi scheme doesn't advance the conversation in a meaningful way in my opinion.
It's really just semantics at this point. There is a lot of evidence here that suggests systematic misleading (if not out-right defrauding) of investors. So you while you are technically correct, I think what Groupon has done is in the spirit of Ponzi even if it is executed differently. What's happened here is more than just a bad business plan executed honestly producing poor results. Just because we don't have the exact word for it doesn't make it any more ethical.
Jason, your gut instinct is correct. Groupon is a Ponzi scheme in every way: last customer in gets no money out. I feel sorry for that Mom & Pop pizza that paid $1,000 to run a Groupon deal, and expecting $300 back in 60 days, only to see Groupon go belly up and get nothing but a letter that says "Please send your creditor claim to the bankruptcy trustee listed below".
Groupon only pays out about 45% of gross bookings. Ponzis generally pay out closer to 100%. Once it brings sales and marketing to a reasonable level it should be wildly profitable.
This is an ongoing falsehood. Several Khan Academy employees were real honest-to-goodness teachers, and we work with teachers directly in-person every single day to make the product and the content better. In addition, we are looking for more folks to make videos. Our standards are extremely high, and that will take time, but I disagree that this is our biggest challenge in scaling.
Furthermore, your opinion of the Biology content may be spot-on, but there are thousands of students who say it's making their lives measurably better. Maybe it would be 100,000 if the content was better; it's hard to know for sure. I'm just not sure that it is directly affecting scale at this point, or that there's not a greater effect on scale trying to get more people to use our existing content.
I realize that now, and apologize for spreading a misconception. We don't hear much about non-engineers through the biased HN-filter; hiring Silverstein gets you headlines. Part of my point, however, stands.
> but there are thousands of students who say it's
> making their lives measurably better.
I'd prefer KA to emphasize content -- quality content made by solid educators in their respective field -- over delivery method. That the latter enjoys priority right now (as Khan's comments make clear) may be a necessity, but an unfortunate one. But I'm pretty sure that you'll get there.
I'd prefer KA to emphasize content -- quality content made by solid educators in their respective field -- over delivery method.
Depending on what you mean by "educators," I might prefer that Khan Academy (and a bajillion different competing providers) offer up content by actual domain experts rather than content by "educators." It is, of course, possible for a person to be both a domain expert in actual fact and a secondary school teacher by occupational category--I've seen Richard Dedekind described as an example, although I'm not sure I'd describe his teaching position as one resembling that of a high school teacher in the United States. But anyway the correct idea that content has to be both factually accurate and appropriate to guide the development of young learners does not constrain content-creation only to persons with the formal credentials of schoolteachers. Many of the best learning materials for young people today were produced by authors who were not K-12 schoolteachers in any stage of their career.
> Depending on what you mean by "educators," I might prefer
> that Khan Academy (and a bajillion different competing
> providers) offer up content by actual domain experts
> rather than content by "educators."
Don't worry. I chose the term "educator" over "teacher" or "expert" for that very reason: namely that neither having a degree in Education nor a PhD in physics makes you a particularly suitable physics educator. KA needs people who can do for biology, neuroscience, history, and so on what Khan can do for college physics and maths.
I suspect that they're going to be PhDs and practitioners as opposed to K-12 schoolteachers -- but I really don't give a damn about credentials. There are fantastic high school teachers out there. There are PhDs and masters in their respective fields who are ridiculously bad educators, especially at the level of teaching that KA provides.
That's a worrisome attitude if your goal is to make the best site possible. Great sites aren't made by people that get defensive in response to user feedback.
Rather, that's a recipe for stagnation and complacency.
Highly recommended reading. I feel like it's a good sign that the community keeps re-inventing this. It means that it has some real legs. Another great example of our best practices slowly strangling good process.
I find that personas are nearly useless for this kind of design discussion. Personas are an attempt to homogenize some group of people into a single pseudo-person that has specific attributes. When the lines between personas are hard to draw or there are so many lines that you wind up with lots of personas, you can find yourself spending lots of time managing personas without a ton of direction or solving anyone's problems.
For a heterogenous audience like "web makers" of various types, an activity centered approach can be really helpful. Don Norman explains this idea better than I ever could:
