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As a related thought; Khan Academy books would be great to have; all lessons about each subject packed in a book format, for all the people willing to pay for them. An elementary Maths book, a high-school and college level Maths book, a Chemistry book, a Physics book, a Biology book, etc. All available in ebook and print formats. You don’t have to print anything in advance, they could be printed on-demand once a book is ordered; with worldwide shipping available of course.
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This might also be a very inefficient process to do, as it would take a lot of time and resources and generally, people tend to remember things better when they are taught things by being spoken to versus just reading it. You can make your own versions if it helps you, but I just don't think it is a very good idea.
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interesting.
with enough time, we could turn each and every lesson in khan academy into article format.
while articles are faster (much faster) to read, spoken videos really help with memory.
does anyone have the ambition to article-ize khan academy's videos? -
What about leveraging generative AI to create the article versions, and then just have someone give it a quick human edit on top? They already partnered with OpenAI after all for Khanmigo. I personally hate AI-generated text, it feels very artificial to me when I read it, there’s something odd, “robotic” about it, but it’s better than nothing, plus with a small edit on top it could sort of be “humanized” at least a bit.
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They already went through the effort of making videos about all those things; to be honest small and concise articles are also faster to make (and there are already a lot of them, it’s not a start from scratch, even so because they already have the video to base it on), plus it is not about replacing videos for text and images, but rather about having both, videos being complementary as reinforcement and articles being way more time-efficient for people who don’t really need the videos (for example people who want to have a quick refresh on all of the maths when they already learned it before, (which happens to be my case), in this context going through all the videos is not only way more time-consuming but also way more tedious, skimming through videos is difficult and a lot of time is wasted waiting for the person to make their point).
As for videos being better for memory… I am not sure how it is for the majority of people, I can only speak for myself, you might be right and I understand it might be better for other people; personally it is not my case, I remember most things I ever read, the text sort of gets ingrained in my head, I can focus really hard on words when I see them and this helps my memory a lot, plus I can read certain lines several times for reinforcement, go back and forth, read each and every word in the perfect pace for me (while spoken words fly by a little bit more unnoticed when I don’t see them, and videos have transcriptions but it’s really clumsy to both read the captions and look at what’s going on in the video at the same time, and equally clumsy to go back and forth on the information, pausing and playing, etc.) but of course we are all different; hard to please everyone, I might be an odd one.
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I’ve heard people tend to remember better when engaging in more active learning; I would argue reading is more active while listening is more passive (I personally don’t feel “spoken to” through a digital device as I do in personal communication), and answering quick questions on the topic on each article is, needless to say, fully engaging active learning, while serving as a sort of proof of comprehension.
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As “darknessbright” said, “does anyone have the ambition to do it?”; this makes me think how leveraging the contribution of the community would make this possible in a breeze. When lots of people can contribute even a little (an article?) each, a lot can be done, way faster than when done by one or two people in the staff trying to do everything, and getting things done rather than it not being done at all. It is a non-for-profit anyway, it makes sense that people would contribute to it for no compensation whatsoever, just with the intention to help, that’s the whole purpose of it in a sense, to help anyone and everyone to keep on learning, so they can then give back to the community, to their society through what they learned. It transcends the sole person when they have improved themselves; they can then help improve the world around them.
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Inmune Miriada khan academy would definitely improve if people work together.
it is non-profit anyway, and if there was some sort of 'wikipedia' vibe into khan academy, that would be VERY AWESOME -
By the way, the best lesson I’ve gone through in the whole of Khan Academy has been Computer Programming, Advanced JS: Natural Simulations; the value of that lesson is inconmensurable. It is said in that unit that the whole lesson is based on a video course on an external source, I think that whole unit demonstrates perfectly how effective and powerful transforming video lessons into article lessons can be. I’ve not seen better content than that one in here so far. And I doubt the original video lessons were as comfortable to follow for self-study, not to mention them being also fully interactive.
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Basically if they work on making an article for each and all topics and subtopics on the site/app, they would at the same time already have everything ready for print in a book format.
And about Anki/Quizlet… I don’t really want to test myself as I said… (but thank you for the suggestion and trying to help, I appreciate it!) and precisely I’m trying to save time so I can study everything I need in the most time-efficient way, so working on cards is just out of question for me. I tried that years ago while learning languages, it is not time-efficient and I just don’t need it, it was kind of a waste of time for me and I learned from that experience; I can just read and read and move on without having to review anything ever and keep learning continually and non-stop, this is truly time-efficient self-paced study for me, reading forever new content and never looking back, my mind got used to learning this way and my memory kept improving while not reviewing anything after being done with it. As long as I understand it while I’m reading it (and I might read a paragraph or a line several times back and forth if I need to), that means I learned it, and it sticks with me forever. Understanding is learning, and once you learn something, you never really forget it, it’s just not immediately accesible at instant reach if you learned it a long time ago, but it is still there, you just have to move it close back to you again when you need it by reading about it again (but it doesn’t have to be the exact same thing you read before), and it comes back really, really quickly, you are not learning it again, you just learn once, you already know it if you understood it before even once, you are just retrieving it back, it’s already there somewhere.
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I use the transcripts every time because I can go through the text much faster than the videos, and I’m grateful for them, however, the general structure of videos is very dissimilar from the structure of articles (not as concise and straight to the point as a written piece can be when perfected; filling words and pauses), I’m basically reading a video, not an article, and it is a bit clumsy and difficult to follow what’s going on in the video while reading the transcript at the same time. As you said, there’s already a considerable amount of articles for a lot of topics, I just hoped there was work going on to complete the platform with articles for pretty much every video counterpart on all topics. I especially found maths lacking articles and having way too many videos (there seemed to be entire subjects which were 100% videos only) and I just personally find maths hard to follow in video lessons because I need much more focus and concentration than that (which I can achieve more comfortably with articles).
As for School-house.world, it is a great mission and I’m glad something like it exists for others and I hope it helps a lot of people, but it is definitely useless for me personally since it is exclusively for tutoring and not about self-pace learning by oneself. I learn way better by myself, but I need content which I can truly follow at my own pace, not at other people’s pace and not in real time (which is the situation in classes, tutoring and videos). I wish I could just have all about maths in book format, but content as brief and complete as Khan Academy is hard to find, even more so for free (maths and science books can be ridiculously expensive and they are just not like Khan Academy but way more verbose and with narrow scopes limited to generally only one little piece of the world of maths).
Thank you for reading me, thank you for your reply, and thank you for considering my thoughts and trying to help.
Cheers ~ -
I’m currently doing some courses on edX for free on computer science-related topics, and fortunately they have been mostly based on short articles and I don’t depend on the few videos available at all, in fact the few videos pretty much sum up what is being said in the articles in a couple minutes and serve more as reinforcement as a summary rather than I depending on them to learn the self-study material, the study material is already explained in a concise and detailed way in their articles. When they use videos to teach they are mostly videos from YouTube, from external sources like companies or experts giving a brief summary of the topic and how things work as an introduction, talking about real-life scenarios or study cases in depth, but that comes only after the articles, so I already know what they are talking about and it all complements together nicely.
I’m okay with interactive parts as long as (and this is crucial) I have already been taught how to solve a problem (with no omissions or tricky questions I have not been taught how to solve) just to check on comprehension, nothing too difficult or time-consuming, rather just interactive, but not demanding me to spend time stressing myself out and spending time trying to solve it, and as long as I can just omit everything and not care about it at all if I want to just move on without having to interact with anything.
I just tried Brilliant these days for the first time (trying to find other possible sources where I could learn maths from intermediate to advanced in a brief and easy way while still being comprehensive in scope, and which is not video-based [which is exactly what I’m trying to avoid] I stumbled upon it); their UI and UX is top of the game, I never had a better user experience with an app in my life, it is simple, elegant and extremely responsive (fast, very performant), their scope in maths is considerably comprehensive and they follow a clear path step by step somewhat like Khan Academy (although I find KA to be even more comprehensive and also being way more detailed and offering way more individual topics, to be honest I wish I could just use KA and nothing else), however, I was entirely disappointed by their method and it’s definitely not what I was looking for; their method is 100% interactive, they barely teach you anything at all, rather it is questions on top of questions on top of questions, and what is worse they question you without teaching you beforehand, this is super time-consuming and just hindering my progress for the whole time, I am not being taught anything rather I’m just being stressed and interrogated as if I was in school doing homework and exams and being tested all the time (which is why I dropped out of college, I can’t stand it), I just want to learn, I don’t want to be interrogated and tested, I just need definitions, examples, explanations, I just need to understand and move on to understand and learn more things, I don’t need work and exercises, they just hinder me forever; if the examples are interactive that’s great if you want to, but not as a test, just being interactive in the sense of seeing how things work (like moving things around and seeing the effects of these adjustments in real time or through images and animations), I want to feel good while learning, absorbing what I’m reading and seeing, not stressed out being bombarded with questions and problems which I struggle to solve (even less is not even having been taught how to solve them exactly beforehand, which is beyond ridiculous and such a failed method of “teaching”). Oh, and I did not mention also how ridiculously expensive Brilliant is (I used the free trial, of course I’m not gonna pay for this.)
In summary I like how Khan Academy does it already, very simple and easy questions which I can just respond in a second or two just as a quick check on what they just taught me immediately beforehand. And I can just skip all of them and not worry about them AT ALL if I want to move on quickly. (Brilliant forces you to stress out and solve problems, without teaching you beforehand, before you can move on and advance at all, it all depends on you answering correctly a million questions in sequence to be able to move on to the next “lesson” which is just another million questions and so on forever and ever).
I did not know about Mathigon, thanks for mentioning it, I’m going to check it out.
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I also found Brilliant way too basic, they don’t go in-depth at all. I need some serious self-paced study, not a game nor an exam.
I guess my best bet would be books, but as I said they are not as accesible, they’re hard to find, hard to get, expensive, and honestly too verbose, while also needing like a hundred books if I want to learn about all math subjects. I am going to keep trying to find the right books, something which covers things like Khan Academy in the least number of books possible, however I’ve had no luck. I wanted to ask the support staff at KA if they had any book recommendations like this themselves, something similar to KA in scope and conciseness without being superficial, but I couldn’t even find a way to contact them, that’s why I ended up posting my thoughts here.
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