Comment by rhdunn
5 hours ago
My understanding is that the idea behind Khanacademy is to switch the classroom -- learn a topic as homework; do the questions in the classroom. That way the teacher can assess (and help) the students.
The other idea is that a student only advances to the next topic once they've mastered the current topic (e.g. by getting 4/5 questions right). The theory behind this is that if you don't understand a concept/topic then it is harder to understand topics that depend on that.
This does mean that students will be at different topics/stages. But because of the structure of the teaching a teacher isn't moving on to a new topic leaving students to fall further and further behind.
The idea of Mastery Learning seems to resurface every couple decades. I guess because it pretty appealing but requires more per-student customization; there’s always a hope that now, finally, we’ve got the tech to let everyone advance at their own pace.
IDK. Maybe some sort of RAG-on-textbook solution will let us do it.