Udacity or Khan Academy?

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I was wondering which was better, or the pros and cons of each. I couldn't find a review comparing these two.

In terms of interactive work and such, definitely Udacity. For almost every video you listen to (which are effectively short by the way), there's a quiz you have to do. And some of the quizzes can be quite interesting and challenging to do. However, the video lessons themselves are not really of the best quality pedagogically speaking. And if you want more than just to learn things mechanically, then Udacity is not the best on its own. Also, the courses are a bit limited for now but they are definitely growing in number.

For excellent quality teaching, definitely go to Khan Academy. Khan Academy probably has the best videos available online that teach you the intuition behind concepts rather than just understand how to do things, especially in all areas to do with mathematics. The exercises, however, are random ... thus boring and quite repetitive especially in comparison to the exercises on Udacity. But you get badges there ... if that means anything to you.

I say, for good online education experience, try both of them out together. And focus only on those two. Ignore all the other crap sites that promote online education. They tend to be quite boring and only dump recordings of long, boring video lectures that were made on campus at some uni. And they aren't even as effective as the Khan Academy videos.

Only tried khan academy so far..

Pros-

I find it a good resource, and it is free.

-Enables people all over world to watch and learn

Kons"

-A little patronizing, lots of repetition and blabbering

-Could be done at a much faster pace.

-Cartoonish style is a little off putting./

It could be at a faster pace, but for dummies like me, sometimes this is a good thing.

I tried to look at the Udacity website...but it was down right now. I would like to brush up on my algebra (starting tomorrow). Along with if a course interests me. I looked at cousera but I didn't care for that it was at a set pace. If I was able to complete stuff more quickly I wanted to have that option (it only put stuff out a unit at a time)

Yep, it's down for now and might not be back up for a while.

Concerning Coursera, I tried it for a while. Didn't like it. It was too traditional for my liking.

I wish Khan had a practice section for science instead of just math. That would give me a real leg up.

I only watch their lectures whenI have to. Their programming section is pretty neat, I'm taking a little time each day to learn JavaScript.

I think it would be cool if I could emulate the algebraic formulas used in physics using objects in JavaScript. I'm not exactly sure if its possible, but that's why I'm learning it.

Udacity is back up.

Be aware that Sal Khan's not a math teacher either, and makes mistakes. Usually they're so obvious it hurts (in "basic multiplication" he says that "two plus itself times one" is what two times one is) -- and hopefully wouldn't confuse. There's also basically almost nothing about concepts; it's procedure, procedure, procedure because Sal Khan thinks that everybody figures out the concepts by doing math probelms over and over again. If you're one of those folks, go for it -- but if you need to know why, you'll want something else.

mathtv website (dot com) as better videos... dreambox site (also dot com) has visuals for the basics but has only gotten to negative numbers and such.

Khan speaks too slowly for my tastes.
I respect him very much for his Academy.

Sal Khan is an expert in mathematics, though. He's what they call a Math Elite or something. Don't know the exact details, but he's not to be underestimated.

As for your misrepresentations of his teaching method, it's intuition AND procedure. I've practically watched the whole of his math videos by now to know this for a fact. In fact it's the intuition stuff that kept me attracted to his videos. Had it been just procedures like in the case of Mathtv.com, I wouldn't be advocating his videos.

As for the mistakes he does, yes, he's guilty of doing that, and I'll admit he should stop letting his videos be too "human" as to allow significant mistakes to be kept in his videos. However, his mistakes most of the time don't really distract from the concept being taught.



MathTV sucks. Most of the teachers lack confidence in their teaching, and they try too hard with the scripted sh*t. Only one teacher there seems to be an exception ... which is the main old guy. But he's just an exception. And none of them focus on the intuition side of things ... at least, last time I checked.