Khan Academy vs PS101
As more and more people discover PS101 I often hear the question, “What’s the difference between PS101 and Khan Academy?”.
Before I explain, let me start by saying that I love Khan Academy, how it came to be, what it’s done for education, and how it continues to set new standards and raise the bar for educational technology and content. However, no market should ever be a player of one and we think there’s a big opportunity to get the best educational content and content creators together in one place. We believe we can do that in two main ways:
1. Diversity & Depth
For all Khan Academy has done to progress online education, it actually has a model very akin to a traditional in-school education. One teacher, teaching one subject, in one style at any given time. It’s not that Sal or the content creators he’s hired are bad teachers or that their content isn’t good — in fact, we already have many of Khan Academy’s videos submitted and included on PS101. It’s just that if you find it difficult to understand them, find them boring, think they’re going at the wrong pace, or find their descriptions too complicated then you’re straight out of luck.
PS101 aims to connect hundreds and thousands of content creators who each bring their own methods, tips, and styles of teaching to the forefront so that students can discover the best teacher for them. This diversity means that we can bring to light thousands of content creators whose videos and articles excite us about education with each view. People like Brett Berry who writes amazing math articles right here on Medium, our favorite scientist/documentarian Brian Cox who is capable of explaining difficult topics so that any of us can understand, or even this teacher who shared an ingenious way of demonstrating gravity in universe right in the classroom.
PS101 is a crowd-sourced card-catalog to the best educational content available online.
2. Feedback & Engagement
Khan Academy has great tools for students to ask questions and stay motivated while learning. We’re hard at work building our own version of some of those tools but we also want to go further than just comments to build a true community of like minded students and educators.
That’s why we allow teachers to sign up, share the grades and subjects they’re focused on, and soon be able to share ideas, tips, and best practices with other teachers just like them.
In conjunction, we want feedback directly from our students so that we can promote the content that truly help someone understand any topic they’re hoping to learn. We’ll be introducing a new and really fun way to rate content soon to see this vision through.
Ultimately, PS101 is still raw
We’ve only launched with limited subjects and grades purposefully avoiding algorithms so that we can begin truly understanding how users discover, share, and engage with educational content online.
Things are bumpy and buggy but it’s the early days and this is a big task. PS101 and our approach to online education is one that we truly believe is needed and we hope you see the value in it too. In the meantime, we’d love to hear your thoughts and feedback so leave a comment and help us make PS101 better together.
