I'm not a big fan of Khan academy for teaching math. The explanations are frequently unclear, and they do not address many of the things I would want to teach my students. They are also almost exclusively procedural, and simply present information just like it would be delivered by a boring math teacher in a classroom. As Dan Meyer points out in this video, Khan gets it all wrong on how to present a new topic to math students. Watch:
So why are American kids so far behind in math compared to countries like Japan, Finland and Switzerland? This video says it all in a minute and a half: math teachers in the US explain things too much. They don't allow their students to struggle with information and try to figure it out on their own.
As is shown in this video, also critical of Khan's methods, American math education is based on the "explain and practice" model, while other countries' models are based more on having the students figure things out on their own.
Meyer is sponsoring a contest on his blog for teachers to send in their video commentary on a Khan Academy video; you can go there to see more of the entries. (The first video I've posted here is Meyer's own entry.)
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