The breadth and depth of Khans work is nothing short of astonishing. His ability to put a large amount of information out there for anyone to use is an overwhelming kindness.
That being said, Khans work lacks polish. You could suggest that his informal presentation style is a plus, or that focusing on producing as much content as possible is more important, but I disagree.
His narration has an erratic cadence and he is often repetitive in a way that corrects or modifies the previous statement rather than building upon it.
His voice is not "radio-friendly", but thats my personal opinion.
The transcripts are poorly laid out and are nearly impossible to scan visually, there only use is for search purposes.
The information architecture is clear and to the point, but it's not oriented to the true beginner. Someone who doesn't already know what the labels mean wont know why they should or shouldn't learn these items.
I hope khan academy invests in polishing some of the great work he has put together so far, I think it would be worth the investment.
At first I too felt like a lot of the videos needed more polish, as well as some other aspects of the site. But eventually I accepted that it really didn't matter whether I was watching one of the newer HD videos or the older pixelated ones. It wouldn't help me learn.
I think the informal style is a plus. Making the videos more professional would risk them being the same thing as a textbook. In my math class, we occasionally do "flip teaching" using brightstorm [1]. Its basically a more formal version of Khan Academy, and I think the videos are super boring to watch compared to something like Sal's video on the squeeze theorem [2].
There's tons of other resources out their that sound like a professional voice over. However they have no personality and don't sound like a individual talking to you one to one.
They sound like they are are polished for a mass audience with no personal attachment what so ever to the user. They sound like a robot repeating facts from a book. This is opposite to khan. Khan takes the 'brotherly'(Despite never knowing you) approach to teaching, and sometimes makes mistakes and lacks a little bit of polish. I think this is actually the key thing that makes khan academy work compared to other suppliers.
Keep in mind how this all got started historically [0]. Khan was teaching math to his cousin and did this with what he had available. It is a very personal style and, yes, includes mistakes from time to time that necessitates him backtracking and correcting them. I haven't watched a lot of videos, but I've yet to see a mistake that he doesn't eventually realize and backtrack to correct it; sometimes within seconds, sometimes half a minute later.
Polishing it too much such that it's scripted with a professional voice actor would, to me, make the videos less approachable and would lose the charm. People pay thousands in tuition for university courses taught by professors who are also not perfect and who have no professional voice acting training either. I'm not seeing this lack of polish as a negative here. Actually, a lot of times I find professionally voiced audio to be annoying as hell because nobody in real life actually talks the way some of those cheesy voice actors do.
That being said, Khans work lacks polish. You could suggest that his informal presentation style is a plus, or that focusing on producing as much content as possible is more important, but I disagree.
His narration has an erratic cadence and he is often repetitive in a way that corrects or modifies the previous statement rather than building upon it.
His voice is not "radio-friendly", but thats my personal opinion.
The transcripts are poorly laid out and are nearly impossible to scan visually, there only use is for search purposes.
The information architecture is clear and to the point, but it's not oriented to the true beginner. Someone who doesn't already know what the labels mean wont know why they should or shouldn't learn these items.
I hope khan academy invests in polishing some of the great work he has put together so far, I think it would be worth the investment.