Are you really comparing the efforts of one man ( for the most part ) who produces free videos for mostly high-school and collage students with the output of a giant global corporation?
Maybe a simple pointer that this does not happen to lie in Salman Khan's area of expertise could probably help.
Your right i guess. My point was that although Khan's videos might be great primers for some topics they tend to miss the boat rather badly when it comes to topics that need a bit more depth like history. That being said algorithms might actually make for comparatively good material to explain in short videos so no need for me to be so grumpy.
Seriously. The thing that always irritated me about university lectures, especially when presented online is that the material covered in 50 minutes could likely be covered in 7. But who would pay $30k for that?
Too terse. It turns out that some points cannot be made in one Tweet, just as other points cannot be made in seven minutes.
And you need to be a bit more generous to those who still admire fine old art forms like the classic long lecture. It is a genre. It used to be the genre, and now it is just one, but the masters of the big lecture were and are great, and a lot of them aren't going to master the new genre - they were born too late, perhaps - so enjoy them for what they are. Use the high-speed button if you must.
All that said: Yes, you're right, the central awesomeness of Khan is not Khan himself or his lectures - people have rightly pointed out that Khan isn't the teacher to end all teachers - but his relentless pushing of this new genre, a genre that relies on the presence of ubiquitous handheld portable video players. In a world where everyone on the bus and in line at the supermarket has a smartphone, a traditional lecture, with lots of throat-clearing and repetition and class mechanics ("before I tell you anything useful let me talk about the TA assignments") and a long recap at the start of every lecture to let the people who slept through the last lecture catch up... it's tedious. Cut out half of it, deliver the rest in chunks, build a replay system that makes it easy to navigate to and play the individual chunks, and suddenly you're in the 21st century. I've been waiting for this to happen ever since I first used YouTube, and countless YouTube teachers have pioneered the technique; Khan is finally doing the evangelization.
I keep wishing, probably in vain, that TV would go the same way. I put off watching Mythbusters for years because I just couldn't stand the editing: shows are edited for people who tune in and out constantly, so every five minute chunk has one minute of pure review of stuff you just saw ten minutes ago, two minutes of new material intercut with one minute's worth of stuff that you have already seen, and thirty seconds of previews for things that you will see fifteen minutes from now.
Erik Demaine's lectures are plenty dense, and you don't have to pay $30K to watch them. Khan breaks things up into short pieces in a way that is not practical for a university lecturer, because you couldn't ask everyone to show up for 10 minutes at a time.
