In South Africa, teaching quality and outcomes remain extremely uneven despite the huge sums of money thrown at education by the state (lazy incompetent unionised teachers being the primary reason [I won't go into the historical reasons for these teachers' chronic incompetence, since there are Apartheid apologists on HN, and I don't want to detract from the main point]).
To deal with this problem, the sort of instruction provided by the Khan Acdemy has been around in South Africa for more than 20 years. The per topic videos, as well as call in tv shows provided by these organisations are extremely important to thousands of students.
Mindset uses Creative Commons licensing, but downloading their content or viewing online seems impossible, while the excellent (in my opinion superior) Learning Channel charges large fees for their content on DVD (although some used to be broadcast for free on state television).
My friends and I used Learning Channel VHS tapes to pass our school-leaving exams 13 years ago, as we didn't have teachers for many of our subjects. Unfortunately, because of the price, I could only purchase a limited number of topics.
It is a pity that massive repositories of Learning Channel content (some of it probably unused because of South Africa's recent ill-advised, and soon to be reversed curriculum changes) are hidden behind a 20th century paywall.
South Africa, despite expensive and limited bandwidth, has a long tradition of students actively using this sort of instruction (via vhs/dvd and tv broadcasts). Distributing Khan Academy videos and Mindset Learn, and especially freeing and distributing Learning Channel videos could make a huge difference to education here. If someone has a philanthropic need to save millions of children in a third world country from chronic unemployability, those would be the first easy steps to take.
that's absolutely deplorable! I'm clearly missing whole genres of conversation on this forum. So as to avoid charges of libel, let me encourage you to provide examples. Can you cite examples?
To deal with this problem, the sort of instruction provided by the Khan Acdemy has been around in South Africa for more than 20 years. The per topic videos, as well as call in tv shows provided by these organisations are extremely important to thousands of students.
The pioneers of this sort of learning in South Africa were the Learning Channel (http://learn.co.za/LC/index.php), and a newer competitor called Mindset(http://www.mindset.co.za/learn/).
Mindset uses Creative Commons licensing, but downloading their content or viewing online seems impossible, while the excellent (in my opinion superior) Learning Channel charges large fees for their content on DVD (although some used to be broadcast for free on state television).
My friends and I used Learning Channel VHS tapes to pass our school-leaving exams 13 years ago, as we didn't have teachers for many of our subjects. Unfortunately, because of the price, I could only purchase a limited number of topics.
It is a pity that massive repositories of Learning Channel content (some of it probably unused because of South Africa's recent ill-advised, and soon to be reversed curriculum changes) are hidden behind a 20th century paywall.
South Africa, despite expensive and limited bandwidth, has a long tradition of students actively using this sort of instruction (via vhs/dvd and tv broadcasts). Distributing Khan Academy videos and Mindset Learn, and especially freeing and distributing Learning Channel videos could make a huge difference to education here. If someone has a philanthropic need to save millions of children in a third world country from chronic unemployability, those would be the first easy steps to take.