PhysicsGraph vs Khan Academy

Khan Academy is a great supplemental resource to quickly brush up on specific topics.

However, they don’t go into the depth that university and AP students will need for physics.

They’ll also never be able create an optimal learning platform - they exist to serve educational videos, and putting any friction between students and a video will not be tolerated, even if it improves outcomes.

What role do videos have in optimal learning?

The optimal learning flow involves a quick explanation, an example, and then solving problems.

Video can be useful in that flow, but only if it gets out of the way quickly. The video should be five minutes, ten minutes at most, and quickly followed by practice problems.

Most platforms - including Khan Academy - spend too much time on the videos and not enough on the practice. While that’s better than sitting through an hour-long lecture before getting to solve problems (or even worse, binging an entire course without solving anything), Khan Academy still waits too long before students get their hands dirty.

This is in some ways built into Khan Academy’s DNA. Sal Khan started out sharing helpful videos, and now he’s sharing helpful videos at a scale beyond his wildest imagination. An amazing thing… just not optimal, on its own, for learning and long-term retention.

As a side note, videos are hard to update - so if they think of a better way to teach a topic, they have to spend a LOT of effort if they want to correct it. With text, even with all the animations and images we use, it’s easy to update to more effective phrasing or structure.

That means we’re going to keep improving our content, while they’ll only update their videos if the original one is truly horrendous.

What’s wrong with trying to teach everything?

Khan Academy started with math and science, but is expanding to cover every subject under the sun.

I get it. I want to teach everything too. In my ideal world, you could get all the major STEM degrees through PhysicsGraph, and employers would come directly to us to source their scientists and engineers.

However, resources are limited.

Right now we’re putting all of our resources into making the best Physics 1 content available.

That’s one reason why, despite them having over 100x the budget that we have, Khan Academy’s Physics 1 content is so sparse compared to ours. They’re busy making courses on personal finance, ancient art, and 2nd grade math. We focus only on the physical sciences.

Appealing to everyone

Khan Academy wants to maximize videos watched.

That means that any change that reduces videos watched is bad for them - even if the change results in more effective learning.

They’ll never tell a student “no, you can’t do topic yet”. They’ll never say “you failed, come back tomorrow”.

They do have a spaced repetition system, but it’s optional.

They’ll also never focus as much on advanced science topics as we will - there simply isn’t enough interest. Instead they’ll expand to whatever topics have the widest appeal while still being educational.

Conclusion

Khan Academy is a great supplemental resource. It offers a lot of great content that is better than many alternatives.

However, there are structural issues that prevent it from being an optimal learning platform, which they can’t overcome without completely changing how they operate. On top of that, they’ll never cover the physical sciences to the depth that we do here at PhysicsGraph.

If you want to quickly become familiar with a single topic, and maybe practice some surface-level problem-solving, then Khan Academy is a great choice.

If you want to fully master physics, ace your tests, and retain your skills for years to come - use PhysicsGraph.