I've tracked them for a long time. They do a an amazing job of PR. Their product did not deliver anything for years but with the massive amount of cash they have, it was bound to get somewhere eventually. Today it's way beyond where it was when they were just delivering lessons over Adobe Connect a few years ago. The problem is that the entire time they've been talking the same talk. So it's hard to gauge at this point how good of a system they really have because when it was non-existant they talked about it the same way they talk about it now, $50 million in funding later. I do wish them luck and applaud them for having a big vision but it's hard to tell if the smoke and mirrors were ever replaced with anything meaningful.
I don't understand why you came in here to say little more than "this costs money, I don't like it", while taking a shot at people who have earned disposable income.
Do you really think Khan Academy is free? It's only free if you have electricity, a computer, and a broadband internet connection. Knewton really adds only a tiny amount of money on top of that massive infrastructure cost.
Even if you think "oh, just go to the public library!" I would respond, "how, with what money or means?" That's not free either.
None of these things are "free". I feel that you've simply taken an arbitrary ideological stance where a company producing materials and asking for money to compensate them is somehow less "preferable".
I think like you that the fact that this company makes money from users rather than receiving from rich benefactors, is not sufficient for disliking it.
As yurylifshits points out, their ads make me feel like their product is awesome, and maybe it really is.
Only that I would not know, till some users points out what are the pros and cons, with Khan Academy as second term of comparison.
I, as eu universitary students, cannot afford to pay 400$, only to see if their products fits my needs.
It's a pity I bet.
This type of faux-populist attitude is bothersome, especially since it's so popular on HN. Why dichotomize attempts to change education along monetary lines?
Khan is changing education from without, and Knewton is changing it from within. What's wrong with either approach?
We can like them both. For-profits have often been better at rapidly exploring the beneficial-interactions opportunity-space than pure non-profits and charitable organizations.
