Khan Academy Embraces BitTorrent

from the nice-to-see dept

Fri, Feb 11th 2011 3:08pm — Mike Masnick

We've written a few times before about the Khan Academy, the free online education resource, started by a former housemate of mine, that has turned into a powerhouse in the online education space. I had lunch with Sal a few weeks ago, and he's got some really fascinating things planned for Khan Academy that go way beyond what's there now. If you think it's disruptive to the educational space, you haven't seen anything yet. The latest move by the organization is to team up with BitTorrent to make it even easier and more efficient to spread the educational videos. They're doing this via the BitTorrent app studio platform, which is a development worth watching. The core of BitTorrent has always been the underlying infrastructure it provides, and the company is clearly moving towards enabling others to build a lot more on top of that infrastructure. As more and more people begin to realize the power of BitTorrent as infrastructure, we should start to see a lot more interesting apps come out of it. So this collaboration seems like good news for both sides, with two companies doing very interesting and disruptive things...

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Filed Under: bittorrent, education, infrastructure
Companies: bittorrent, khan academy

18 Comments

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The eejit (profile), 11 Feb 2011 @ 2:42pm

But you just KNOW that someone will try and kill it over a patent or something stupid like that.

And the only people who win that one are the lawyers.
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Anonymous Coward, 11 Feb 2011 @ 3:13pm

The core of BitTorrent has always been the underlying infrastructure it provides

Except they don't provide infrastructure, users do. BitTorrent as a protocol only presents that methods by which people can choose to share their internet connection and bandwidth.

Sadly, Bit Torrent as a protocol is mostly used for less than legal purposes. I am sure your friends institute will reset the balance, once again turning the P2P arena into a nearly perfectly lawful way to do business.

but but censorship!
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Anonymous Coward, 11 Feb 2011 @ 3:18pm

Re:
Yawn.
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Anonymous Coward, 11 Feb 2011 @ 3:20pm

Re: Re:
.torrent = .knowledge
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Anonymous Coward, 11 Feb 2011 @ 3:23pm

This has brought me much joy. Finlay real change.
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Anonymous Coward, 11 Feb 2011 @ 3:23pm

This is news to which the RIAA/MPAA had to say, "KHAAAAAAAAN!!!"
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Anonymous Coward, 11 Feb 2011 @ 3:28pm

Re:
Finlay was involved? He never told me!
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ChurchHatesTucker (profile), 11 Feb 2011 @ 3:35pm

Perfect
Online courses are a perfect fit for bittorrent. People are likely to keep them for at least a semester, which ensures a lot of seeders.
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Anonymous Coward, 11 Feb 2011 @ 3:39pm

Re: Re:
lol
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Anonymous Coward, 11 Feb 2011 @ 3:49pm

Somebody should contribute a patch to any subtitle editor to use voice synthesizers, basically it would be a SRT -> SABLE then people can translate it to many many languages automagically.
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Anonymous Coward, 11 Feb 2011 @ 3:51pm

Re:
I can just picture a porn movie translation.
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Anonymous Coward, 11 Feb 2011 @ 4:48pm

This is just incredible. I will ask my kids to take a look at this tonight.
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Anonymous Coward, 11 Feb 2011 @ 7:06pm

Re:
Don't worry, P2P will be "perfectly lawful" in another 2 years, when yet another protocol or infrastructure comes along to make it obsolete.

Remember kids, piracy knows how to change with the times!
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Usha, 11 Feb 2011 @ 7:17pm

I can't open the webpages of Khan Academy. I suppose there is some problem in loading the page.

What is everybody talking about??
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Prashanth (profile), 11 Feb 2011 @ 7:27pm

Woah, that's awesome news. When I first heard about Bill Gates praising it, I was a little skeptical because I thought it might lead to Microsoft having a stake in it and releasing videos in proprietary Microsoft formats like they did with the previously-archived Feynman lectures in physics (in Silverlight). Now, however, I know that Bill Gates was praising it as a parent of school-age children and wasn't subtly implying a future Microsoft takeover of sorts having been the former chairman and CEO; I think it's great that the Khan Academy is embracing a technology that is too often wrongfully called illegal for various reasons. Given that the Khan Academy has gotten very good press, hopefully BitTorrent will gain a better reputation among the wider media types through this collaboration.
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xenomancer (profile), 11 Feb 2011 @ 8:42pm

Re:
Dammit, you beat me to it. Look out for their ear slugs (commonly known as lawyers).
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Anonymous Coward, 11 Feb 2011 @ 9:46pm

Re:
http://www.khanacademy.org/

Just tested it and it is working, maybe is something on your end, have you tried a webproxy or a proxy?
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JEDIDIAH, 14 Feb 2011 @ 9:43am

The man trying to keep a good protocol down...
Yes. Let's continue to smear a perfectly good technology with FUD and make all of the claims about it a self-fulfilling as people are scared away from it for no good reason.

Bit Torrent is nothing more than distributed (rather than centralized) distribution mechanism. If you have no problems with your stuff being copied, the DRM and lockdown provided by websites that use Flash are of no value and possibly a hinderance.
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