I have been following the story of Khan Academy for about a year now. My kids used it for summer refreshers in math last year. I've seen the TED talks. I've followed Bill Gates' support of the Academy. I've seen him on mainstream TV. And I've read a lot of critiques of him and his videos.
Now there is a push to do a series of video critiques called the MTT2K prize, based on a video by John Golden and David Coffey that satirized and commented on one of the Khan math videos. Physics professor Rhett Allain did an analysis of a Khan projectile motion video as well. These critiques point out various errors in the videos. Depending on who you are, the "errors" range from being big and important to being rather nit-picky (Dr. Allain commented that it was annoying that Khan repeated himself often, but then found himself doing it occasionally as well in his video response). In the end, if these critiques remain constructive, and really concentrate on important issues rather than looking for every little item to criticize just to prove that Khan is inferior, some good could come from them. There have already been corrections made in response to Golden and Coffey's video. At the moment, however, the tenor of the discussion seems to have a huge negative bias.
To me, however, the main issue with Khan Academy is not the places where it could be pedagogically more efficient, or where it skims over details a teacher would like to see. The main issue is that there is a group of people, Bill Gates included, who are asking/expecting it to be much more than it is, or than it ever likely can be. Even Sal Khan himself seems to have shifted the focus with the idea that it could be the center of a "flipped classroom", where students watch a video at home, and then do problems at school.
In general, Khan videos not do a very good job as the sole or even primary source of information. There are too many issues with the videos to be good with that. Because of Khan's attempt to teach a broad range of topics, he doesn't have the expertise to identify all of the common misconceptions and tackle them head on. And, of course, since it is just a video, there is no opportunity to ask it questions when those misconceptions are encountered by the student watching at home. Because of Khan's desire/need to keep the videos at a length of 10 minutes or so, he has to skip many of the fundamentals that explain why the math/physics/etc. is that way. They turn into problem solving tutorials, which is good for the question at hand, but doesn't do much for teaching general methods. Because Khan has no way to know which videos have already been watched, and/or in what order they are watched, there is no way to know exactly what topics the student may already be familiar with (there was a few minute discussion of air resistance in the projectile motion video that seemed too hand-wavy for someone who knew nothing of the subject, but was too in-depth for someone who already had solved a similar problem or two).
Explicitly addressing misconceptions, the ability to go in-depth into the hows and whys of a topic, and classroom management that takes into account the current knowledge of the class are all things that a live teacher should be handling. I'll acknowledge that some teachers are probably not up to par on these things, but replacing the instruction of all teachers with Khan Academy as the primary source of information is not the answer.
Khan Academy has great use as a review for students, as my kids did last summer, or a refresher for people who have been out of school for awhile, or even a resource of explanations, problems and exercises for students as they learn the material from a teacher. For these cases, the occasional pedagogical oversight or imperfect explanation is acceptable. It is not a tool that can do anything and everything. It can not be the primary solution to poor education. Expecting it to be more and denying its weaknesses is the problem.
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