I really thought that Salman Khan had been on Colbert before. Can't imagine where I'd have heard about him otherwise (not that there isn't a whole lot out there about the guy), but there it is...
Here's a brief intro, from Techawards.org
2009 Microsoft Education Award
Salman Khan
Khan Academy
Laureate Country: United States
Project Country: United States (although content is accessed globally)
Website: www.khanacademy.org
Video: http://www.youtube.com/...
The Khan Academy is a remarkable, one-person effort to educate the World.
Salman Khan has produced over 900 videos on YouTube-with 6 million views-covering everything from basic arithmetic to calculus, chemistry, and physics. Continuing to produce several hundred videos a year, Salman intends to provide instruction in all subjects to anyone, anywhere.
Millions of students around the world lack access to high quality instruction, especially in the sciences and math. The Khan Academy provides it for free in a way that can be accessed on-demand at a student's own pace.
The videos are directly teaching tens of thousands of students on every continent on a daily basis. Other non-profit groups have even begun distributing off-line versions of the library to rural and underserved areas in Asia, Latin America, and Africa.
The current curriculum is lots of math, a bit of science, some finance, a touch of history, and a whole lot of test prep. Nothing wrong with that, far as it goes, but it really does only go so far. Algebra is algebra, sure, but as important as the trio of math/science/money is, they're not everything that education is about. Really. No matter what the big winners in Silicon Valley think. Other subjects (and the mental and intellectual skills they teach) generally require different approaches. And that's not even getting into the question of whose version of which historical account should be taught, for example...
Looking over the articles about Khan, it's hard to tell how much of this acclaim is genuine and how much press release. He intends to keep his coursework free (it's a nonprofit with a handful of employees), but my Education Pirate Privateer Alert is beeping and blinking furiously with headlines like Thoughts on How Education is Changing (Or Not) Before Our Eyes, and, well, this:
Mark them tardy to the revolution
...And despite the advent of the personal computer and the Internet, most education today remains much like it’s been for hundreds of years: one teacher, 30 kids, textbooks and a blackboard.
Now that’s about to change. The cost of education has gotten so high, student achievement has become so disappointing, and the technology and computerized pedagogy are now sufficiently developed and ubiquitous that the long-awaited revolution in education is about to begin...
It’s not just me who thinks so. Just last week, at a digital run-up to the G-8 summit meeting in France, Rupert Murdoch announced that his News Corp. would be getting into the business of developing digital learning content and systems “in a big way.” There is now an entire ecosystem of venture capitalists, social entrepreneurs, angel investors and philanthropists eager to provide risk capital for technology-based education startups. A blue-ribbon advocacy group, the Digital Learning Council, was launched last fall by former governors Jeb Bush of Florida and Bob Wise of West Virginia. And, naturally, there’s even a new blog devoted to the subject, EdSurge, launched by my former Washington Post colleague Betsy Corcoran.
The person who has emerged as the pied piper of this movement, however, is Salman Khan, a former math geek and young hedge fund analyst who five years ago began making 10-minute videos to help his struggling nieces with their math homework...
..What is even more exciting — or threatening, depending on your point of view — is what the Khan Academy model might do to the rest of the educational establishment.
Think about it for a minute. If education moves to a teaching model in which students learn through online tutorials, exercises and evaluations created by a handful of the best educators in the world, then how many teachers will we need preparing lesson plans and delivering lectures and grading quizzes and tests? Surely we’ll need some for one-on-one tutoring, or to run small group discussions, or teach things that can’t or shouldn’t be taught online. Despite assurances to the contrary, however, there’s likely to be fewer than we have now — fewer but better-paid with more interesting jobs — just as has happened in nearly every other industry that has gone through a similar transformation...
...Given these implications, you can understand why the education establishment has been in no hurry to embrace a digital future. The battles over standardized testing and adoption of common national standards were just the warm-up. Now that the opposition to them has been largely overcome, capital and creative talent will pour in to develop both the hardware and the software of the new education technology.
Over the next decade, look for teaching to be transformed from an art into something much closer to a science, look for learning to become highly individualized, and look for education to go from being a cottage industry to one that takes full advantage of the economies of scale and scope. And as in every other industry, look for quality to go up and cost to go down...
(Full disclosure: that was in Kaplan University's Paper-of-record.)
and this:
Salman Khan: The Messiah of Math
Can an ex-hedge fund guy and his nonprofit Khan Academy make American schoolkids competitive again?
...Less than five years later, Khan's sideline has turned into more than just his profession. He's now a quasi-religious figure in a country desperate for a math Moses. His free website, dubbed the Khan Academy, may well be the most popular educational site in the world. Last month about 2 million students visited. MIT's OpenCourseWare site, by comparison, has been around since 2001 and averages 1 million visits each month. He has posted more than 2,300 videos, beginning with simple addition and going all the way to subjects such as Green's theorem, normally found in a college calculus syllabus. He's adding videos on accounting, the credit crisis, the French Revolution, and the SAT and GMAT, among other things. He masters the subjects himself and then teaches them. As of the end of April, he claims to have served up more than 54 million individual lessons...
Khan is more than just popular. He's a darling of America's amateur educational elite—people such as Bill Gates and John Doerr—who write checks and invite him to speak at their functions. Many of his followers are tech leaders, who understand more than most how dire America's standing in math education has become and what it may mean. In its 2010-2011 Global Competitiveness Report, the World Economic Forum ranked the U.S. 52nd in the quality of math and science education. Khan's March speech at TED 2011, the ideas conference in Long Beach, Calif., was met with an immediate standing ovation and capped by Gates, who interviewed him onstage about the project.
Gates is one of Khan's biggest fans...
But at least "The Seinfeld of the Education Revolution" recognizes at least some of his limits:
Though he’s the buzz of education circles – at two conferences in Silicon Valley where I saw him speak in the past six months, long lines of fans waited to thank him for his work– Khan has his share of critics, too. Some educators think Khan is arrogant in believing that videos can replace the human touch in a classroom, and in the process squeeze teachers out of the equation. Others believe his focus on basic skill drills misses more important learning ideals, like critical thinking and collaboration.As an institution, education does not so easily adapt to newfangled ways. “Entrenched systems don’t go away because Sal Khan is charming,” Klein said.
I spoke to Khan about these questions, and more.
Q. How do you answer teachers who say your videos will replace them in the classroom?
A. Depending on the teacher’s mentality, I think this can actually make it a lot more fun. If I was a teacher, this is exactly the type of class I’d want to teach, because for the core skills, I don’t have to prepare in a traditional sense. But I do have to prepare for projects and all that, so I have to prepare for creative things. As a teacher, when I’m in a room, I’m relying on my innate skills and teaching abilities, I haven’t scripted it ahead of time. I’m doing like a doctor would. I wouldn’t have a script about what I’m going to say to the next patient. They look at the patient’s data, they ask questions, and they try to diagnose the patient and somehow cure the patient. It’s the same exact model here.
But it’s going to be hard for teachers who have trouble letting go of the idea that they’re the sage on stage, that they have all the information, “Do not question me, be quiet,” and it’s all about classroom management. It throws all that stuff out the door. But the people who are attracted to this model is exactly the type of people we want and who this will work for.
Q. Are you adding any input from teachers?
A. Yes, we’ve had input on both the videos and creating the software, from teachers and students. In Los Altos, it’s a very tight design. We have our engineers in the classrooms on a regular basis. They’re talking to students and teachers. In fact, they figured out that some kids were gaming the multiple choice, and we realized we had to fix that.
Sometimes we see what teachers are doing in class, and we realize that it should be a feature in the videos or the software. ... So we’re learning a ton from the teachers themselves. And we’re actually going to hire some of them. There are teachers who were laid off, some of the best teachers the district has. It was a travesty at first, then we thought, Gee, we could hire them. These teachers have been masterful with the technology and what to do with it. They weren’t afraid of the ambiguity.
Though once you take out the 'damn teachers, who do they think they are? Expecting middle-class wages and job security..!' crowd, I see less to worry about:
The Khan Academy was founded by Salman Khan about five years ago. When Khan was working as an analyst at a hedge fund in Boston, his cousins in New Orleans asked him to tutor them in math. Because of the distance, Khan decided to post his lessons to You Tube for his cousins to view. Seeing no reason to make them private, Khan allowed anyone in the world free access to these videos...
It was not long until the videos became popular with the general public. Many people began leaving comments on the videos, saying that they were understanding and enjoying math for the first time. Teachers have also written Sal Khan telling him how much his videos have impacted their classrooms. Chemistry and physics teacher Mr. Powell says, “Khan Academy is very useful as a supplement to the classroom. Its main advantage is that it is self-paced.” These teachers have flipped their style of instruction. Now they assign the Khan Academy lectures as homework and make the work that was previously done at home into class work. Sal Khan says these teachers are using technology to “humanize” the classroom. They are no longer giving a “one size fits all” lecture that students cannot interrupt. Now, the students are encouraged to interact with each other and the teacher as they do their work. Khan describes these teachers more as coaches and mentors.
The Khan Academy is not limited to its 2,200 lectures; it also includes practice problems and hints for each subject. The goal is to answer ten questions correctly in a row before proceeding to the next subject. Khan says this solves a major problem with the modern education system; teachers today are moving on to the next topic when many students have not even mastered the current one. Sophomore Cathy Bruno says, “At times, both my classmates and I have trouble when the teacher decides to move onto a new chapter or topic, especially in math and science.” Khan says it is analogous to not properly learning how to ride a bicycle but then being given a unicycle to ride. Khan says teachers encourage experimentation but do not expect mastery. Khan, on the other hand, encourages experimentation and the occasional failure, but ultimately expects mastery.
Salman Khan does not expect his videos to replace the current education system; he just wants it to be a supplement. With the data feedback of Khan Academy, teachers can see which students have progressed past a certain level and which students need help. Teachers can see what exercises students have completed and for how long they worked on them. They do not even need to ask what the students do not understand; they can see it for themselves. Khan’s goal is to humanize classrooms globally. Teachers should be giving one hundred percent of their time to meaningful interaction with students.
Actually, I've bookmarked the site, preparing for the any-moment-now when my nephews' homework outstrips what their parents' recall from grade school. We've all known that day will come sooner or later -- and reviewing, say, fractions (LCD? That's a light bulb, yes?) could help maintain my academic mystique... |