How Khan Academy Is Changing the Rules of Education
Found via Simoleon Sense.
For years, teachers like Thordarson have complained about the frustrations of teaching to the “middle” of the class. They stand at the whiteboard, trying to get 25 or more students to learn the same stuff at the same pace. And, of course, it never really works: Advanced kids get bored and tune out, lagging ones get lost and tune out, and pretty soon half the class isn’t paying attention. Since the rise of personal computers in the early ’80s, educators have hoped that technology could solve this problem by offering lessons tailored to each kid. Schools have blown millions, maybe billions, of dollars on sophisticated classroom technology, but the effort has been in vain.
Khan’s videos are anything but sophisticated. He recorded many of them in a closet at home, his voice sounding muffled on his $25 Logitech headset. But some of his fans believe that Khan has stumbled onto the secret to solving education’s middle-of-the-class mediocrity. Most notable among them is Bill Gates, whose foundation has invested $1.5 million in Khan’s site. “I’d been looking for something like this—it’s so important,” Gates says. Khan’s approach, he argues, shows that education can truly be customized, with each student getting individualized help when needed.
………………..
Related previous posts:
Salman Khan on Charlie Rose
TED Talk - Salman Khan: Let's use video to reinvent education
- Flipping Med Ed
To help medical students progress faster and find their calling in the field, two educators suggest moving content delivery out of the classroom may be the way to bring the students back in. The plan, featured in the October edition of Academic Medicine,...
- One Man, One Computer, 10 Million Students: How Khan Academy Is Reinventing Education
The headquarters of what has rapidly become the largest school in the world, at 10 million students strong, is stuffed into a few large communal rooms in a decaying 1960s office building hard by the commuter rail tracks in Mountain View, Calif. Despite...
- Salman Khan On 60 Minutes
...
- Online Learning, Personalized
SAN JOSE, Calif. — Jesse Roe, a ninth-grade math teacher at a charter school here called Summit, has a peephole into the brains of each of his 38 students. He can see that a girl sitting against the wall is zipping through geometry exercises; that a...
- Bill Gates' Favorite Teacher
Sal Khan, you can count Bill Gates as your newest fan. Gates is a voracious consumer of online education. This past spring a colleague at his small think tank, bgC3, e-mailed him about the nonprofit khanacademy.org, a vast digital trove of free mini-lectures...