The (near) future of education
I discovered KhanAcademy.org about a year ago and have subsequently mentioned Khan and his website to every educator I know. Last month, I emailed a link to this BusinessWeek article with a message:
Empowering kids to control their learning really motivates and enables them to learn much faster. One principal at a school where kids are learning from free KhanAcademy videos and learning tools says “Students are working at a level of mathematics that I have never seen in an elementary school before, maybe not even in a junior high school.” One 5th grader in the article is already doing differentiation using the chain rule!
Khan Academy is hardly the only organization building powerful adaptive learning programs. Other successful innovators in this emerging field — now beginning to revolutionize learning — include Carnegie-Mellon’s Open Learning Initiative, Grockit, and Knewton.
I mention Sal Khan, founder and “faculty” of KhanAcademy.org, here not because he has produced more than 2,100 free video lectures and math learning tools for K-12 (though that’s extremely cool).
I mention him because I’ve spent the day watching videos of Khan discussing Khan Academy, and he really maps out a compelling vision of what tomorrow’s classrooms will look like. Struggling students discovered Khan Academy (and commercial sites like Grockit and Knewton) long ago. What’s exciting is how these new tools promise to reshape learning inside and outside of classrooms. Smart teachers have begun leveraging Khan’s lectures to flip the teaching model from class lectures and homework to home video lectures and working problems in class (where students can receive immediate feedback and help). Khan Academy gives each teacher a dashboard to view each student’s progress at a macro level and drill down to exact question responses and time spent watching each video. It awards students badges for completing tasks. It even flags students who seem to be struggling with a particular module and recommends certain other classmates who could help teach their struggling peers.
I can’t boil down Khan’s insights (and humor) in a short blog post, but he has posted many excellent videos describing Khan Academy and his views on the future of education. If you care about optimizing education, you’ll want to watch. A good place to start is this 20-minute TED talk. I also especially enjoyed and watched twice this 83-minute MIT Club of Northern California talk.
Posted by James on Thursday, June 02, 2011