The Future of Education?
A free world-class education for anyone anywhere. Khan academy is an online educational website that has more than six million logins a month. It teaches math, biology, astronomy, humanities, and economics for free. In 2004 Salman Khan a Hedge Fund Analyst in Boston with three degrees from MIT and a MBA from Harvard created this website. He agreed to start teaching his seven year old cousin in Louisiana who was having a hard time with algebra; he remotely uploaded the videos to YouTube in an attempt to tutor her. Soon other people where using his videos to help their children and themselves, so in 2009 Khan quit his job and devoted all of his time to KhanAcademy.org. At the 2010 Ideas Festival Bill Gates announced that he was using Khan’s teachings for his own children, this put Khan in the limelight. Now with a 30 million dollar backing from Bill Gates, Google, and other supporters Khan has been able to hire some of the most talented software engineers in the country. With the team working out of the Khan Academy office in California, they are currently focusing on changing the way Math is taught in American class rooms.
Teaching children out of the classroom can be a touchy subject. Khan has experienced some opposing comments from viewers and teachers. Teachers worry that the children would be losing face time with them. Khan explains that this is quite the opposite. With some proto type “flipped classrooms”, Khan has proven that the children are able to view the lessons at home and then get more one on one time with the teacher during class while doing their homework if they run into snags. Khan sees the teacher more as a coach or a mentor and this “flipping the classroom” technique as a stepping stone to assist the teacher in mentoring those who need it at specific times versus going over an entire subject again for the entire classroom.
Why it works so good. Khan’s videos are around ten minutes long, there’s no picture of him talking just a black screen which he writes on. This allows you to focus on the subject at hand and because these are not live lectures the student is able to stop and rewind when they need to. Students are more likely to do this if they don’t understand a topic or subject where’s in live lecture a student may be shy or feel embarrassed to ask questions. So the students are able to go at their own pace learning, and I think it is common knowledge at least at the
