Sal Khan’s ‘Academy’ sparks a tech revolution in education
May 31, 2012 | Source: USA Today
Salman Khan (credit: Khan Academy)
Salman Khan’s simply narrated, faceless home videos on everything from algebra to French history have been viewed half a billion times.
Last year, a number of schools began “flipping” their classrooms, having students study Khan videos by night and do homework with teachers by day.
His staff has been ramped up to 32, including the recent high-profile addition of Google’s first hired employee, programming ace Craig Silverstein. The staff’s immediate mission is to further broaden the site’s content and improve assessment and feedback features so the Khan Academy experience becomes more interactive.
This summer, he’ll launch the first Khan Academy Discovery Lab in Palo Alto, Calif., a small, project-based summer camp “that’s like a lab for us, so we can learn more about how kids learn,” he says. If it’s a hit, the labs will expand nationwide next year.
And after, perhaps a bricks-and-mortar Khan Academy.
Khan Academy is part of a looming tech-education iceberg, says Victor Hu, head of education technology and services for Goldman Sachs. ”Technology is doing to education what it’s done to countless other industries: disrupting it,” Hu says. “Where education once was static, bound to a textbook, now it’s moving to a global, interdisciplinary model.”.
Khan notes that Stanford will soon put medical classes on his website. “But hopefully they realize from what I’ve done that it can’t be a professor at a whiteboard with PowerPoint. It has to be bite-size and conversational, and no faces.”
“When I started, you wouldn’t have imagined that some crazy dude in a closet making videos would help lead this charge. But my mission is to have every precocious 13-year-old in the world have access to every bit of information they could ever want.”
Comments (11)
by DeBee Corley
I find it amusing that “we” (old people) want to prepare our children to live the life we had.
Our children are preparing for the life they will live. Laziness? Perfect.
Do nothing jobs are disappearing. Soft college degrees are rapidly proving to have no value.
Programming, engineering, Chemistry and Physics degrees require really smart students with motivation. But it appears to me that really, really, really smart students are bored to tears with the slow pace.
As an example, a summer intern from Stanford was assigned to me. He picked up our process, mainframe program testing and software problem resolution, overnight. So he was going to spend another three years getting his degree, when he could have made a significant difference at my company immediately.
by Bri
In less than ten years the cell phone will be the size of a red blood cell. There will be no need for cliff notes or lecture halls or any of that crap. Like in the movie The Matrixs you will be able to down load any skill with Watsonesque ease. Me personally I feel a sleep in school and waited for the test review to learn what was needed to just pass my classes. On my own I’m voracious at consuming information and have an unquenchable curiosity . In my view it was the schools fault for not understanding what motivates people. This of course includes your ‘Higher’ educations protocols for ‘Teaching’. The problem is one of motivation. What motivates people. Watch Born Rich, it is a classic study in failed motivation. Not for nothing this problem is only going to get much worse. It’s as if you have no ability to relate to them, and it’s not your fault. You just weren’t motivate to understand what is actually happening in your students minds, only to learn a method to cram info into their heads. They’ve learned not to buy what your selling. I sure didn’t buy it and still look back at it as a waste of time. If I don’ learn something new I go thru withdrawal symptoms , andy friends have a hard time relating to my knowledge base. All my life I’ve been teased and called brain not brian. I hide it from most people. They hate that I need t know and that I quickly figure out most things like it’s Childs play. My parents wanted to send me to an advanced school because I have a high IQ but I told them that it was no good. Most adults seam like children to me. Very little comprehension of the actual factors at play and more concern getting though the day without melting down from stress. We place far to much emphasis on test scores and performance and almost nothing on the fact that we are mammals and need Masloffs heirchy of needs. Social stand is the vast majority of our sense of self and that comes naturally from our peers, not our teachers you are them the students are the us that each class derives it’s sense of identity. Unless your Ray Kuzwiel and found your sense of identity outside of that black hole of public education. Sorry to bring you into this Ray, but when you’re described as Woody’s nerdy brother I know you chose not to relate to your peer group and the group still ostricizes you as a nerd. My mother was a psychogist, and had teems of excellent info around. In the magazine psychology today was an article about children who grew up normal despite adverse home life. The researchers discovered that these child activly found replacement role models. For me it was Da Vinci , Aristotle,,etc. Ray most definitely would have been one. The hallmark of our spieces is the acquisition of knowledge and then the transmittal of that info to the next generation. Look at Jane Goodals work with chimps. Your class just didn’t view you as part of their troop.
by Snake
Bri, is it your strong distaste for the education system which has caused you to revolt by refusing to use paragraphs? ;) Take that, English class!
by james
Bri, if you haven’t already, check out Daniel Pink’s book Drive. He tries to explain human motivation and has some interesting/counter-intuitive things to say. You make some good points. I went through school thinking the teachers didn’t really understand how learning happens. And I was frustrated because they’re the ones who should know.
by XavierD
@Susan, those types of comments which include personal attacks are made by people who are looking to get a rise out of other readers or do not know how to have a discussion without reverting to personal attacks. I personally feel personal attacks take away from the credibility of the arguer. For example, your statements would be much more effective without the comment at the end of your statement.
by shakespeake
As a high school English teacher of 17 years I can say this is a fabulous development for roughly 33% of my students when I began in the 1990s and less than 20% now in 2012.
Those who are motivated and curious will revel in this. I’m excited by it, certainly, because I love to learn, to know more today than yesterday…. But I–likely “we” since this is a site dedicate to newly acquired, ever-accelerating, intelligence–am a quickly growing minority.
That my students would take any initiative and responsibility for their own education is laughable. That they would watch a video and learn something of their own accord over texting, Facebooking, Tweeting, having sex, doing drugs, playing video games, playing sports, sleeping, eating, chillin’… It’s no contest.
I try desperately to believe that kids today are not “worse” than kids of my generation because I know how much I abhorred that concept when in high school and college. Yet they are worse in the sense that they capitulate to any diversion or distraction immediately and the number of those diversions and distractions is infinitely greater than when I was that age.
Try teaching Pride and Prejudice (or let them choose their own novel if it please you to be student-centered). 10% of AP students will not open it with another 40% reading some and relying on Sparknotes for the remainder. In Honors I’d say 33% won’t open it with 66% total relying on study aides. With regular (“college prep”, mind you) track I’m lucky if 50% even know the author of the title we’re reading and 25% are actually reading it. I regularly…REGULARLY…have high school seniors tell me they’ve never read a book, ever, when I give them their research-based literary analysis assignment for the year. When I ask what about book x, y, or z they covered in grade p below? I didn’t read it. I went to summer school instead.
This is the growing majority. Every year it is worse and worse and worse. And, “no”, I am not in an urban district. Adjacent, “yes”, but in? No.
So, the Khan Academy is fantastic…but not really, if you’re looking at the world as it is and not as we wish it might be.
We are so unbelievably lazy as a culture that I cannot see the Khan Academy as a realistic alternative for at least 2/3 of my students.
by james
Shake: great insight. Laziness, Tweeting, texting, sex, drugs, and rock n roll. And sugar, video games, sports, etc.
Why do we humans do what we do? The answer is right between our ears. We’re driven by the primal regions of the thing we understand so poorly: our stone-age brain.
We’re reaching the limits of what can be accomplished with brains that are becoming obsolete. The solution: Artificial Intelligence.
by John McDonald
Online lectures are great for disseminating facts. No argument. However there is no substitute for a great teacher with the ability to pique students curiosity. To motivate them and to challenge them think about problems and solutions from many dimensions. The genesis of new knowledge is the ability to creatively question the validity of current “facts” not to simply parrot them.
by XavierD
@John, I agree with your statement and I believe that Khan Academy is trying give these teachers better tools to accomplish those goals. In traditional teaching environments, teachers have to spend 30 of the 50 minutes they have with the students lecturing (disseminating facts)
Now using these online tools, video lectures, etc. the student can review this same information, at their own pace, from home. The teacher can then spend that 50 minutes of class time to engage in discussion with the students.
by Fred
Yeah, in any human endeavor, there are lots and lots of mistakes. I’ve had my share of good teachers say stupid things too. That doesn’t subtract from the awesomeness of the availability of good teachers, and, similarly, these great videos.
by Susan Jones
On some of the prints of this article commenters ask why teachers are too stupid to have done something like this.
Teachers out there have done *much* better than these videos, which are good (or not) old fashioned lecture-and-chalkboard, procedure-based and full of mistakes from saying that 83 x 4 is a sum to telling me — when you’re supposed ot be *teaching* me times tables — that 2 plus itself times one is what two times one means (so two plus two is only four some of the time). Check out mathvillage.info and mathtv.com — but I guess they aren’t MIT grads with Bill Gates’ ear.