Rethinking Education

Speakers

Sal Khan

Founder, Khan Academy

Session Description

With over 3,700,000 users per month, Khan Academy is transforming learning. Founder Salman Khan will provide insight into its history and evolution, and how we can rethink education.

Notes:

• Opening sample video from the Khan Academy [See: Khan Academy on YouTube or the Khan Academy website for sample videos.]
• Khan Academy – “A free, world-class education for anyone anywhere”
  • 140 million+ lessons delivered
  • 500 million+ excerises done
  • 6+ million unique users (10 times all Harvard graduates since 1636)
• Sal’s story started in 2004 working with his family on math problems for fun and for helping and tutoring his cousin. It started with phone calls and Yahoo IM. Long story short he started Khan Academy in tutoring and it grew from there. He began writing software that would generate problems for his cousins. Sal then had trouble scaling up his lessons and then started putting up his videos on YouTube. This worked because it shifted the time and gave them the opportunity to review… it then also made their live sessions more valuable. The videos started to be more popular on YouTube. Sal eventually quit is day job and started the academy as a non-profit.
• The videos and content on Khan Academy sites are part of the picture with a sequence and content and the underlying software adds richness and guidance for learners.
• Assessments are included which help identify gaps and builds and adapts in an individual way so that students are forced to build upon their “gaps” in knowledge.
• Instead of holding fixed to a time to process through learning.  The variable is how long it takes and what is fixed – that everyone learns the topic.
• You can do things with videos and tutorials that you can’t do with a text book.  (e.g. Hints, check answers, instant feedback, on demand interactive help, on demand tutorial and review content, etc.)
• Faculty can spend most of their time on interventions with students, working individually with students, group work, etc. while students process content via the video and software.
• The Khan Academy also includes a progress and analytics tracking mechanism to see where students are succeeding, where they are having trouble, and how far they are in progressing through the content.  If students are not performing, interventions can occur by peer students and/or the instructor.
• Students are working at their preferred pace through differentiated instruction that is personalized and outcomes based.
• Whenever you think of technology in the classroom you sometimes think of it as dehumanizing, but in fact it can increase the student – to – teacher ratio time is significantly increased via video.
  
• NBC Video on Khan Academy
• A couple of videos were played during the keynote on how the Khan videos are changing lives of real people around the world (orphans in Mongolia who is now a translator for Khan Academy videos!).
• Use time in the classroom for other things and the videos can be watched offline. “Flipped Classroom” model.

Khan Academy – “A free, world-class education for anyone anywhere”

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