At first glance Salman Khan appears a most unlikely revolutionary. Although well educated (note: he is neither an educator nor a psychologist) he has nonetheless, and from most accounts, single-handedly ignited a revolution in teaching that any “real” educator, government administrator or instructional designer would be proud to lay claim to.
What started as simple private tutorials in math for his cousins – utilizing what he describes as about $200.00 in computer accessories and shareware – Khan drew upon his innate interest in education (along with perhaps his own personal frustrations as a student) to craft a series of screen capture how-to guides for solving high school math problems. As word spread among friends and family members, viral interest forced Khan to move his homespun videos to YouTube to service his burgeoning audience, completely for free. The rest, as they say, is history.
At present the Khan Academy (a not-for-profit educational organization founded in 2006) has served over 51 million views from a library of over 2200 videos. In addition to math and physics, topics now embrace history and biology. School districts and major corporations are attempting to use and develop his methods for their own internal applications. Donations from private sources and the likes of Google and the Gates Foundation have subsequently allowed Salman Khan to quit his day job and devote his energies full-time to the development of his Academy and the distribution of educational programs worldwide (“providing a high quality education to anyone, anywhere”).
Looking over Khan’s presentations on his methods you begin to wonder what makes the Khan Academy so successful. After all, this isn’t the result of a major educational research program, a sweeping government initiative, or a mass popular movement in educational reform. Further, what makes the Khan Academy even more interesting is that Khan’s tutorial method is not so much ingenious as it is ingenuous.
In several of his talks Khan is fairly straightforward in his assessment of what makes his method work. First and foremost, as Khan attests, each of the videos offers a lesson on a single concise topic (a “concept”) for no more than about 10 minutes. One key idea, cut in a bite-sized chunk, for a period not to exceed the boredom threshold of the average viewer. Given that the videos are recorded and stored online, the presentations can be played any time and repeated as needed by the student until he or she feels comfortable to move forward.
Another feature of the tutorials is the general tone they are given in. As Khan describes it, they feel like they are coming more from a friend than a teacher. You have a sense that Khan is there with you, sitting by your side, leading you through the problems with a pencil and paper. They are down-to-earth, enthusiastic and rigorous without a trace of giddiness, pomposity or pedantry. The student feels like “…there is an individual who cares about you,” Khan says. The student comes away with a sense that the instructor wants to help him or her over the obstacles in the landscape because he has been in the student’s place himself and sympathizes with the struggles that lay ahead.
Drilling down a layer into the Khan Academy’s unique style reveals even more about what makes the “secret sauce” special. Each of the bite-sized topics that are referred to previously are in fact carefully culled and curated learning objects. The trick, of course, is to first know the subject well enough to select which topics to present and in what order. Following that, the teacher must distill the concepts to their absolute essence.
This distillation process is, to all who have tried it, much harder than it looks. In fact, the ability to select and summarize complex material and ideas, rather than resorting to the indiscriminate slathering of a PowerPoint slide with bullets, might be one of the hallmarks of an educated mind. Clearly, Khan groks it.
Despite the thought and planning that goes into Khan’s presentations they can hardly be accused of being over produced. This is not Pixar doing technical training. If anything, the digital blackboard and colored chalk renderings show the human side of learning and mastery. The notes and diagrams often appear rough and awkward, but they are at the same time quite genuine, funny and sometimes – to the advantage of the learner – mistaken. As Khan explains it, he is often in the place of the learner and, in contrast to many schools and universities, has not rehearsed the solution beforehand, offering the student the patented procedure. Instead he lets the students witness his own thought processes as he wrestles with the problems and sometimes wanders down the wrong path from which he has to back out and start again – just like a real student.
Nowhere in Khan’s methods can be found any of the bells or whistles of modern post-industrial pedagogy. No Flash animation, interactivity, games, social networking tools, 3D graphics or monolithic learning management systems are to be found. In fact there is little beyond a virtual blackboard and some equally virtual colored chalk. You don’t even see Khan’s face.
The faceless almost tactile sketches and equations provide little distraction and promote focus on the material. This decidedly low-tech solution to training might harken back to ancient watch-me-do-it tribal methods but its effectiveness is not lost on Khan’s students, many of whom write to express thanks that they are not only mastering their classes for the first time but excited about the subjects as well.
Khan’s approach is to teach for academic competency. That is, he instructs in the methods and procedures that assist the student in passing standardized tests and formal exams. After the student completes a module, test problems are offered through a program that Khan designed himself that acts to monitor student progress and flag trouble areas for the teacher. The student is asked to correctly answer 10 problems in a row before moving to the next module. This final process closes the instruction, feedback and assessment loop in Khan’s method and further acts to eliminate the small voids in understanding that can multiply as the student moves forward. Interestingly YouTube assists in the process as well, offering statistics on usage and attention.
One of Khan’s own revelations about his method is telling: it’s so simple and effective that he does not see why anyone needs to give live lectures anymore.
Although he does not refer to it by name, Khan points to (and his method directly parallels) the use of what is commonly called the Inverted Classroom. In an inverted classroom recorded presentations impart new information prior to class while class time is taken up with teachers and peers solving problems (or “doing homework”) quite in reverse to what is traditionally done in schools and training centers.
The results of this method have so far been compelling. Both teachers and students benefit. Teachers benefit because more of their time is spent in directed remediation (particularly if they use Khan’s monitoring software), problem solving and exploration of the material. Students like the inverted classroom because it potentially transforms class time into something useful and interesting. In Khan’s case the testimonials from parents, teachers and students are hard to ignore. His academy and tutorials do work.
More needs to be seen to ascertain whether the Khan Academy represents the future of education as some claim. But what is clear is that it stands as a forceful reminder of what can be done to improve the instruction of certain skills and particular subjects while simultaneously improving the classroom experience for everyone.
References.
YouTube Teaching as Guerrilla Public Service
Yes, the Khan Academy IS the Future of Education (video; singularityhub.com)
Yes, the Khan Academy is the Future of Education
Khan Academy Exercise Software
Khan Academy and the Effectiveness of Science Videos
The Khan academy is Not that Good
In a recent development, jQuery creator John Resig, formerly of Mozilla, has decided to move to the Kahn Academy:
This certainly portends big changes at Khan Academy.
See full story here.
Is the Khan Academy an Indictment of American Education?
Check out some illustrative examples in the critique here.
Sal Khan and the Metaphors of Math Salvation
Audrey Watters at Hack Education offers a few insights on the Khan Academy “phenomenon.” One in particular that caught me off guard is interesting because it apparently illustrates how people in educational programming might view Sal Khan and the Academy:
Further down in her post Watters returns to the question of what makes Khan Academy successful from the point of view of an educator and concludes:
Critics and reviewers of the Khan Academy seem confused by its success largely because they miss two things: 1) Khan does not act as a teacher, he acts as a tutor; and 2) the medium is (still) the message.
The full article Sal Khan and the Metaphors of Math Salvation can be found here.
Khan Academy iPad app screenshots show progress
It looks like the Khan Academy is on the brink of its own iPad app to help distribute tutorial materials via its web repository:
See full article here.
http://www.tuaw.com/2011/07/13/khan-academy-ipad-app-screenshots-show-progress/
As reported on ReadWrite Enterprise:
Khan Academy iPad App Open-Sourced
“Though it’s not really a business app, I thought this was worth noting here: the Khan Academy has open-sourced its iPad app. The app isn’t available from the iTunes store yet, but the organization has made its jQuery-based source code available on GitHub. The Khan Academy offers free video lectures on a variety of academic topics.” – Klint Finley
Attribution:
http://www.readwriteweb.com/enterprise/2011/07/ipad-for-business-round-up-khan-academy.php?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+readwriteweb+%28ReadWriteWeb%29
From Github:
“Khan Academy has created a generic framework for building exercises. This framework, together with the exercises themselves, can be used completely independently of the Khan Academy application.
The framework exists in two components:
An HTML markup for specifying exercises.
A jQuery plugin for generating a usable, interactive, exercise from the HTML markup.”
See: https://github.com/khan/khan-exercises#readme
Khan Academy Gets $5M Grant. Plans to Expand Faculty and Build School:
“Khan Academy announced this morning that it has raised $5 million from the O’Sullivan Foundation (a foundation created by Irish engineer and investor Sean O’Sullivan). The money is earmarked for several initiatives: expanding the Khan Academy faculty, creating a content management system so that others can use the program’s learning analytics system, and building an actual brick-and-mortar school, beginning with a summer camp program.” – Audrey Waters, Hack Education
See: http://www.hackeducation.com/2011/11/04/khan-academy-gets-5-million-to-expand-faculty-platform-to-build-a-physical-school
Khan Academy to go bricks and mortar – well, kind of…
According to Liz Dwyer at GOOD/Education:
Interesting comments on the role of the inverted, or flipped, classroom and the value of project-based learning.
Please see the full post here.
Don’t Use Khan Academy without Watching this First
The Khan Academy continues to attract attention. This time it is getting a satirical poke from a couple educators who deconstruct a mathematics lesson in the style of a Mystery Science Theater performance. Very amusing and points well made. Edweek.org cautions:
First and foremost, the Khan Academy is a tool, not an end in itself. Tools have limits and it is the job of the person wielding the tool to know the boundaries in order to apply the tool effectively and appropriately, avoiding ill effects. Second, all tools are imperfect (e.g., schools, classrooms, courses, textbooks, lectures, training programs) and it is incumbent on the teacher (and perhaps the learners) to use the imperfections as a source of discussion and investigation. After all, isn’t “learning to think critically” part of every educational venture? Lastly, one has to hope in fairness that the authors of the video turn their critical eyes toward other teaching tools and methods as well so we can see how more “traditional” approaches stack up against the approaches used by the Khan Academy.
http://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/edtechresearcher/2012/06/dont_use_khan_academy_without_watching_mmt2k_first.html
[...] Learning About The Khan Academy - You have heard about Khan and have possible even used the tutorials. Before making your own… take a moment to learn from Khan and discover the method of his success. There really is a lot of thought in each of those clips. Jack McShea in his blog HG2S Training Blog gives an awesome explanation, provides a link to Khan’s TED Talk, and provides other useful Khan Links. [...]
It might have holes in it, but Sal Khan’s brief history of education in America is still useful if you are looking for a view from 32,000 feet of the whys and wherefores behind the ways we (still) do things in schools and classrooms.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=LqTwDDTjb6g
Some comments on where it falls short are here:
http://www.good.is/posts/sal-khan-s-history-of-education-has-some-pretty-significant-holes
Increasing numbers of middle schools, high schools and colleges are flipping or inverting their courses. Flipping is catching on with impressive results, catching praise from both students and teachers. Apparently even parents are pleased.
A few careful watchers are calling for research into the method, questioning its effectiveness and long-term value. Others already note that it does come at a cost: It is more work for the teacher. Production of background audio and video presentations aside, it is dangerous to fill the class time with material that is not engaging. No old-wine-in-new-bottle here. This is going to be the major obstacle to the widespread success (not adoption) of the Inverted Classroom.
References.
‘Flipped Learning’ Classroom Model Embraced By Teachers In Schools Nationwide
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/01/28/flipped-learning-classroo_n_2567279.html
Teachers Flip for ‘Flipped Learning’ Class Model
http://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory/teachers-flip-flipped-learning-class-model-18330896?page=2