Salman Khan, founder of the Khan Academy, responds to a request for a meta-tutorial on how to make Khan tutorials. In it he describes four guiding principles for making “KSVs,” or Khan Style Videos, as they are now called. Maintain a Conversational Tone Talk the way you would talk to another human being – the [...]
These two stories on the seismic changes underway in education could be footnotes to the post “Witch Hunt or Reformation?” but they seem to stand well on their own. Anya Kamenetz writing for Fast Company recounts a note from Coursera’s Daphne Koller on putting the student first, a trend that will no doubt gather into [...]
A recent study from researchers Louis Deslauriers, Ellen Schelew and Nobel Laureate Carl Wieman suggests that the Methuselah of instructional technologies, the venerable broadcast lecture, might finally be showing signs of going the way of geocentricity and the four humors. Applying methods taken from the theory of “deliberate practice” by psychologist Anders Ericsson, the research [...]
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 [...]
I’m tired of talking. Let me explain. One of the basic rules of thumb for adult learning says that a class should be a little more than half practical application and workshop material to appeal to the audience. That aside, classroom (or instructor-lead) training has become expensive, and managers and consumers have become vocal in [...]
Dean José Bowen of Southern Methodist University is not only advocating an outrageous pedagogical overhaul that many see as dangerous and ill-conceived, he is in the throes of implementing it as well. His professors at the Meadows School of the Arts are now required to teach primarily without computers or, more precisely, without PowerPoint slides. [...]