In his recent 20-minute TED talk, “Let’s use video to reinvent education,” Salmon Khan elaborates on why he founded Khan Academy, a not-for-profit that publishes carefully structured series of educational videos—more than 2,100 to date. Each month this collection of short videos is viewed by one million students around the world; each day learners see more than 100,000 videos. He started with mathematics and now offers basic addition to advanced calculus, physics, chemistry, and biology. And it’s all online and free.
Here’s one of them, featuring a Cambridge neighbor:
An Introduction to Calorimetry from thewood on Vimeo.
Here’s a story from Wired that quotes some of the project’s critics. See comments for a lively debate.
Not all educators are enamored with Khan and his site. Gary Stager, a longtime educational consultant and advocate of laptops in classrooms, thinks Khan Academy isn’t innovative at all. The videos and software modules, he contends, are just a high tech version of that most hoary of teaching techniques—lecturing and drilling. Schools have become “joyless test-prep factories,” he says, and Khan Academy caters to this dismal trend…
As you might imagine, Khan heatedly rejects the notion that he’s promoting a return to rote learning. “It’s the exact opposite!” he says: The more that teachers flip their classrooms—with students watching his lectures at home—the more time is freed up for creative activities during the school day, like arts, games, or collectively brainstorming more abstract stuff.