22 Oct
Khan Academy Challenges the Way We See the Online Classroom
There's a lot of talk about how the traditional classroom setting and school day experience can be adjusted to help kids study better. Some people think we should standardize our students better while others champion "free school" methods of learning. Others point to traditions themselves they see as outdated, like summer vacation and athletics, as being the inhibitors of academic performance. It wasn't until online educator Salman Khan started getting recognition about his radical teaching theory that people started to wonder if boosting our nation's academic performance was simply a matter of switching around the school day/homework schedule.
The typical online university and other web-based learning programs have pretty much been doing what Khan does for years, but nobody had thought about using the model for childhood learning. Essentially Khan's program which he calls the Khan Academy, is a non-profit organization that provides a series of free online instructional videos that vary in topic from basic math to chemistry to social studies, and in degree of difficulty depending on your level of education. They're able to be watched by anyone anywhere, yet were originally meant to help Khan's nephew stay caught up in school. Khan's video lectures gave his nephew a chance to learn at his own pace and therefore keep up with a classroom schedule that was moving faster than he could. It occurred to Khan that this might be the problem for many children and he started making his videos available to more people. Before he knew it Khan was hearing about how Bill Gates was using his lectures to help his own children learn better.
The Khan Academy has been featured on PBS, NPR, and CNN. Khan has used the recent attention to promote a revolutionary theory he has about the way we should be teaching our kids. Khan thinks we have the learning/homework model backwards. He thinks time at home should be spent reviewing lectured material, where such information can be consumed at the pace of the pupil who can rewind and replay things they don't quite understand right away. Then classroom time should be spent with students talking amongst themselves and solving problems as teams, with the supervision of a teacher acting as more of a tutor. Khan points to the fact that many grade school teachers are already using his system for "homework" as a sign of how obvious the ease of online learning from home really is for children.
With universal Internet access approaching reality in the United States, something like what Salman Khan is suggesting might not only be effective, it might actually work. If enough research is performed that proves a system where children are lectured via video from home and introduced to teamwork and problem solving at school actually works, it might become a reality. It might just come down to economics; it's cheaper to pay one person to make a lecture worthy of thousands of students for years than pay thousands of teachers to perform thousands of lectures for years. I'm not exactly thrilled about teachers being cut out of the equation, let's hope there's a way to steer clear of that, but if kids learn better the Khan Academy way, educators have to be prepared for change. This country's educational system needs something drastic to happen, and if that means turning the school day upside down, that's what will have to happen.
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