The Khan Academy is a non-profit educational organization and a website created in 2006 by Bangladeshi-American educator Salman Khan, a graduate of MIT and Harvard Business School. With the stated mission of "providing a high quality education to anyone, anywhere", the website supplies a free online collection of more than 3,600 micro lectures via video tutorials stored onYouTube teaching mathematics, history, health care and medicine, finance, physics, chemistry, biology, astronomy, economics, cosmology, organic chemistry, American civics, art history, macroeconomics, microeconomics and computer science. Khan Academy launched a computer science module in September 2012. Khan Academy has delivered over 200 million lessons.
History
The founder of the organization, Salman Khan, was born to a Bangladeshi father and Indian mother from Kolkata living in New Orleans, Louisiana, United States of America. His father is from Barisal, Bangladesh. After earning three degrees from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (a BS in mathematics, a BS in electrical engineering and computer science, and an MS in electrical engineering and computer science), he pursued an MBA from Harvard Business School. In late 2004, Khan began tutoring his cousin Nadia in mathematics using Yahoo’s Doodle notepad. When other relatives and friends sought similar help, he decided it would be more practical to distribute the tutorials on YouTube. Their popularity there and the testimonials of appreciative students prompted Khan to quit his job in finance as a hedge fund analyst at Connective Capital Management in 2009, and focus on the tutorials (then released under the moniker "Khan Academy") full-time. Bill Gates once said that "I'd say we've moved about 160 IQ points from the hedge fund category to the teaching-many-people-in-a-leveraged-way category. It was a good day his wife let him quit his job".
The project is funded by donations. Khan Academy can be a 501(c)(3) not-for-profit organization, now with significant backing from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and Google. Several people have made US $10,000 contributions; Ann and John Doerr gave $100,000; total revenue is about $150,000 in donations. Additionally, it earned $2,000 per month from ads on the website in 2010 until Khan Academy ceased to accept advertising. In 2010, Google announced it would give the Khan Academy $2 million for creating more courses and for translating the core library into the world’s most widely spoken languages, as part of their Project 10100.
Khan Academy has eclipsed MIT’s OpenCourseWare (OCW) in terms of videos viewed.
Its YouTube channel has more than 202 million total views, compared to MIT's 43 million. It also has twice as many subscribers, at more than 429,000. Khan Academy also had a language release in mid-2012. It was supported by volunteers from Amara and included Indonesian, German, Spanish, French, Italian, Swahili, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Turkish, Xhosa, Greek, Bulgarian, Ukrainian, Urdu, Arabic, Persian, Bengali, Hindi, and Chinese.
Technical Format
The Khan Academy started with Khan remotely tutoring one of his cousins interactively using Yahoo Doodle images. Based on feedback from his cousin, additional cousins began to take advantage of the interactive, remote tutoring. In order to make better use of his and their time, Khan transitioned to making YouTube video tutorials. Drawings are now made with a Wacom tablet and the free natural drawing application SmoothDraw 3, and recorded with screen capture software from Camtasia Studio.
All videos (hosted via YouTube) are available through Khan Academy's own website, which also contains many other features such as progress tracking, practice exercises, and a variety of tools for teachers in public schools. Logging into the site can be done via a Google or a Facebook account for those who do not want to create a separate Khan Academy account.
Khan chose to avoid the standard format of a person standing by a whiteboard, deciding instead to present the learning concepts as if "popping out of a darkened universe and into one's mind with a voice out of nowhere" in a way akin to sitting next to someone and working out a problem on a sheet of paper: "If you're watching a guy do a problem [while] thinking out loud, I think people find that more valuable and not as daunting". Offline versions of the videos have been distributed by not-for-profit groups to rural areas in Asia, Latin America, and Africa. While the current content is mainly concerned with pre-college mathematics and physics, Khan's long-term goal is to provide "tens of thousands of videos in pretty much every subject" and to create "the world's first free, world-class virtual school where anyone can learn anything".
Khan Academy also provides a web-based exercise system that generates problems for students based on skill level and performance. The exercise software is available as open source under the MIT license. Khan believes his academy points an opportunity to overhaul the traditional classroom by using software to create tests, grade assignments, highlight the challenges of certain students, and encourage those doing well to help struggling classmates. The tutorials are touted as helpful because, among other factors, they can be paused by students, while a classroom lecture cannot be.
The success of his low-tech, conversational tutorials—Khan's face never appears, and viewers see only his unadorned step-by-step doodles and diagrams on an electronic blackboard—suggests an educational transformation that de-emphasizes lecture-based classroom interactions.
Services and Vision
The major components of Khan Academy include:
- a video library with over 3600 videos in various topic areas and over 200 million lessons delivered. These videos are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 License.
- Automated exercises with continuous assessment; as of December 2012, there are 381 practice exercises, mainly in math.
- peer-to-peer tutoring based on objective data collected by the system, a process that will be projected in the future.
Khan has stated a vision of turning the academy into a charter school:
This could be the DNA for a physical school where students spend 20 percent of their day watching videos and doing self-paced exercises and the rest of the day building robots or painting pictures or composing music or whatever.
A November 2011 grant of $5 million from Ireland-based The O'Sullivan Foundation, founded by Avego MD and cloud computing pioneer Sean O'Sullivan, will be directed to three initiatives:
- Expanding the teaching faculty
- Extending content through crowd-sourced contributions following a Wikipedia-style model
- Developing curricula to help users blend the content with physical teaching through STEM [Science, Technology, Engineering and Math] learning
Recent teaching appointees as a result of the grant include Dr. Steven Zucker, formerly of Pratt Institute, and Dr. Beth Harris, from the SmARThistory project at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, to produce art and history content. YouTube video creators Vi Hart and Brit Cruise have also joined the teaching faculty.
A series of summer school camps are planned to start in Northern California from June 2012 to test curricula for real-world schools.
Educational Impact
There are both critics and proponents of Khan Academy, disagreeing on the actual effectiveness and potential that it has. Some critics have stated that the Khan videos are insubstantial, "repetitive," and "leave kids staring at screens" rather than promoting interaction and active engagement. Although Salman Khan himself has addressed the fact that there is no "consistent, comprehensive plan" for revamping school courses, critics are unsure of the reliability and wide-spread application of Khan Academy.
There are many however, that support Khan Academy for its technological ingenuity and its ability to introduce different educational dynamics. The Khan Academy's ability to freely distribute lessons has demonstrated technology's ability to eliminate economic barriers that prevent effective education. Since Benjamin Bloom’s 1984 study on the effectiveness of "one-on-one tutoring," close student-teacher interaction has been aggressively sought after. However, both the cost and the realistic implementation of this ideal has been an issue. Critics promote that the Khan Academy has addressed these issues, through both cost-free nature of the site and its wide accessibility via the internet.
From: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khan_Academy
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Footnote by the blog author
Formal academic settings in the United States have become so corrupted by political correctness and indirect federal loan guarantees that a technological wilderness has been created in which in it inevitable that a new, cheap and fact-based approach like Khan’s would surface and developed an internet and YouTube following. There will be more of this and in the Khan Academy or copycats, it is going to challenge and potentially derail academia due to the ridiculously high cost and brutal biases of the status quo.
Having said this, it IS possible to exceed both the academic status quo and at least match the Khan Academy. It isn’t free, but for a startlingly reasonable amount of money, a classical college education under the best teachers in North America is available through the "The Great Courses" from The Teaching Company. Their overview course on western philosophy and their Shakespeare courses are, simply, unbeatable, anywhere, at any price. Here’s the link:
http://www.thegreatcourses.com/
Footnote to the blog author’s footnote
The future certainly belongs to those educated in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics). But one or more mediocre or merely boring teachers of STEM subjects in junior high school or high school can end the road to success with a quiet but soul-crushing thud.
I don’t have any teen children in seventh through twelfth grade in the USA, but if I did I would certainly get them THESE computer tutorial tools as linked below. I’d have them take the algebra tutorials the summer before algebra, the geometry tutorials the summer before geometry, the trigonometry tutorials the summer before trig, and the same with chemistry and physics. Here’s the link:
http://www.mathtutordvd.com/
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