Khan Academy

There are a few things you should be familiar with if you are going to read this blog. One particularly important one is Khan Academy.

Khan Academy is a website with over 2,000 educational videos on a large number of subjects ranging from elementary school levels to higher college levels. Khan Academy is a non-profit organization that creates and provides these videos free to the public. In addition to videos, the site has a coaching section that can be used to keep track of the progress of users. Many of the videos also include exercises for practicing and evaluating the progress of users. The coaching section can be used by teachers to keep track of any number of students. The system even tracks which specific exercises students have difficulty with, so that teachers can offer focused help to each student, exactly where it is needed. I hope this becomes the standard education system of the future.

The benefits of the Khan Academy teaching method are great. Instead of sitting through a 30-45 minute lecture on a subject in class, then doing the homework on their own at home, the students watch the 10-15 minute videos at home (which allows them to rewind and rewatch sections where needed, which cannot be done in a lecture setting), work on the exercises at home, then they do the "homework" in the classroom, where they can get help from the teacher as needed (and as I mentioned, the coaching section allows the teacher to know exactly where each student needs help based on their performance on the exercises). Salman Khan, the owner and producer of Khan Academy describes his system, the benefits, and the results of ongoing research using his system in this video.

I mentioned that the website can keep track of student progress. Each student can register a free account that will track their progress in the exercises. The progress is tracked with a "badge" system. This is essentially a milestone based system (which I will discuss more in a future post) that awards badges as milestones are completed. Milestones are completed by completing exercises with satisfactory scores. This allows a teacher to determine the overall progress of a student by look at what badges that student has earned. More important though, this turns education into a game, where students are encouraged to learn new subjects more thoroughly so that they can earn these badges. According to the website, they have fifth grade students competitively completing college level material in order to earn more badges.

The overwhelming success of this system is more evidence that our current education system is deeply flawed. I would like to see this type of system entirely replace how our current education system currently works. Khan is working with at least one school to research the viability of this system (see the video I mentioned above for details) with great success. I hope the US public education system will see how well this works and care enough about actually educating to use it.

Lord Rybec