Summary:
In this TED talk, Salman Khan shares how he came to create the Khan Academy, and a new model for education. Khan tutored his younger cousins, and decided to create online tutorials to supplement his tutoring. He made the videos public on YouTube, and got a huge response from others who found the tutorials useful. His initial response was that perhaps these videos would be helpful to motivated students as a learning supplement, but then as teachers began to respond he realized that this could be bigger than just supplemental learning. Teachers explained that they were integrating his videos into the curriculum by assigning the lectures as homework. This brought Khan to the idea of “Flipping the classroom”, in which the lectures are assigned before class, freeing up class time to do activities, what might otherwise be done at home. This changes the role of the teacher from lecturer, teaching to the whole class, to facilitator allow time in class for students to work together instead of just listen and take notes.
After such a positive response to the videos, Khan created the Khan Academy, a non-profit organization that makes tutorials and exercises available for free online. Khan academy exercises replace traditional homework as an interactive program with hints, instruction, reminders. The program is designed to forward the student to more advanced modules as the student demonstrates mastery of content, always pushing students forward. In addition, the teachers have access to a dashboard that shows exactly where students are at in their exercises, how long they are taking, where they are stuck, what sections they keep repeating. This is an objective way to track student progress, and see what kids need help and what kids can give help in peer-to-peer tutoring.
Response:
I find Khan to be a very engaging speaker, very enthusiastic about this project, and really excited about the idea of “flipping the classroom”. After reading responses from other viewers, this idea seems to be very well received. I watched some of the videos and think the way information is presented is really effective, combining videos of various images with audio in a media that the viewer can pause and rewind. It reminds me a lot of RSA animate videos that I have viewed on YouTube.
I was thinking though, about what flipping the classroom would look like in an English class that is already very discussion based. In addition to reading the text in preparation for class, students could review videos covering background information on the historical, political, and cultural background of the text and/or author. If everyone came to class with the background knowledge, class discussion can be spent on discussing the implication of the context and how it helps us better understand the text.
So out of curiosity I went to the Khan Academy website. They have a plethora of videos and exercises in Mathematics, and a fair amount in the Sciences, and only have three topics in the Humanities—Art History, American Civics, and History. There was no section for English/Language Arts. I suppose that some of the videos in history, civics, and arts may provide context for discussions of text. But I think this system would work really well in studying language, both English and foreign language, especially grammar. So I would like to see some activities in these areas.
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