Salman Khan has made a name for himself for producing bite-sized videos that explain everything from fair value accounting to how the Hawaiian Islands were formed on the free online Khan Academy.
Here, Khan uses his trademark “chalkboard” sketching approach to explain how the idea of blended learning — combining technology like online videos and software with classroom instruction — works.
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Salman Khan's library of free instructional videos has reached millions of people, and now his videos are reaching into classrooms.
If you’re curious at all about the future of education, you should know about Salman Khan. He’s the charismatic brainiac who’s created more than 2,000 instructional videos about everything from photosynthesis to the Bay of Pigs invasion. As former New York City schools chancellor Joel Klein recently noted, “Sal Khan has 50 million people on a site that doesn’t sell sex.”
Self-effacing (“Any joker in his closet can reach millions of people”), fast-talking, and pragmatic, Khan spins his big-picture views about education in the same way he describes subjects like valence electrons or mortgage-backed securities: as a bemused observer pointing out the obvious. “If Isaac Newton had made YouTube videos about gravity, I wouldn’t have to!” Khan said at a recent TED Talk.
But rather than quarterbacking from the sidelines, Khan is intentionally getting in the game. Some, including Bill Gates (who’s donated millions of dollars into Khan’s vision), believe his free YouTube videos, the full collection of which are called The Khan Academy, will profoundly change what we know as classroom instruction.
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At a big gathering of entrepreneurs, innovators, and educators today at the NewSchools Venture Fund summit in the heart of Silicon Valley, the morning kicked off with two big names in education circles.
Salman Khan, founder of the Khan Academy, which offers more than 2,000 free YouTube videos covering almost every subject under the sun, and Joel Klein, former chancellor of New York City public schools who spearheaded New York’s iZone and who’s currently with NewsCorp, brought up intriguing points.
These are some of the ideas that stood out from the public discussion (paraphrased).
ON THE CURRENT LANDSCAPE IN EDUCATION INNOVATION:
Joel Klein: Where we are today is a lot better place in terms of discussion, but not in terms of results compared to 10 years ago. What we’re doing now is building a system empowered by technology with a huge infusion of private capital aimed at bringing a total delivery system. Eventually, we’ll have far fewer teachers who are paid much more. Education would be data-driven, customized, will engage kids, differentiate instruction, and value human capital in a different way. What we’re doing now is trying to reform a broken delivery system rather than create an effective delivery system.
Salman Khan: It’s a pretty exciting time in education. There’s grassroots hunger for something better. Even 20 years ago, for someone who wanted to produce lessons online for the public to access, it would cost tens of millions of dollars. Now all need you is the technology and any joker in his closet can reach 50 million people. Things take a long time to start happening, but when it does happen, it goes fast. In five to 10 years, a lot of classrooms will look a lot different than they have in the past 100 years. Continue reading
Salman Khan, interviewed by Charlie Rose, talks about his Khan Academy, a series of thousands of informational YouTube videos about a world of subjects. Khan talks about his goals for wanting to be taken as seriously as other revered institutions; about the systemic problem of students being forced to move on to the next level in schools despite having huge gaps in knowledge; about how he researches all the subjects he teaches in his videos (step 1: Wikipedia), and the freedom of making entertaining videos without high production costs (people like the fact that it’s “some dude is making this for his cousins. There’s a human element to it,” he says.)
I spoke to Khan last December about his vision of the future school day, and am looking forward to interviewing him next week at the NewSchool Summit.
Salman Khan has an idea or two about what the future school day should be. In fact, the founder of Khan Academy — a series of thousands of YouTube videos that teach everything from calculus to the French Revolution — is working on making it happen as we speak.
It goes something like this:
Here’s Sal Khan describing it in his own words.
For those who missed the original article describing the program, here it is in full.
For the first time in history, the children of one of the most well-heeled people on earth are getting the same education as those with far less means in places like Calcutta, Kabul, and East Palo Alto.
Salman Khan made this point in reference to the well-known fact that Bill Gates’ kids watch and learn from the free Khan Academy, instructional YouTube videos on math, science, and the humanities. It’s the perfect example of technology helping to close the achievement gap. Continue reading
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MindShift reports on technology and education from KQED in San Francisco
