The Khan Academy: Try It, You Might Like It!

Free online learning sites are a great idea - at least I think so. But I've never run into one with as much "wow" impact as Khan Academy, which claims to be the fastest-growing, open-course project on the Web. Having watched and been involved in the production of online classes and webinars in higher education, I'm truly impressed by this relatively new site. Instead of elaborate productions that seek to reproduce the formal lecture or class experience with a few interactive modifications (so radical at the time!) , the Khan Academy feel like a friendly tutoring experience - which, in essence, it is.

Sal Khan, who is from New Orleans, began the Khan Academy by tutoring his cousins long-distance. The tutoring eventually evolved into more than 2,100 short YouTube videos, all free and easy to access. Most of the videos are in challenging subjects such as basic mathematics, calculus, organic chemistry, physics, statistics, etc. There are also "softer topic" videos in plate tectonics, banking and money, brain teasers, the French revolution, etc. What's great about them is they are all sequenced - you start at the beginning and progress bit-by-bit in a logical fashion.

Sal Khan jokes he is "the founder and faculty of Khan Academy." His philosophy is, 'No one is a genuis, or everybody can be a genuis.' He has been featured on national TV, and has received $2 million from Google's Project 10 and more recent support from Bill and Melinda Gates. You can see various presentations and interviews with Sal for yourself on the Khan Academy site. I watched a presentation he made to the MIT Club of Northern California. Here are some highlights:

• Sal claims he is getting more than 70,000 views a day, more than MIT's 30,000-40,000 views for its open-course videos.
• Sal is anti grades. "Grades are ridiculous... everyone should be forced to be an A student."
• Everyone has gaps in their knowledge. Even A students who got 95% correct on a test got 5% wrong.
• K-12 schools are "huge filtering systems... the fundamental model is bizarre." The K-12 model should be reversed - homework should be done in school, and lectures watched at home.
• Continual assessment through digital data collection is key, along with differentiated learning (i.e., inductive versus deductive approaches, etc.).
• The Khan Academic doesn't currently offer videos in different learning styles, but Sal sees opportunity.
• Ditto for incorporating bio-feedback.
• People like informality - they like to see when he makes mistakes.
• Sal breaks his information into nuggets (i.e., not more than 10-minutes videos) but makes sure the information is part of a comprehensive picture.
• Sal thinks some K-12 teachers will be able to scale up in the future, but the majority will become human mediators.
• Sal thinks 80 to 90 percent of students would not have discipline problems in the Khan Academy - in other words, he believes the site is not limited to a small, self-selecting group of students.
• Everyone should start with "one plus one" - most people have superficial understandings of academic topics, and teachers are products of the same failed system.
• Sal thinks his model can eventually tackle complex questions - such as the impact of slavery - through meta data analysis and collection.
• Others are welcome to potentially collaborate and contribute videos - although in his experience it's hard to get people to put themselves publicly "out there" and make a sequence of around 50 videos.

I'm not sure I agree with everything. But I'm going to start self-experimenting. I'll report on my Khan Academy experiences as they occur. I've got my eye on statistics. The one-plus-one lesson sounds good too, if I can find it. Let me know if you try out any of the videos, and what you think of them.