Khan Academy Teaches Millions of Students

With the backing of Gates and Google, Khan Academy and its free online educational videos are moving into the classroom and across the world. Their goal: to revolutionize how we teach and learn. Sanjay Gupta reports.

Its mission is to provide a free world-class education for anyone anywhere.  Still by any standard or walk of life, Bill Gates is not just anyone and he does not sit just anywhere.  The ambitious academy is the brain child of Salman Amin Khan, an Indian American educator and entrepreneur.  The fact that Khan Academy has unwittingly engaged the famous, wealthy tech icon adds immediate credence to this brain child.

The following are comments from 60 Minutes (emphasis, added):

This is a God send for me and my daughter. She consistently comes home with difficulty in math and only math. I have scoured the internet for the past 3 years looking for something that will help her understand math the way she needs it. That was always the issue for me as well. I need to be able to understand a concept my way, the way my brain works. Traditional classroom lecturing pretty much goes over her head and she is lost with some concepts and loses all the information by the time she gets home to do homework. I look forward to math now where I used to dread having to help her with math homework. Thank you for reaching every student every where. Love the mission.

I teach middle school science, and the idea of the flipped classroom actually holds some appeal for me. Generally lecture is the most boring part of my class (or any class) for both students and teachers. It makes sense to make that part homework, and have the students come into class preloaded with the "information" part of the lesson. That way I can spend class time on labs, practice, writing, etc. There are definitely some issues that need to be worked out, but it's intriguing.

This is like the 4th time this has been hyped.  Online education is not a panacea.  Other online schools have instructors doing lax work, not following up, students questioning instructor capability.

It is certainly difficult for a teacher with a large class to adapt his or her teaching to each student's learning ability, style and interests.  American education, for one, is geared for mass teaching, and advances standards that apply across the board for millions of students.  So the teacher must abide by this longstanding Zeitgeist and protocol.

Khan Academy is clearly one solution where individual adaptation is possible.  Why is this important?  Because individualized teaching optimizes the learning experience for students, as the parent above suggests.

The notion of flipped classroom is also intriguing: Students do homework at school, and do schoolwork at home.  This is so different from how it's usually done, that those students who want or need an alternative like this can revel in it.  The caveat, though, is that the usual approach may work perfectly well for some students, so we don't necessarily want to dismiss what is working well.

More videos from 60 Minutes:

Khan Academy in the Classroom: School administrators Alyssa Gallagher and Jeff Baier of the Los Altos, California, school district are testing out Khan Academy software in their classrooms.

Google's Eric Schmidt on Khan Academy: Eric Schmidt, the chairman of Google, explains why he's backing the work of Sal Khan and Khan Academy.

Khan Academy's "world-changing" plan for education: Khan Academy's core team - Sal Khan, Shantanu Sinha, Sundar Subbarayn, Ben Kamens and Jason Rosff - say they hope to revolutionize education.

Thank you for reading, and let me know what you think!

Ron Villejo, PhD