If you listen to folks such as Bill Gates and Al Gore and Carlos Slim Helu talk about Salman Khan, it would be understandable if you thought that the founder of the online Khan Academy is an education miracle worker.
Here are just a few of the quotes on Amazon.com on the page praising Khan’s latest book, “The One World School House: Education Reimagined.”
Gore: Since its founding in 2006, Sal Khan’s project — the Khan academy — has revolutionized our thinking on the potential and promise of unfettered, open-access online education.
Gates: The way Khan portrays the concept of education and the mechanism of learning is revolutionary.
Is it really? Clearly Khan has become the vessel for many reformers’ hopes and dreams about how to educate the masses. How Khan sees himself and his academy — which had, its website says, delivered lessons to 239,373,163 students when I last looked on Tuesday — is a more complicated matter.
The Khan Academy is a website that offers free video lessons in math, science and other subjects, such as art history, as well as interactive activities and assessments. Growing out of his efforts to help tutor his cousin in math, the academy now has more than 4,000 videos in a variety of subjects. Teachers use the videos in their classroom; students use them at home as a supplement to their teacher’s lesson. Some folks love the videos, others say they aren’t helpful, and Kahn says he knows they won’t work for everyone. Some mathematicians say that some are mathematically flawed, while others say they aren’t.
“The One World School House” clearly indicates that he believes he is offering a vision of a new way to educate students. The flap of the book reads: “A free, world-class education for anyone, anywhere: this is the goal of the Khan Academy, a passion project that grew from an ex-engineer and hedge funder’s online tutoring session with his niece, who was struggling with algebra, into a worldwide phenomenon.”
The Khan Academy website says: The Khan Academy is an organization on a mission. We’re a not-for-profit with the goal of changing education for the better by providing a free world-class education for anyone anywhere. All of the site’s resources are available to anyone. It doesn’t matter if you are a student, teacher, home-schooler, principal, adult returning to the classroom after 20 years, or a friendly alien just trying to get a leg up in earthly biology. The Khan Academy’s materials and resources are available to you completely free of charge. That is a pretty bold goal.
Yet in his book and in conversation he notes that nothing that he is advocating — ending teacher lecturing, using mastery learning, expanding learning time, incorporating technology as an essential part of education, eliminating letter grades — is new or original to him.
And while there is a public perception of the Khan Academy as being a virtual school, Khan said in an interview: “We will never be a 100 percent complete education.”
“For my kids,” he said, ” I see it only as a tool.” And, he said that he expects his children to go to a traditional brick-and-mortar where they will get a holistic education.
Furthermore, he takes positions in his book that contradict the world view of some of his financial backers’ forays into school reform. Take Gates, for instance Gates, through his foundation, has invested hundreds of millions of dollars in teacher evaluation systems that use student standardized test scores in an important way to assess a teacher’s effectiveness.
In the book and in conversation, Khan says that standardized testing is terribly overused in public education. “Suffice it to say that our over-reliance on testing is based largely on habit, wishful thinking, and leaps of faith.”
Given that the Gates Foundation is the biggest backer of the Khan Academy (which when we talked, had 36 employees, up from one — Khan himself — two years ago), I asked Khan if he ever discussed this with Gates. In the five or six conversations he’s had with Gates, Khan said, he hasn’t, and he “doesn’t have specifics” about what the foundation is doing in terms of funding school reform.
Should he? It’s presumably hard for somehow who is called a revolutionary to tell acolytes to stop saying it, especially when many of them provide funding to pursue the so-called revolution.
Here are some of the things he said that seem to bump against the public perception of Khan and his academy.
* His videos make teachers more important not less, though his promotion of them, though his view about who should be teaching is controversial. As someone who entered the world of education without teaching or curriculum design credentials, Khan is not a believer in the traditional licensing of teachers.
It is important, he said, for educators to “have some deep understanding or connect with the subject matter.” Someone with a deep understanding of geometry is, then, qualified to teach the subject. Should these people also, I asked, have knowledge about how to effectively teach and address the needs of children with learn differently? “That too,” he said in the interview, and noted that he has many teachers and people with a deep understanding of curriculum working on his team.
Regarding the licensing of teachers, he wrote in a follow-up email: “On licensing, I think it is up to the people running the school to decide what credentials/licensing best meets their needs. Every school is different and serves different populations.”
* The Khan Academy is in the “very early stages” of where he wants to go. He said that he told the Khan Academy board that he would like to reach 100 million people worldwide. A study with the Gates Foundation (one of his funders) is now underway that is supposed to measure the effectiveness of his videos.
* New technology has given us an “opportunity to rethink the [school] model we inherited from the Prussians 200 years ago.”
* The United States is “unlikely to decline like everyone is afraid of” because it is still the place where entrepreneurship and creativity are rewarded. “Kids in Singapore who are creative want to come to the United States,” he said.
* International comparisons of student achievement should be looked at but not be a cause for alarm. Comparisons between the United States and small countries aren’t fair, he said; Singapore is a city state and Finland is a homogenous country of 5 million people, while the United States is a large diverse country.
The latest priorities of the academy, he wrote in an email, are:
1. Internationalizing the site (priority on Spanish and Portuguese)
2. Making the site experience more coherent and rethinking much of the navigation (including how students progress through topics). Part of this will be to make it gel better with the Common Core State Standards.
3. Trying to make our exercises better at measuring where a student is and helping them retain knowledge.
4. Ways to make the videos easier for teachers to use.
Khan’s videos have value to a lot of people, and his desire to reach as many people as he can in impoverished areas of India and other countries is laudable. But technology is only one tool necessary for a real educational revolution, and the hype around Khan suggests a continuing need by many Americans to find “the right formula” or the silver bullet that will fix what ails us. There isn’t one.
How did Khan get to be regarded as the savior of education?
According to Khan, he was just at the right place at the right time.
And he is a really excellent marketer.
Article source: http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/wp/2013/02/20/sal-kahn-on-his-famous-online-academy/
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Khan Academy, TED-Ed and the new leaders in education reform
(Kyle Bursaw – AP)
The news program 60 Minutes had an answer last night for kids struggling with their algebra homework. It featured Khan Academy, a nonprofit founded in 2004 that delivers short, free online video tutorials on thousands of different topics. Now backed by the Gates Foundation and Google, the site is beginning to be used experimentally in a couple dozen schools, apparently to great success, and finding an audience around the globe. Others appear to be following suit: On Monday, the nonprofit TED, which puts on a popular annual ideas conference, announced it would be starting TED-Ed, an online collection of free video lessons delivered by the best teachers on a range of subjects.
Khan Academy is the brainchild of Salman “Sal” Khan, a former hedge fund analyst that founded the service initially to help remotely tutor his cousin in algebra, only to find his videos going viral, his career changing as a result, and Bill Gates taking notice. Khan’s method—in which students watch videos to learn the lessons at home, and then work through problems in school with their teachers’ assistance—has been described by some as “flipping the classroom,” and is being hailed as a solution for better educating students and perhaps, as Sanjay Gupta suggested on 60 Minutes, “the future of education.” Commenters on 60 Minutes’ story are suggesting he should win the Nobel Prize. And yet, he has no PhD in education, no experience working for nonprofits to turn around schools, no time spent studying education reform in think tanks or universities.
And that does not surprise anyone who has studied innovation, including Google chairman Eric Schmidt. “Innovation never comes from the established institutions,” he told 60 Minutes. “It’s always a graduate student or a crazy person or somebody with a great vision.” He’s right, of course. Think for a moment of all the industries that have been disrupted by outsiders. Netflix founder Reed Hastings knew how to write code but was an outsider to the world of film. Steve Jobs was known primarily for his beautiful design of computer hardware before he upended the music industry. The list goes on.
Harvard professor Clayton Christensen has written about this phenomenon at length. In The Innovator’s Dilemma, he writes about why so many big companies miss opportunities to innovate, and get disrupted by outside players. It is not really the managers who dictate the course of a company, but the inflow of resources from customers and investors. Markets that don’t exist can’t be analyzed, he writes. And an organization’s capabilities are defined by its disabilities.
The large public-school education system, although not quite a big, slow company, is not really that different. Teachers are at the center of a system that has long relied on lecturing in classrooms and homework at home. No matter how good their intentions might be, it is hard for them to think about their own jobs differently, much less step outside the predominant teaching methods that have been used for hundreds of years. You can’t exactly study methods that haven’t been invented yet, and as difficult as it can be to get companies to experiment, doing the same on school children is even harder.
Who knows how much Khan’s video-based, “flipped-classroom” approach will truly change what ails American (and global) public schools. But whether it is Khan or someone else, my guess is that the most revolutionary—and potentially, most effective—educational reform will come from leaders outside the system.
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Article source: http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/post-leadership/post/khan-academy-ted-ed-and-the-new-leaders-in-education-reform/2011/04/01/gIQARWmU7R_blog.html