What do you do when a cousin calls you for help? You help out in any way you can. So, when your name is Salman Khan and your cousin calls from 1,000 miles away for help with her math homework you help. Being a hedge fund manager with degrees from MIT and Harvard, it was easy for him to work out how to solve the distance problem. He resorted to picking up the phone and Yahoo Doodle to help his niece with her math problems.
It snowballed from there. Next, he began making videos of math lessons to share with family and friends and posted them to Youtube. The size restriction worked in his favor – he had to keep his lessons to about 10 minutes.
Today, his Khan Academy hosts over 2,700 videos and has expanded from math to include other topics, such as Science, Economics, Finance and History. It’s free and highly accessible. Anyone with a computer and a Google or Facebook account can log into this vast array of lectures and practice exercises.
Flipping the Classroom
Mr Khan hasn’t stopped there. Although he did not invent the term ‘flipping the classroom’, he has certainly become a poster boy for this new teaching methodology. Reversing traditional teaching methods, with children watching lectures at home and doing exercises at their own pace in the classroom, has led some teachers to rethink their classrooms.
The Economist points to one such example of a class of 12-year-old students working through Khan Academy exercises and the teacher exposed to an online dashboard of student progress, pinpoints individual students struggling with specific concepts and teaches them one-on-one in the classroom.
Lecturing Doesn’t Necessarily Lead to Learning
I’d like to wave one cautionary flag here, though. The flipped classroom is still built on the traditional model of teaching and learning. Children listen to lectures and learn. For younger kids this may not be the preferred method of learning. Often they don’t have the patience or focus to sit through even the shortest lectures before they can interact and ‘do’.
We believe providing younger learners with tutorials that are interactive from the get-go is more productive for these students. Hence, why we launched K5 Learning.
