Khan Academy: A different way to learn

Education – as they say, should be for everyone and all. However, there seems to be an endless debate on how it can be achieved and more importantly, how effectively so.

At a time when teachers are struggling to stand at the board, trying to get 50 odd students to learn the same stuff at the same pace, Salman Khan from Bangladesh seems to have a different view altogether of his own.

Salman runs a non-profit educational organization called the ‘Khan Academy’ since 2006 in attempt to make education fun and interesting to students who otherwise find it a daunting job to keep pace with their ‘smarter’ counterparts.

What is it?

It is a non-profit educational organization started by created in 2006 by Bangladeshi American educator Salman Khan, a graduate of MIT and Harvard Business School. With the stated mission of "providing a high quality education to anyone, anywhere", the website supplies a free online collection of more than 3,200 micro lectures via video tutorials stored on YouTube teaching mathematics, history, healthcare andmedicine, finance, physics, chemistry, biology, astronomy, economics, cosmology,organic chemistry, American civics, art history, macroeconomics and microeconomics, and computer science.

Quite interestingly, Salman used to work in a hedge fund and even in his own words, it is actually surprising for him to pursue something of such a social motive.

Inception:

It all started when Khan was remotely tutoring one of his cousins using Yahoo Doodle images. He found that his cousin actually found it more interesting to learn from him over the internet rather than in person. Based on feedback from his cousin, additional cousins also began to take advantage of the interactive, remote tutorial. In order to make better use of his and their time, Khan transitioned to making YouTube video tutorials. Along the same line, it occurred to him that this might actually be a better solution to the numerous educational problems students and teachers face across the world.

Relevance:

The question that might be bugging you is, why Khan? We are discussing principles of management and organization here. Well, simply because one can hardly get a better example of managerial skills merged together.

Vision: To start with, Khan has adapted a wonderful vision for his academy: a vision of providing free education anywhere for anyone. The beauty of the vision is that it reaches beyond normal achievable limits of any pre-existing educational system.

Innovation: It is a simple but a very novel idea. Teaching students in a iterative and interactive fashion. Khan provides education through free videos. The advantages are very clear. As Khan explains:

·         It makes the same topic interesting (as Khan’s cousins found their uncle more interesting in the videos)

·         Students can pause, rewind or move forward the video lessons

·         It makes education graphical and physical rather than abstract

·         Each student gets time as per his/her convenience

And the list goes on

Training: Effective training is essential for the health of any organization. Khan academy deals with the same idea for its students. They make the students go through problems repeatedly, unless every concept is actually absorbed. Students thus prepared are expected to be adept in the subject.

Theory X and Y: We discussed the theory X and Y in a previous post. This time I get another chance to explain the value if the same. Khan believes each student is equally capable of learning. Every student has his/her forte. So he provided a wide degree of freedom for the student as far as time, complexity and procedure are concerned.

                In everyday classroom scenario, we often find teachers picking out ‘brilliant’ students from the lot and focus on them while teaching. As a result, many students don’t get enough attention just because they lost out on the ‘initial edge’ opportunity. Khan’s method ensures that there is no such discrimination in students. Equal education and attention is provided for everyone. So, it is theory Y – “There is no bad student, might only be bad teacher”.

Electronic Entrepreneurship: Khan has used electronic medium to full use to implement his idea. He realized the growing importance of internet in every field of our life. Implementing his idea on the web world widened the reach of the idea manifolds.

With the hope that Khan’s example enabled us to learn something, I would like to conclude this post. Happy Learning !!!