Khan Academy : Evolution of Teaching
Salman Khan, who founded the
Khan academy, is harnessing the power of the internet to teach 100,000 pupils a
month from the comfort of their own home.
Pupils watch the lessons on
their computers and then get together in the classroom to work through exercises
and receive tutoring from their teacher.
Beginnings :
Khan Academy began in 2006 as
a tidy collection of math and science tutorial videos from its founder Salman
Khan, a hedge-fund analyst who had posted the material to help friends and
relatives. Its popularity snowballed, and in recent years Khan has beefed up
the software that sits behind and around the video lessons, delivering
interactive practice exercises and enabling conversation and remote teaching.
Organisation Structure :
From just two programmers at the beginning of
2011 and five programmers a year ago, Khan is up to 20 coders now, not counting
15 summer interns. It could use more engineers, but has deliberately slowed its
hiring to preserve its laid-back workplace culture, which includes group
outings for bowling, movies, and board games.
In many ways, Khan Academy
resembles a software startup more than a traditional nonprofit. Workers say the
pace of software development can be intense – “I am working as hard as I was at
Facebook, if not harder,” says Juan – and the salary is calibrated to match
that intensity.
“We compensate extremely well,
especially for this area,” says Ben Kamens, who quit Fog Creek, a well-regarded
New York software boutique, to join Khan as lead developer, bringing a
programmer coworker along with him. “Life here is pretty good and we wouldn’t
be able to hire the team we’ve hired if that wasn’t the case.”
Khan is constantly peppered
with unsolicited overtures from people interested in helping to improve the academy’s
code base, Kamens says, a wide spectrum of developers including the very
seasoned and very young. That’s partly because Khan invites contributions to
its source code, freely available on GitHub, but also because the organization
is at the center of the hot, fast-emerging online education movement.
How it works for students: Watch the video-
The Khan Advantage :
There are no textbooks and no
teacher lecturing. The students watch the Khan video for homework the night
before to learn a concept. Then, they come to class and do problem sets called
modules and they can get one-on-one help. There is less lecturing and more
interaction. What you think of as homework, you do at home, and what you would
normally do in the classroom, you do at home (they call it “flipping the
classroom”). You are able to rewind or pause the video if you miss something or
aren’t understanding something. Computer lab at the school is open until 10 PM.
In addition, the teacher can
help with the student’s progress. The teacher doesn’t have to assume that
everyone understands everything. She can see who needs help and how long each
student took on each problem with this software. The teacher then can have mini
workshops with those few students that need help in a certain area of math.
They are gathering data from these classrooms and those who are watching the
videos online. There have been 41 million visits in the past 18 months from
people in the United States alone.
It’s really neat to see how
the future of education is changing for the better because of technology,
specifically through Khan Academy. I think that I would’ve done much better in
math with this type of learning. It sounds like the software really helps the
teacher see what students need help and in what areas. That way the students
who are excelling can continue learning new material and the students who need
help can get one-on-one help from the teacher.
"A global classroom- A free world-class education for anyone anywhere."
For more information you can visit the website - https://www.khanacademy.org/
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