Ever since quitting his job as a successful hedge-fund analyst to dedicate himself full time to this, Khan has managed to win fans worldwide and goad skeptical educators. His simply narrated, faceless home videos on everything from algebra to French history have been viewed half a billion times. Last year, a number of schools began “flipping” their classrooms, having students study Khan videos by night and do homework with teachers by day.
Khan says that his educational videos are all about taking the stress out of learning and making concepts approachable. He began the educational videos to help his family. “(The videos) feel like I’m sitting next to you at the kitchen table and they’re very conversational, off-the-cuff sometimes. And I think that’s kind of caught on a little bit,” he said. “People feel, when you learn something, it’s a very stressful experience. I think people have under emphasized how important tone is and not being condescending and being very conversational. I think that and the breadth of the content that’s there has gotten people engaged.”
Khan explains the philosophy and differentiates between learning and credentials associated with it. “If you think about what education is, it’s a combination. There’s a learning part. You learn accounting, you learn to write better, to think, whatever. Then there is a credentialing part, where I’m going to hand you something that you can go take into the market and signal to people that you know what you’re doing. Right now they’re very muddled, but this whole online debate or what’s happening now is actually starting to clarify things. At Khan Academy we’re 100% focused on the learning side of things.”
However Khan Academy does face a problem – the majority of world Internet users aren’t fluent English speakers. For Khan Academy, the answer is obvious: Translate content, using the Internet as its translators. The donation-funded non-profit has spent the past few years systematically porting their lectures and tests into over 16 foreign languages. Volunteer workers crowdsourced from the Internet work closely with Khan Academy supervisors to create subtitles for lectures, along with voiceovers for select videos. Khan Academy also plans to add original foreign language content–lectures and chats conducted from start to finish in non-English languages with no translation involved.
The Khan Academy are now inviting prospective pupil to spend two weeks at the Khan Academy Discovery Lab this summer. Also planning an in-person session in Palo Alto, California for campers who are curious about the world and have a hunger to learn and explore. They promise hands-on projects in Math, Science and Economics, explore robotics and engineering, and much more. They think that this Discovery Lab will allow them to show innovative ways to integrate technology into the hands-on learning experience.
The Academy does have it’s fair share of critics too but it is reasonable to conclude that Sal Khan has potentially changed the way education method for next generation of students.
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