World-Shaker

Khan Academy Brings Its 3,500 Educational Videos To The iPhone →

infoneer-pulse:

Whether or not one believes Khan Academy is helping to reinvent education, it’s hard to dispute the fact that Khan (and now his team) are an educational video-producing machine, or that the platform continues to diversify. In part, that started with the release of its iPad app in March. This week, Khan Academy brought its 3,600 videos to the iPhone.

This means that the company’s learning library is now accessible on the web, tablets and the iPhone and will likely be showing up on Android in the not so distant future. It may not seem particularly shocking given the exploding popularity of mobile, but it does seem notable when put in context.

» via TechCrunch

Presented without comment.

"Digital instruction faces limits. Online, you will never smell a burning resistor or get your hands wet in a biology lab. Yet the economics of distributing instruction over the Web are so favorable that they seem to threaten anyone building a campus or hiring teachers. At edX, Agarwal says, the same three-person team of a professor plus assistants that used to teach analog circuit design to 400 students at MIT now handles 10,000 online and could take a hundred times more."

— Coursera, edX, and MOOCs Are Changing the Online Education Business

Before We Flip Classrooms, Let's Rethink What We're Flipping To →

A refreshing and challenging take on the Flipped Classroom Model. I’d recommend a read regardless of where your thoughts fall. Here’s an excerpt:

Instructionism vs. Constructionism

It seems to me that some recent MOOCs and start-up ideas — which at the outset appear exciting and promising — are basically indifferent to what we know about what constitutes good learning. All of a sudden, John Dewey, Jean Piaget, Lev Vygotsky, Maria Montessori, Seymour Papert, Jerome Bruner, Howard Gardner, Allan Collins, John Seely Brown — more than 100 years of theory about cognition and learning-by-doing — are being forgotten.

Branded instructional online channels playing speaker-centered videos and tutorials on a range of themes and topics, such as TED and Khan Academy, claim to break new ground with the ability to teach you anything, including physics and programming fundamentals.

But think about it: they are using rather traditional instructional methods. Instructional TV (ITV) is half a century old. While this medium is compelling when produced well, isn’t it time to make use of new technology to move beyond streaming impersonal frontal teaching, instructional video tutorials or filmed lectures aimed at mass audiences?

Will: The Khan Iceberg →

willrichardson:

From USA Today:

Love it or hate it, Khan Academy is part of a looming tech-education iceberg, says Victor Hu, head of education technology and services for Goldman Sachs. He says that from 2002 to 2006, venture capital firms put $300 million into about 50 tech-ed deals; since 2007, $2 billion…

"Khan Academy is videos of lectures. This is nothing new. They are boring and do not allow the student to interact with the lecturer. They also focus on solving a math or science problem through basic steps, but do not focus on the actual theory behind the problem. The student may be able to solve that problem, but can they apply the concept to other problems and situations? Many of my students who have watched the videos say that they are boring, and even confusing at times, and that they would rather have me show them. I agree. I find the videos boring and not as great as people seem to say. The other sad thing is that there are millions of dollars flowing to Khan Academy to create more boring, teacher centered, lectures. This money could be better spent in schools on truly innovative ideas and projects."

— Khan Academy - not good pedagogy and not #edreform

"In the very foreseeable future, teachers will be able to upload their own videos to the Khan Academy, but also be able to create their own “knowledge maps” or repositories of content for their classes, using videos – within or outside of the Khan Academy – and all of Khan’s analytics, and reporting tools, in order to customize their own curricula."

—

(Source: mindshift.kqed.org)

Khan Academy Gets $5 Million to Expand Faculty & Platform & to Build a Physical School →

infoneer-pulse:

Khan Academy announced this morning that it has raised $5 million from the O’Sullivan Foundation (a foundation created by Irish engineer and investor Sean O’Sullivan). The money is earmarked for several initiatives: expanding the Khan Academy faculty, creating a content management system so that others can use the program’s learning analytics system, and building an actual brick-and-mortar school, beginning with a summer camp program.

The $5 million marks the latest in funding for the non-profit, which has received over $2 million in grants from the Gates Foundation and from Google.

» via Hack Education

"Sal Khan helps kids learn how to regurgitate what we already have in textbooks, without reading the textbooks, a video CliffsNotes for the now generation. He allows the worst parts of education to be efficiently streamlined for ingestion, about as effective and useful as cod liver oil. It works, but it’s over-rated."

—

A very interesting counter-perspective on Khan Academy.

Science teacher: No Khan Do

Free learning videos go viral →

One misconception many people have when they see videos or technology in the classroom is that this will either make the content mechanical or be an attempt to replace the teacher. We firmly believe that Khan Academy is doing the exact opposite.

Our videos focus on conceptual development rather than formulas.

We believe that you don’t need to memorize most things if you understand the underlying thought processes that lead to them. Our exercises address core skills so that they don’t need to be addressed by the teacher. This allows the teacher to spend more time strengthening concepts with deeper, hands-on and experiential learning. Khan Academy believes this makes a teacher even more valuable in the classroom.

A quick article on Khan Academy from Salman Khan himself.

Thanks to Josh over at Sagan Sapien for the submission!

The Wrath Against Khan: Why Some Educators Are Questioning Khan Academy →

This is a very good article, and certainly worth the read. I normally don’t quote this much from a source, but this part really stood out to me:

One of education historian Diane Ravitch’s oft-uttered complaints is that we now have a bunch of billionaires like Gates dictating education policy and education reform, without ever having been classroom teachers themselves (or without having attended public school).

But the skepticism about Khan Academy isn’t just a matter of wealth or credentials of Khan or his backers. It’s a matter of pedagogy. No doubt, Khan has done something incredible by creating thousands of videos, distributing them online for free, and now designing an analytics dashboard for people to monitor and guide students’ movements through the Khan Academy material. And no doubt, lots of people say they’ve learned a lot by watching the videos. The ability pause, rewind, and replay is often cited as the difference between “getting” the subject matter through classroom instruction and “getting it” via Khan Academy’s lecture-demonstrations.

But that’s the crux of the problem right there: lecture-demonstrations. Although there’s a tech component here that makes this appear innovative, that’s really a matter of form, not content, that’s new. There’s actually very little in one of the videos that distinguishes Khan from “traditional” teaching. A teacher talks. Students listen. And that’s “learning.” Repeat over and over again (Pause, rewind, replay in this case). And that’s “drilling.”

And while Khan Academy and his students may tout mastery, some educators aren’t so sure. They point to studies that find while students receive these sorts of videos positively, they are actually learning very little or learning very superficially. Physics teacher Frank Noschese, for example, contrasts the video of Khan’s explanation of force with a video documenting his students’ exploration of force through hands-on experimentation.

"But one glaring hole has yet to be undertaken: context. I’ve had my kids watch math videos, and, in fact, YouTube is full of them. However, when my students go home to engage in math learning, they need one huge thing that Khan Academy doesn’t have- their own teacher’s style, their own teacher’s examples as they relate to prior discussions in class, their own teacher’s process as they think through a problem, they need to see their own teacher mastering technology, mastering online publishing, and just plain being a master. Khan Academy is a symptom of a teaching profession where too many teachers are too shy or too old-school to jump into the publishing world. We need that to happen faster."

— Khan Academy: Great Idea- With One Glaring Hole

10 Open Education Resources You May Not Know About (But Should) →

I’m loving mindshift. Just saying.

Here’s a list of 10 cool OER and OCW resources that you might not know about, but should know:

1. P2PU: The Peer 2 Peer University is a grassroots open education project in which anyone can participate. Volunteers facilitate the courses, but the learners are in charge. P2PU leverages both open content and the open social web, with a model for lifelong learning.
2. OpenStudy: OpenStudy is a social learning network where independent learners and traditional students can come together in a massively-multiplayer study group. Through OpenStudy, learners can find other working in similar content areas in order to support each other and answer each others’ questions. OpenStudy supports a number of study groups, including those focused on several MIT OCW courses.
3. NITXY: NIXTY is building a learning management platform that supports open education resources. Rather than an LMS that closes off both academic resources and academic progress, NIXTY is designed to support open courses so that schools, teachers, and students’ work is not necessarily closed off from the rest of the Web.
4. OER Glue: Still under development, OER Glue will be a site to watch. The Utah-based startup is building a browser-based tool that will allow students and teachers to “glue” together OER resources online. Rather than having to copy-and-paste resources into a new setting, OER Glue will reuse and integrate resources.
5. iUniv: iUniv is a Japanese startup that is building web and mobile apps to support and make social video and audio OCW content. Resources can be shared to Twitter, Facebook, and Evernote so that students can actively engage in discussions around OCW content.

"The way we teach our kids is…well, stupid. Our overcrowded classrooms with one-size-fits-all solutions teach good students that success and knowledge is the ability to complete tests with little or no relevance in the real world, and leave students who struggle in a spiral of failure that can dictate the limits of their future. It is a system that is good for no one—not teachers, not parents, not students, and definitely not an economy receiving more bored drones than engaged minds."

— Big Ideas from TED 2011: Letting Students Drive Their Education - Education - GOOD

Khan Academy Distributing Through BitTorrent →

BitTorrent and the Khan Academy have partnered to make more than 2,000 educational videos available for free through a video catalog app.

The app is available for both the BitTorrent Mainline client and the µTorrent client and allows users to access and share videos covering math, science, and humanities, among others.

Both the app and the videos are free, though donations are encouraged and can be made directly through the app or at the Khan Academy Web site.

The funny thing is, this is what BitTorrent was originally created for.

Khan Instant! →

Exactly what it sounds like. It’s like Google Instant for the Khan Academy.