KHAN ACADEMY

Khan Academy is amazing. The breadth of this humble guy's knowledge is amazing (3 degrees from MIT and one from Harvard), but also has an incredible gift for lucid teaching combined with the real time working out of problems/diagrams on screen. God bless him! He was a HEDGE FUND MANAGER. Do you know how much money those folks can make? $90 mil a year salaries.

60 Minutes Overview of Khan Academy Being Used in Schools
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zxJgPHM5NYI (embedding disabled)

I do think it's a little scary to see the teacher standing off to the side, just monitoring and stepping in when needed. (Students watch videos at home at night and then come in and work out problems with their computers. It's called "flipping the classroom.") The teacher can watch their progress on HER computer. Blue bars on her computer means the student has learned the concept. Orange means they're working on it. Red bars mean they're stuck and need teacher intervention.

Veritasium (the You Tube maker who questioned the effectiveness of science learning videos) called videos a "passive" format--to describe what might be the answer to the proven failure of people to learn from them and get correct answers. But with Khan's videos, there is no passivity. Students work out problems in reality WITH him. Khan kept talking about the "humanity" in his videos. He doesn't want his teaching/learning experience to be robotic.

I like the idea of kids learning at their own pace and being able to spend more time on what they're struggling with, but I have always learned better in an open environment with a certain pace set by the teacher for the "average" (I always fell behind in Math and had to stay after school for tutoring.) But I still liked trying to "keep up," listening to other student's problems and questions, etc. I always learn anything better in either a classroom environment or someone teaching me (apprenticeship). I'm not a DIY person or a read the instruction manual person or a "I'll just figure it out on my own" person. But maybe that's what Khan Academy IS: Mr. Khan teaching the world, one student at a time. Don't knock it till you try it.