Where do the most innovate ideas in learning come from? Until recently, the debate over this question had two primary camps: academia and corporate America.
Now, there’s a third possible answer: Khan Academy. This YouTube-based learning environment was founded in 2004 by former Boston hedge-fund manager Salman Khan, and today contains more than 2,200 lectures on more than 100 topics (mostly math related).
From a recent article at Knowledge@Wharton called Technology and Teaching: Flipping the Model:
Khan stumbled upon the idea for his free web-based academy while trying to teach math to cousins in New Orleans. In an effort to bridge the time and distance gap, he started making 10-minute videos of math lessons and posting them on YouTube. Much to his surprise, Khan found his cousins preferred learning from him via YouTube to learning from him in person.
Quickly, the videos gained an online following, grew like wildfire, and today Khan Academy has delivered more than 42 million lessons.
While the Khan Academy is interesting for many reasons – one unintended outcome is especially fascinating. Also from the Knowledge@Wharton article:
According to Khan, several teachers have written to him, saying, “You’ve already given the lectures, so we assign watching the lectures for homework. And what used to be homework [solving problems] is now done in the classroom.” This shift has had a non-intuitive outcome, according to Khan, because “when teachers do that, they remove the one-size-fits-all lecture from the classroom and let students watch self-paced lectures at home.” What happens in class is interactive problem solving – which means, in effect, that the “teachers have used technology to humanize the classroom,” he says.
Khan discusses this whole phenomenon in this 20-minute TED talk.
The idea of flipping the age-old model of lecturing in class and assigning problems for homework is brilliant, of course. Encouragingly, I am seeing some evidence that corporate learning departments understand this model, and many of them have actually been practicing it for years.
The now-common blended learning practice of assigning one or more eLearning modules prior to attending classroom training is similar to the Khan/schoolteacher model. The eLearning modules act as the “lecture”, which learners do on their own time. Then, the classroom becomes an interactive environment where precious face-to-face time is reserved for learning the most complex aspects of the subject matter – aspects that would certainly have been glossed over had all the content been delivered in a classroom lecture.
The next step in this evolution still needs to take place – in which the lecture itself becomes more bearable – whether online or in the classroom. In this case, the corporate learning world can learn a lot from Khan Academy, about how to keep lessons informal, quickly-paced, and ultimately, a lot more engaging.
