Kahn Academy

Bill Gates said this about Salman Khan in the April 30, 2012 issue of Time Magazine:

“Like a lot of great innovators, Salman Khan didn’t set out to change the world. He was just trying to help his teenage cousin with her algebra from across the country. But from a closet turned office in his Silicon Valley apartment, Sal, 35, has produced an amazing library of online lectures on math, science and a host of other subjects. In the process, he has turned the classroom – and the world of education – on its head.

The aspiration of khanacademy.org is to give every kid a chance at a free, world-class education. The site has over 3,000 short lessons that allow kids to learn at their own pace. Practice exercises send students back to the pertinent video when they’re having trouble. And there’s a detailed dashboard for teachers who use Khan Academy in their classrooms.

Early pilot programs in California classrooms show terrific promise.

I’ve used Khan Academy with my kids, and I’m amazed at the breadth of Sal’s subject expertise and his ability to make complicated topics understandable.

Sal Khan is a true education pioneer. He started by posting a math lesson, but his impact on education might truly be incalculable.”

Kahn Academy is an incredible resource. I assume Bill Gates is pretty good at math and science, but Sal’s lectures are so good that Bill Gates uses them to help teach his kids, and you should too. It is the great equalizer: if your child is not lucky enough to have a great teacher in any course in high school math or science, or beyond, Sal has an easy-to-use world-class lecture online.

In some ways having a world-class lecture online is ever better than having a world-class lecture in class, because if and when a student does not understand something in an online lecture, they can rewind the online lecture and listen to that item or concept again.

Furthermore, it would appear that the process of listening to lectures online as homework and then doing the exercise in class (with whatever assistance or support from one’s teacher is beneficial) would be a better method of learning. Towards that end, teachers could put their own lectures online, require their students to listen to their lectures online as homework, and then either aid students in class with exercises, or lead them in discussion groups regarding the lectures the students had viewed the previous night. It is difficult to imagine that this method would not be superior to our current method of lecturing in class and giving exercises as homework.

Accordingly, every teacher, Principal, and educator should spend at least 10 hours listening to Kahn Academy lectures to figure out how they may best use this incredible tool, or emulate it, as an aid to help them in educating our children. Additionally, we should all spend 10 hours listening to Kahn Academy so we can find how to best use it to further our own education as well as the education of our children.

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