Thursday, 5 July 2012

Management Concepts on Khan Academy.org


About
They are on a mission to provide a free world class education for anyone, anywhere.

Mission
They are a not-for-profit organization with the mission of providing a free world class education for anyone, anywhere.

Company Overview
Khan Academy was founded by Sal Khan who started making YouTube videos to help tutor his cousins in Math. Today, Khan Academy offers thousands of free instructional videos and hundreds of practice exercises at www.khanacademy.org
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They are a small team trying their best to improve the way the world learns. Too many people around the globe don’t have access to high quality educational materials, or are forced to learn through a system that doesn't allow them to learn at their own pace.

They think the technology exists today to fundamentally change this, and they are trying to build the tools and resources every learner deserves.

Innovation in Online Learning and changing Rules of Education

 
                   When Matthew Carpenter wants to push ahead, he can watch 
                    Khan Academy videos at home.


                 Kami Thordarson uses Khan Academy in her fifth-grade class.
                 Some kids are already learning calculus with it.



                                     
                                         In the new era of popular, YouTube-friendly education videos, Khan’s site is unique in that it’s ruthlessly practical: It’s aimed at helping people master the basics, the humble bread-and-butter equations they encounter in elementary and high school. Traditionally, these kinds of videos can be dry and difficult to slog through. But Khan manages to pull off his lessons with a casual air that keeps the viewer engaged. He says his relaxed approach isn’t faked—it’s a result of the way he prepares. He never writes a script. He simply researches a topic until he feels he can explain it off the cuff to “a motivated 7-year-old.” (Preparation can take anywhere from 10 minutes with a familiar subject like algebra to nearly a week in the case of organic chemistry.) Khan also never edits. Either he nails the lecture in a single take or he redoes the entire thing until it satisfies him.

                                                       Khan thought he could offer teachers crucial new insight into how students learn. He envisioned a dashboard system that would track students’ individual statistics, showing them and their instructors how many videos they’d watched, how many questions they’d answered, and which ones they’d gotten wrong or right. Normally, of course, teachers fly blind. They use quizzes, homework, and their own observations to try to figure out how much their students understand, but it’s a crude process. Day to day, it’s hard to know what a student is and isn’t learning. A dashboard, Khan says, can change all that.

Theory Y way of assuming the world

Free on-line academies like Khan won't continue to inflate the student debt bubble, but they need now to specify high-end populist quality results to go with their quantity of access.

The real barrier to educational quality on the mass public scale is not resistance to innovation but systemic poverty.

People most effective at producing courseware in the future will have complete production studios staffed with video crews, interactive experts, gamification mavens, courseware experience specialists, usability teams, outcome testers, and much more.”
 

It's rather dumb Theory X rich-kid behavior to blame faltering Public U educational results on a lack of innovation rather than on a lack of money.  Money isn't the sufficient but it is the necessary condition to building the big complex project teams that Silicon Valley will now use as a market differentiator, not because it makes for better educational content but because it is their competitive advantage.

In turn, public universities should hold the Udacities of the world to Theory Y standards of creative educational outcomes--excellent staging yes, but mass creativity as the actual point..


Classical to Generation Y thinking

Khan Academy is very much like Windows itself: good enough. It helps students do their homework. It may even help them pass the end-of-year state tests. Indeed, the website is a wonderful resource for people looking to bone up on basic skills, and certainly makes good on its promise to “help you learn what you want, when you want.”

By all measures, Khan Academy offers substandard math instruction. It focuses exclusively on basic skills. It has no pedagogical underpinnings, yet we love it, and think it has the potential to revolutionize education. It’s nobody’s fault. We just don’t know any better. It’s the inevitable product of optimism and ignorance.
Khan Academy Spans Generations
Though many might think of the Khan Academy as a tool best used by grammar school or high school children, the digital tutorial forum has an expansive collection of videos for GMAT studies as well as those topics studied in med and nursing schools. Bill Gates was once one of Sal Khan's most famous pupils, according to CBS News. Gates said that Khan is the "teacher to the world" and has given us a glimpse of what possibilities the future holds for education

At the end:



“Exponential growth + budget cuts = Khan Academy”

 
 


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