Khan Academy = Free Education
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bornnraisedoffCMR
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The Khan Academy is a not-for-profit educational organization created and sustained by Salman Khan. With the stated mission "of providing a high quality education to anyone, anywhere", the Academy supplies a free online collection of more than 2,000 videos on mathematics, science, history, and economics.[1]
Salman Khan is a Bangladeshi American born and raised in New Orleans, Louisiana.[2] His father hails from Barisal, Bangladesh.[2][3] Khan holds three degrees from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology: a BS in mathematics, a BS in electrical engineering and computer science, and an MS in electrical engineering and computer science. He also holds an MBA from Harvard Business School. In late 2004, Khan began tutoring his cousin in mathematics using Yahoo!'s Doodle notepad. When other relatives and friends sought his tutorage, he decided it would be more practical to distribute the tutorials on YouTube.[4][3] Their popularity there and the testimonials of appreciative students prompted Khan to quit his job in finance in 2009 and focus on the Academy full-time.[3]
As of December 2009, Khan's YouTube-hosted tutorials receive a total of more than 35,000 views per day.[3] Each video runs for approximately ten minutes. Drawings are made with SmoothDraw, which are recorded and produced using video capture from Camtasia Studio. Khan eschewed a format that would involve a person standing by a whiteboard, desiring instead to present the content in a way akin to sitting next to someone and working out a problem on a sheet of paper: If you're watching a guy do a problem [while] thinking out loud, I think people find that more valuable and not as daunting.[5] Offline versions of the videos have been distributed by not-for-profit groups to rural areas in Asia, Latin America, and Africa.[4][6] While the Khan Academy's current content is mainly concerned with pre-college mathematics and physics, Khan states that his long-term goal is to provide "tens of thousands of videos in pretty much every subject" and to create "the world's first free, world-class virtual school".
The Khan Academy also provides a web-based exercise system that generates problems for students based on skill level and performance. Khan believes his academy points to an opportunity to overhaul the traditional classroom by using software to create tests, grade assignments, highlight the challenges of certain students, and encourage those doing well to help struggling classmates.[3]
Several people have made $10,000 contributions; Ann and John Doerr gave $100,000; total revenue is about $150,000 in donations, and $2,000 a month from ads on the Web site.[7] As of September 2010, Google announced they would be providing the Khan Academy with $2 million to support the creation of more courses and to enable the Khan Academy to translate their core library into the world’s most widely spoken languages, as part of their Project 10^100.[8]
Vision
Major components:[9]
* Video library (already over 1800 videos and counting in various topic areas - logging over 17 million visits[citation needed])
* Automated exercises with continuous assessment (already over 70 modules mainly in math)
* Peer-to-peer tutoring based on objective data collected by the system (future projected)
* Khan Academy videos are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 License.[10]
Partner not-for-profit organizations are making the content available outside of YouTube. The Lewis Center for Educational Research, which is affiliated with NASA, is bringing the content into community colleges and charter schools around the country. World Possible is creating offline snapshots of the content to distribute in rural, developing regions with limited or no access to the Internet.[2][11]
He has a vision of turning the academy into a charter school:
This could be the DNA for a physical school where students spend 20 percent of their day watching videos and doing self-paced exercises and the rest of the day building robots or painting pictures or composing music or whatever.[7]
http://www.khanacademy.org/
Good ? right here. Free Education and quality too. hundreds of video tutorials and he does a great job of really teaching.
Comments
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What's the catch?
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Peace to that man. (The gentleman provides an extensive list of subjects)
Yeah, the Khan academy is much better than MIT's bogus openware or whatever it's called. This is great for the entrepreneur, but the average joe who's trying to land a job is still stuck in the Academic monopoly of certification for education. I mean you could CLEP some courses, where I live it's around 50 for each one. I think there should be CLEP's for entire degree's.
From an economic standpoint, I think tutors are about to lose a major chunk of their market share. -
KTULU IS BACK wrote: »What's the catch?
It's not a real school, just educational videos. Based on the one I checked out, its a pretty amateur thing and much more basic than what you'd learn in a college classroom, but there doesn't seem to be any kind of catch. -
nice website, good source for informations.
