As Morten mentioned in class, here are some links about Sal Khan, the YouTube-based teacher who is disrupting our common conception of what a “classroom” means, as well as the requisite qualifications for teaching. Traditional gatekeepers of knowledge are adopting similar methods: many universities now offer their courses online for free (e.g., MIT’s OpenCourseWare). Degrees, however, are not included.
http://money.cnn.com/2010/08/23/technology/sal_khan_academy.fortune/index.htm
http://www.khanacademy.org/
4 replies on “Disrupting the Classroom”
This is in fact pretty amazing. He teaches a wide range of subjects (without having a PhD in any of the subjects or a Master’s for that matter), and he delivers it all over the Internet. Is it good enough? Maybe for a whole bunch of people who want “101” lessons. In terms of the course, you can see how difficult this disruption is for large universities (like UCB) to handle. I doubt we and other universities have appropriate innovation processes for dealing with this.
What do you think?
Morten
I would agree that UCB would struggle with integrating this type of instruction. The culture of higher education doesn’t match this model in two important ways:
1) Currently, the responsibility for learning lies with the teacher/professor as opposed to the student. Professional schools and online instruction place the onus the student.
2) Public universities have 3 goals: student instruction, research and public service. Online instruction-only poses a dramatic change for the current balance at UCB.
Basically, we’d be talking a massive cultural shift to adapt to this disruption.
This is a good example of how one single man can revolutionize the educational model as we know it.
Just to add some numbers to the story:
– Khan’s videos have 22 million views between them
– He has published more than 1800
– By the time I am writing this entry there are 1542 people using his system.
I like how this socializes the education and makes it accessible for everyone, especially for those living in areas where there is no proper infrastructure or resources that guarantee universal access to it. However, I still believe on the power of the personal component of the education.
In terms of innovation, I would say that this can be disruptive in an specific context (social, economic, …) whereas it might not reach the status of the predominant model in others. Khan’s idea can be well accepted in some situations (developing countries, personal use, …), but I think it is really difficult that it will replace traditional ‘on-site’ education. There are other factors in the education process that cannot be transmitted over an ethernet cable.
Maybe a hybrid model?
If you found Khan’s initiative interesting, you might check this out: http://www.apple.com/education/itunes-u/
Regarding Jackson’s comment, I think there ways to integrate this type of instruction into the class–particularly with respect to technical topics and GSIs. We’ve used videos on Microeconomics to teach our students concepts in Intro to Public Policy Analysis.
What’s so nice about leveraging well composed videos is that they combine both visual and verbal descriptions executed by a master teacher. After having our students watch 3 videos on market failures, there was less burden on our teaching, which allowed for more discussion time.
Here is the microeconomics series we use:
http://www.youtube.com/user/mjmfoodie#p/c/336C870BEAD3B58B