This article on NPR jumped out at me. This hedge fund manager established the Khan Academy Channel, producing numerous academic tutorial videos on Youtube.
"The evolution to online videos came, Khan says, when it became difficult logistically to manage his work and the kids' soccer practice. He began recording videos and putting them on YouTube. He began with Microsoft Paint and a piece of $20 software called Screen Video Recorder, which let him capture his screen and record it at the same time.
"I just did it because I thought it was the cheapest and fastest way to make a decent quality video," Khan says. "Since then, one of the viewers actually donated a $300 piece of software called Camtasia Recorder for the screen capture, and now I use another piece of shareware called SmoothDraw 2.0 ... I just use that to draw, and I just have a little Wacom graphic pen tablet to do the writing."
Khan's videos cover math, chemistry and biology, but they also cover finance and economics, subjects that came out of last year's financial crisis. He says it began with him reading the Federal Reserve Act."
Salman Khan took his skills to the web, and made available fantastic tutorials for all to see. Hail open source!
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Great post Dave! This reminds me a lot of what Terry Berna does with her math classes - recording them and posting them on Angel for students to review at home.
ReplyDeleteThis guy is giving away his time and his expertise. If he had decided to try and maximize profit from this - by making it a subscription service for example - it would reach far fewer people (I think). I can imagine Venture Capitalists reading this and grinding their teeth at the lost profits.
My students (and I) go to Youtube often to check out tutorials on video production and animation techniques. Youtube has become "tutor tube" for many of us. I think we're just beginning to see the power of this kind of sharing. It changes education. If knowledge and "know-how" can be shared like this, then the job of teachers shifts from purveying knowledge to modeling - showing kids how to think, how to solve problems, how to access and assess knowledge, etc. Maybe I'm off base here, there's a lot to think about as far as the long term impacts of youtube and wikis and such on teaching...
It's great that we've decided to open youtube up again for students. Granted, many of them are wasting time watching "jackass" style goofs, but some of them are making great educational use of it.
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ReplyDeleteAnd I think we should post this link somewhere on our SHS webpage. An amazing educational resource for our kids:
ReplyDeletehttp://www.khanacademy.org/
L.
John says:
ReplyDelete"If knowledge and 'know-how' can be shared like this, then the job of teachers shifts from purveying knowledge to modeling - showing kids how to think, how to solve problems, how to access and assess knowledge, etc."
I wonder, if we had multiple Khan Academies like this, would we need teachers, physically in a school, at all...?
This Khan person seems to be able to "show kids how to think" quite well via his YouTube videos. Why do we need a teacher, in a classroom when he can do it so well...? If Terry can post videos of her lessons, why do her kids have to physically come to her class...? Why not let them do that work on their own time, when they're most in a mood to learn it...?
Maybe schools could simply establish competencies -- as we've done -- and we can virtually point kids in a direction to access materials. If they need help, they can send us an electronic shout-out.
Or maybe there's something inherently valuable about the social structure of our shool day...? I'm not sure.