Online learning is skyrocketing, but who would have thought that
this would also fundamentally alter the traditional classroom
teaching? Not even Salman Khan, the founder of Khan Academy, whose web
tutorials are by now reaching 5 million students every month.
Humanize the classroom
Khan started his online teaching in order to help his cousins
with their mathematics classes in 2006. Six years later his academy
already offers 3.000 different tutorials, from basic arithmetic to
vector calculus and many other subjects like art history.
Contrary to intuition it is within the classroom itself that his
videos have the greatest effect. As Khan puts it: "We have used
technology to humanize the classroom." Where the teacher used to do
the lecturing and the actual problems used to be solved at home,
Khan's tutorials have turned his around: every kid can work with
the fundamentals at home, re-watching the videos as often as they
need to, and school time is used for solving math problems with the
help of the teacher.
Khan Academy is now offering teachers the ability to access all
of their students' data on a 'dashboard', giving them an overview
of the class performance as a whole, or diving into a particular
student's profile to figure out which topics he or she finds
problematic. This means that teacher can intervene exactly there
where they are needed most.