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.