A dashboard for the teacher

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26 juni 2012 | What started as a series of youtube postings to help cousins with their math homework, is now turning the classroom fundamentals upside down. Former hedge fund analyst Salman Khan has already taught millions of students mathematics.

Online learning is skyrocketing, but who would have thought thatthis would also fundamentally alter the traditional classroomteaching? Not even Salman Khan, the founder of Khan Academy, whose webtutorials are by now reaching 5 million students every month.

Humanize the classroom

Khan started his online teaching in order to help his cousinswith their mathematics classes in 2006. Six years later his academyalready offers 3.000 different tutorials, from basic arithmetic tovector calculus and many other subjects like art history.

Contrary to intuition it is within the classroom itself that hisvideos have the greatest effect. As Khan puts it: “We have usedtechnology to humanize the classroom.” Where the teacher used to dothe lecturing and the actual problems used to be solved at home,Khan’s tutorials have turned his around: every kid can work withthe fundamentals at home, re-watching the videos as often as theyneed to, and school time is used for solving math problems with thehelp of the teacher.

Khan Academy is now offering teachers the ability to access allof their students’ data on a ‘dashboard’, giving them an overviewof the class performance as a whole, or diving into a particularstudent’s profile to figure out which topics he or she findsproblematic. This means that teacher can intervene exactly therewhere they are needed most.