New and better way of learning


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New and better way of learning

I have already looked at the Khan Academy before and I used to think that, education-wise, it was one of the best things since sliced bread.

Now I know it is. This dude has come up with a solution for making sure that knowledge gets into the student's head.

Here is the link to the academy for reference:

Khan Academy

Before I go on, here is a recent talk by Salman Khan at TED:

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Over 2000 video lectures so far! And the ones I saw are highly entertaining and informative. That is damn impressive.

In addition to the personality of this inspiring teacher, there are three very important processes he has implemented that I believe will revolutionize education over the long haul.

1. The interactive part of taking a mini-test right after you learn a particular item of knowledge--and you keep doing it until you correctly answer 10 questions/problems in a row. Then you move on to the next one.

2. Inverting classroom learning and homework. When his system has been put into place at schools, the kids watch the lectures at home and do testing and explore what to do with that knowledge with their teacher. The results have been mind-blowing.

3. Kids who have mastered a particular item of knowledge mentor those who are having trouble. In general, I don't think this is a good idea, but when it is narrowed down to a very specific small chunk of information like Khan does, I think it is brilliant. Especially because it works and works well.

The downside to all this is that Khan is getting funding from some one-world-order kind of folks, so he plays to that political side. That is kind of irritating. Actually it's a turn-off.

But I believe those politics will pass while Khan's work will live one. So I am on board.

If anyone is homeschooling right now, you might want to look at this video and Khan's site. It's all free and, frankly, I believe it is better than most of the education you can get in other systems.

It's all very math and science heavy right now, but there are some other topics. Salman Khan used to be a hedge fund analyst, so you get a focus on financial stuff, too. And new videos are going up all the time.

As for adults, this is a good place to go back to school on the sly for free without it being a big drag on your time and/or boring you to death. We all have stuff that we fudged over in school that we wished we now knew. Well, now we can fix that.

I have used the Khan Academy a few times so far for my own learning.

It was love at first site.

(groan... :) )

Anyway, I will be using it a lot more as time goes on. I cannot recommend it highly enough.

Michael

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I've only watched the first 5 minutes but this is great. How can these videos be accessed. I know I'm getting ahead of myself but is it possible that education will become automated? I mean just look at how automation has benefited the world of industry, the biggest benefit of course being cost reduction. That would be something to really look forward to. Well, I'm gonna stop before I get too imaginitive. I'll come back later and finish the video. This really excites me.

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Michael, Bobby, Mikee:

Excellent approach.

In terms of Bobby's question about education being automated, I am certain that will be a positive result of the communications revolution that is in process.

It is economically unsustainable to have billion dollar schools being built to house failing systems which are over populated by public sector unions which encyst failure as a norm.

The virtual internet little red school house is not only a viable option now, but it can be supplemented by a master teacher who can present lessons to thousands at a time. Small satellite neighborhood rooms can exist with tutor teachers who would have extremely small classes which would provide true mentoring teaching.

The present system is too corrupt, too rigid and too immoral to survive. It should be dismantled now;

Adam

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Self-paced learning, mastery of each step before you go on, and liberating the teachers' time to work individually with students in the classroom are not new concepts, and one would have to study the quality of the many, many videos -- but this is very promising for those who don't get things well from just reading a textbook and doing the problem sets at the end.

It's certainly a way to reach those whose reading skills or other 'classroom learning' skills aren't as good or who get bored in those environments.

For me as a big "reader", however, this 'video-driven' approach would have been way too slow and boring for some of the same reasons I detest audiobooks. They slow me down. I used to love the textbooks. Back when there used to be really excellent textbooks in most of the four core subjects.

The whole key to doing this is the quality of the materials and presentation: Crappy videos, crappy problem sets, crappy sequencing of steps would lead to crappy education with this method just as with the old-fashioned methods.

Also: this 'video' approach perhaps works best in 'linear' and procedure-driven simple step-by-step subjects such as math. As opposed to, say, literature.

Edited by Philip Coates
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Self-paced learning, mastery of each step before you go on, and liberating the teachers' time to work individually with students in the classroom are not new concepts, and one would have to study the quality of the many, many videos -- but this is very promising for those who don't get things well from just reading a textbook and doing the problem sets at the end.

It's certainly a way to reach those whose reading skills or other 'classroom learning' skills aren't as good or who get bored in those environments.

For me as a big "reader", however, this 'video-driven' approach would have been way too slow and boring for some of the same reasons I detest audiobooks. They slow me down. I used to love the textbooks. Back when there used to be really excellent textbooks in most of the four core subjects.

The whole key to doing this is the quality of the materials and presentation: Crappy videos, crappy problem sets, crappy sequencing of steps would lead to crappy education with this method just as with the old-fashioned methods.

Also: this 'video' approach perhaps works best in 'linear' and procedure-driven simple step-by-step subjects such as math. As opposed to, say, literature.

I agree. I can't see this adding much to language learning, for example, except for vocab and grammar lessons and tests which students could do at home.But maybe I am not imaginitive enough.

For math and science it looks just terrific. What a boon to teachers, it really could revitalize the classroom.

Btw Phil, I think you mentioned somewhere that education was your second career (same here). Did you become as Adam would say a "slave of the state" and work in the public system?

NO, the poutine hut will not deliver to Florida, and certainly not for the the fee you are offering.

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> Btw Phil, I think you mentioned somewhere that education was your second career (same here). Did you become as Adam would say a "slave of the state" and work in the public system?

Hi Daunce,

Thanks for asking. No, I never was willing to try to teach at a public school and deal with the discipline and 'progressivism' problems. Brief summary: It developed slowly toward a profession over many years. I first started by doing computer language and programming after-school courses for high school students as a community service for a small business, then taught one-shot classes as an adjunct at the New School for Social Research and UCLA, then I became a corporate trainer at Hewlett-Packard, then some private tutoring. Years later I decided to make a complete professional break. I found several schools in California with a strong classical and "back to basics" education focus and with quasi-Objectivists who ran them. That's when I started my transition from sciences to humanities (history, english, literature, civics, etc.) I started with middle school, did some subbing in primary thru middle, and worked my way up to high school and finally Advanced Placement (and since then - last three years - some community college and adult ed).

I worked my way from teaching a prescribed curriculum and school-selected textbooks and a week-by-week prescribed schedule of topics, to having the freedom to develop and choose my own in each of those three areas.

This term I'm teaching a course on three great plays and a thinking skills/psychology course. (I can tell you more, but those are the basics.)

PS, What was your odyssey? Leave out the iliad if it's too bloody.

Edited by Philip Coates
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> Btw Phil, I think you mentioned somewhere that education was your second career (same here). Did you become as Adam would say a "slave of the state" and work in the public system?

Hi Daunce,

Thanks for asking. No, I never was willing to try to teach at a public school and deal with the discipline and 'progressivism' problems. Brief summary: It developed slowly toward a profession over many years. I first started by doing computer language and programming after-school courses for high school students as a community service for a small business, then taught one-shot classes as an adjunct at the New School for Social Research and UCLA, then I became a corporate trainer at Hewlett-Packard, then some private tutoring. Years later I decided to make a complete professional break. I found several schools in California with a strong classical and "back to basics" education focus and with quasi-Objectivists who ran them. That's when I started my transition from sciences to humanities (history, english, literature, civics, etc.) I started with middle school, did some subbing in primary thru middle, and worked my way up to high school and finally Advanced Placement (and since then - last three years - some community college and adult ed).

I worked my way from teaching a prescribed curriculum and school-selected textbooks and a week-by-week prescribed schedule of topics, to having the freedom to develop and choose my own in each of those three areas.

This term I'm teaching a course on three great plays and a thinking skills/psychology course. (I can tell you more, but those are the basics.)

PS, What was your odyssey? Leave out the iliad if it's too bloody.

Good one. My Troy burned when recession decimated the workforce of the health charity where I had toiled as writer/editor, pr flack etc for five years, after a decade previous of similar work in government and business. 1/10th of the workforce was was simultaneously, individually fired and escorted out the door in a well-planned and executed surprise operation. After collapsing from the shock/trauma, I rose again and threatened to sue them for wrongful dismissal, so they raised the payoff satisfactorily.

Then I had a year of getting interviews for nearly every comparable job I applied for, often getting to the last round, and never getting the job. One day I walked into a place where it is impossible not to get hired, a call centre. I think I've described my adventures there elsewhere on this forum.

One of my workmates was the husband of an ESL school principal. He told me I should teach adult ESL because I "had the personality" for it, whatever that meant, and that if I got my certification his wife would hire me. So I did, and she did.The story is longer, of course, but that's the gist of it.

I had never considered teaching children or teenagers. I could never even get my own kids to do their homework. But after the usual newbie faux pas (initially I was so over-concerned with treating my students as adults that I made the lessons too hard and we never had any fun) I eventually hit my stride in the best job I ever had.

We do not work to a curriculum, only benchmarks, and are expected to create our own lessons according to the needs of our individual classes. The teacher has near-total autonomy and bureaucracy is minimal at my level. The supervisor only visits the class once a term.

The students are remarkable, warm, valiant human beings with the usual human mix of a few shifty characters and hopeless screw-ups. It's a joy in my life to know them and learn from them.

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If I had had to teach mathematics for a whole lifetime - as well as teach it at a public institution, the men with nets would have had to come along and put me in one of those sleeveless jackets into a rubber room at another kind of public institution.

What I've done has been more varied.

Edited by Philip Coates
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If I had had to teach mathematics for a whole lifetime - as well as teach it at a public institution, the men with nets would have had to come along and put me in one of those sleeveless jackets into a rubber room at another kind of public institution.

What I've done has been more varied.

I hear you. I know an Objectivist who quit an excellent job, suited to his skills and highly paid, because he "felt like a lackey"-- i.e. because he was an employee. The O-soul is freer when self-employed, although then he has the worst bosses in the world - himself and his clients.

I have been self-employed (that is a freelancer) at various times and marvel at those who are so organized and industrious as to start and run businesses. I would never hire me as an employee, but if by some fluke I did get hired, I would work for me but not very hard.

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More information on the Khan Academy for anyone who is interested. From Wikipedia: Khan Academy

The Khan Academy is a not-for-profit educational organization created by Salman Khan. With the stated mission of "providing a high quality education to anyone, anywhere", the website supplies a free online collection of over 2,200 micro lectures via video tutorials stored on YouTube teaching mathematics, history, finance, physics, chemistry, biology, astronomy, and economics.

. . .

Major components:

  • Video library (over 2,200 videos and counting in various topic areas - logging over 42 million visits)
  • Automated exercises with continuous assessment (107 modules, mainly in math, 4 challenges, 103 individual modules)
  • Peer-to-peer tutoring based on objective data collected by the system (future projected)
  • Khan Academy videos are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 License.

Not-for-profit partner organizations are making the content available outside of YouTube. The Lewis Center for Educational Research, which is affiliated with NASA, is bringing the content into community colleges and charter schools around the country. World Possible is creating offline snapshots of the content to distribute in rural, developing regions with limited or no access to the Internet.
. . .
Recognition

  • Salman Khan has been featured in San Francisco Chronicle, on the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS), National Public Radio, CNN.
  • In 2009, the Khan Academy received the Microsoft Tech Award for education.
  • In 2010 at the Aspen Ideas Festival, Bill Gates endorsed the learning resource, calling it "unbelievable" and saying "I've been using [Khan Academy] with my kids."
  • In 2010, Google's Project 10100 provided $2 million to support the creation of more courses, to allow for translation of the Khan Academy's content, and to allow for the hiring of additional staff.
  • In 2011, Salman Khan delivered a talk at TED that was met with a very strong reaction from the audience.

In terms of social proof (endorsements), you can't get much better than Bill Gates publicly saying he uses it for his own kids.

I have nothing but good things to say about this system.

Michael

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