When Salman first started making his videos, he was an analyst for a hedge fund and was tutoring his cousins in Louisiana and made videos to do so. By using the “automated version” of him, they said that they didn’t feel like they’re wasting his time, they could rewind and fast forward, and they could go back and review after a long period of time. As people stumbled on his tutoring videos on YouTube, he got some really good feedback from people around the world. A lot of people thought what he did was a REALLY good idea. Parents of an autistic child had their kid watch his videos and it got through, after many other methods had failed him. It started to occur to Salman that if these videos could stay around, they could also help people in the future.
He also got feedback from teachers say that they were using his videos in class to teach. They said that “what used to be homework is now what the students do in class." It doesn’t take 15 times to reexplain information and teach by rote; students get it the first time and work on it in class. The teachers have used technology to humanize the classroom. This seemingly inhuman bit of technology has created a much more people-oriented classroom. The Khan Academy videos fundamentally different from traditional classrooms because you don’t advance until mastery has been achieved, and there is no penalization for trying something that fails. In traditional schools, you advance to other topics whether or not you master the preceding skill. Khan equated this method to teaching someone how to ride a bike, then making them try to ride a unicycle when they are still unsuccessful at riding the bike. The Khan Academy also analyzes each student's progress and where they are in the lessons. There is a knowledge map, which visually displays where you are topic-wise in a web graphic organizer.Research was done at Los Altos school (2 grade school classes participated) on the Khan Academy.
- There is a teacher, but every kid works at their own pace.
- There is a grid that tells where each student is on each concept. Green is proficient, blue is in progress, and red is stuck. This is where the teachers come in to help with those red areas or bring in the proficient students to help.
- Data on videos – looks at what parts of the videos classes stop on the most, what activities classes participate in the most, etc.
- There is also tracking for each individual student. It shows how students may take longer to master some skills, but after they do they often race ahead through the next skill sets. In regular classrooms, these students would most likely be labeled as slow before they ever got the chance to master the skill and race ahead.
The Khan Academy wants to globalize and humanize education. The following are areas that are vital to this transformation: improvement in student to valuable human time ratios (rather than just student to teacher ratios; other students can act as effective peer mentors); adult learners who are embarrassed to go back to school and catch up or relearn what they didn't exactly get back when they were in school; kids who must learn on their own because they have to work (instead of go to school) to help support the family; and a peer-to-peer tutoring network, where anyone who wants to mentor/tutor can and anyone who needs help can access it easily. A global, one-world classroom is the Khan Academy's ultimate goal.
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