Changing Education

One of the reasons I started this blog is that I feel education needs to be changed. This not a new unique sentiment that few others share. I hear about it all the time. One person who feels this way is Sir Ken Robinson [1], [2], [3], an international advisor on education in the arts. He says that change is not enough. We do not need the system to evolve. If the foundation and fundamentals of the system are broken, then the evolved system will still be fundamentally broken. What we need is a revolution.

The problem is that despite all of the people that are passionate about educational reform, very little is taking place, especially at the college and post-graduate levels. The change within the sciences is even slower because a scientist wants to see scientific results that one set of educational methodologies is better than another. It is sort of a Catch-22. Where is the scientific method here?

So, my plan is to highlight education programs that are doing something new, reaching out to a larger audience, concerned with social and global issues, etc., as well as platforms for education, creative and new ideas, and outreach programs -- because education should not only be better, it should be available at a high quality to everyone, regardless of geographic, economic, and demographic factors.

Just as a start, I already partially introduced TED.com and their "ideas worth spreading" with the Sir Robinson videos above. TED is a conference that tries to feature people with great ideas and inventions. They oublish new videos weekly on their website.

Additionally, there is the Studio School, a new type of school for 14-19 year olds in England that turns the classroom into a hands-on environment in an attempt to bridge the gap between classroom skills and workplace skills.

Khan Academy

Through my frequent readings of Saturday Morning Breakast Cereal, I came across a link to the Khan Academy and watched their featured video. It is of Salman Khan, the founder and sole teacher of the Khan Academy, speaking about his youtube school at a TED convention.

Khan was a hedge fund analyst at a brokerage firm when he started making youtube videos to help tutor his little cousins. After receiving numerous positive emails and comments from his family, friends, strangers, and teachers, he quit his job and decided to found the Khan Academy.

There are over 2,100 educational videos on the site (mostly pre-/highschool level), all made by Khan. Each video is 10-15 minutes long and consists of Kahn's voice explaining a topic while the video shows Khan's notes appearing on a computer-based blackboard (via SmoothDraw).

Additionally, there is a fantastic organization and homework scheme created by the software crew. All of the videos are thrown into an intricate flowchart that creates a smooth learning path through and across subjects. You can start at the beginning and be guided through harder and harder topics. Each topic requires 10 consecutive correct answers before permitting you to move on.

The program allows teachers to get a microscopic view of what their students are spending their time on and having troubles with. A teacher can see where, when, and how long/often students pause or replay a video, which types of problems they get stuck on, how long the spend on each question, and where holes in their knowledge base are. With all of this information being made available, teachers are able to assign lectures for homework and do homework during lecture, thereby increasing student-teacher and student-student interaction.

Furthermore, the student progress can be tracked through each class and grade, providing a great tool for evaluating of the quality of student being generated by the school system and of the school system and teaching staff itself.

The most amazing thing was seeing how the self-paced learning was going for each individual student and how, after progress flatlined for a period of time, their learning curve suddenly rose sharply upon the mastery of a difficult topic and continued to climb quickly and steadily.

Fin.

(To get a proper, resolving conclusion, you will have to check out the site and see it for yourself.)