(Guest Post by Matthew Ladner)
Khan Academy has announced next evolutionary steps: 5 new faculty members to extend into the arts and humanities, a crowdsourcing project for videos and blended learning experiments, starting with summer camps in the Summer of 2012. The O’Sullivan Foundation provided a $5m grant to get these projects underway.
I have wondered for some time whether Khan would choose to add new faculty. Despite the fact that Sal Khan is bright, talented and works diligently to research his topics for videos, there are limits to what a single person can do. I’ve noticed for instance that over the last few years I have gravitated towards reading multi-author blogs more than single-author blogs. The reason why is pretty simple: they tend to have more content and differences in perspective. The first two of the five new faculty are already at it: Dr. Steven Zucker and Dr. Beth Harris have begun to produce content on art, history, and the humanities. Dr. Zucker was formerly Chair of Art and Design History at Pratt Institute while Dr. Harris was Director of Digital Learning at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. You can watch their early videos here.
The crowd sourcing project is obviously very interesting, if a little baffling to me. If you can start a global encyclopedia through crowd sourcing, I guess there will be a way to sort high quality videos from drek.
Although Khan Academy makes for one of the most potentially powerful remedial and supplemental tools that one can hope to access for free, I find myself most interested in the progress of blended learning models. If you haven’t read the Wired Magazine article on Khan Academy, shame on you. Go read it now! There you will read about a 10-year-old who has mastered Trig. Or was well on his way to mastering Trig when the article was written. He might be into calculus these days. Those trig equations are giving me a bad flashback to 1985, but Matthew Carpenter is having fun with them.
After reading the Wired article, ask yourself if there is any reason why Matthew Carpenter ought not to be able to take a trigonometry end of course exam. If he passes, it seems rather self-evident to me that he ought to be given credit for content mastery, and allowed to plow ahead. A future in which content mastery determines course credits and education funding, rather than mere seat-time, makes so much sense that it will surely be fiercely resisted. Unsuccessfully.
Keep up the good work Sal. How long can it be until we see some similar platforms built for more specific niche purposes? Stay tuned…
Posted by matthewladner 
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