Elearning! August - September

2013

Elearning! Magazine: Building Smarter Companies via Learning & Workplace Technologies.

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Learning!100 Khan Academy Educating 280 Million pushed ahead to more advanced topics. >> Interactive and Exploratory – Learn- As Sal Khan's visionary project, Khan Academy, continues to grow, the organization has been named to the Learning! 100's Top 10 list for the second consecutive year. As of last month, more than 280 million videos had been viewed on the Khan Academy website, and more than 1.2 billion problems have been completed. Te online academy now boasts 4,258 videos, has 50 classrooms in its School Partnership program and 30,000 schools around the world participating. All this with just 42 full-time employees (including seven who create content) — but more than 13,000 volunteers. "Many of our employees have had very successful careers at places like Oracle, McKinsey & Company and Pixar," the founder notes. "Some have been leaders at technology start-ups; and others have come from education institutions such as Teach for America." What he has done in fve short years is to create a new learning and teaching model that can be used not only by students, teachers and home-schoolers but also by adult and lifelong learners to expand their knowledge. It has been hailed by professional educators as a truly advanced style of teaching and learning. Khan founded the web-based organization on four core philosophies or guiding principles: >> Personalized – Giving students/learners the time and space to master concepts before moving on to a more advanced concept. Personalized learning allows students to build confdence, learn how to take responsibility and drive their own learning experiences. >> Mastery-based – Students must possess a deep, conceptual understanding of fundamental ideas before they are 26 August / September 2013 Elearning! ing must bring students together to explore questions and grapple with them in tangible ways. Open-ended projects can help make concepts real and relevant to students while also giving them an intuitive and deeper understanding of a subject. To that end, the academy also runs in-person summer programs (Discovery Labs) to test and showcase interactive and project-based learning material. "Te obvious beneft to peer-to-peer The Khan Academy learning team has 280 million reasons to be happy. teaching and learning is that it's at least as powerful for the student doing the tutoring as for the student getting tutored," Khan says. "To truly get mastery of a subject, you really have to teach it, distill it, explain it. On top of that, you're building other sof skills, which are at least as important as other, tangible skills — skills like empathy, listening and guiding someone without making him or her feel intimidated or insecure." >> Data Driven – Accurate real-time data can supercharge learning ex- periences by allowing students, teachers, parents to see exactly the material that students should focus on for optimal learning outcomes. Additionally, data analysis of the billions of data points from Khan Academy users enable it to build a robust, data-powered learning experience. Khan sees the day when the academy's educational model is accepted by both educators and forward-thinking corporations. Indeed, some of its core philosophies are today being embraced by some companies. Kahn suggests that organizations make videos of any lecturebased content, so that learners can review them privately and repeat them as ofen as they like. "It's much more interesting to show rather than just tell," he says. "Trow in exercises, data, analytics, badges, awards, and then all of a sudden managers and CEOs can see what content is being consumed, how it's being consumed — and employees can do it on their own time, on the plane or from their iPad. It's a much richer, constructive way to learn." Khan Academy is a repeat winner of the Learning! 100. AREA OF INNOVATION EXCELLENCE

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