To begin with, let me give a small introduction of Khan academy. Its a non-profit organization targeted at revolutionizing the education system of the world. The website has thousands of video lectures covering all possible subjects like mathematics, history, healthcare, medicine, finance, physics, chemistry, computerscience etc. This seemingly small venture started Salman khan to educate his neice has now grown by leaps and bounds.This project is funded by donations. It has significant backing from Bill and Melinda gates foundation and google.
Below is the video of salman khan adressing the students of Rice university about "increasing the net happiness of the world"
By providing an innovative solution to the degrading educational system, he has shown the path to not only the young and budding but also the old mature minds who feel too shy to start learning. It has thus managed to solve the problems of people of all age and sex category who don’t have to be dependent on others to learn.
The knowledge is now in your hands and it is just a click away.
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The lectures of khan academy are very well conceived and lucid in description. An intensive research seems to have gone into choosing the subject of lecture and organizing the content. The lecture are designed in such a way that the fundamentals of the subject gets cleared. The series of lecture gives a holistic view of the entire subject. It caters not only to basic and fundamentals of a subject but also more advanced level subjects like economy, finance, astrophysics, calculus etc. There is also a sense of familiarity in his teaching style, he has not completely done away with the traditional type of teaching. The black background and the paint tools just retain the original sanctity of the classroom
The present educational system are grade oriented and hardly centres upon the need to make the student’s concept clear. Students slog through their exams and once they get passing grades nobody bothers to revisit the previous chapter. Also some of the bright student get stuck at a particular concept and find it difficult to regain the pace of the lecture. A recorded classroom lecture helps us to revisit the lecture umpteen times till all our doubts get solved. The lecture stresses upon the clarity of concept and makes learning more fun.
Indian Scenario
India has been reeling under the problem of illetracy since the times of independence. Not only the reach of education system but alo the quality of education imparted to some of the less previliged children puts a major hindrance to the personality developement of student. The teacher student ratio is also very low. Classes wherein a single teacher handles a class of 80 odd students is not uncommon. It is becoming increasingly difficult to give personalized teaching to all of them. In such situations some students seem to get neglected and loose focus in their studies. Khan Academy can definitely be the answer to all the above mentioned problems. Its is upto the government to take the initiative to tie up hands with khan academy and increase their penetration to each and everyhousehold as well as the schools of India.
Future Scope
Even the Prominent B-schools of the world seems to have taken a leaf out of Khan academy by starting flipped classrooms. Flipped classroom basically mean that students are supposed to watch the videos uploaded by their professors and then attend the classrooms. This makes the classroom totally interactive and there is a healthy exchange of ideas between the students and teacher.
In fact what Khan academy has shown us is the future of world education system. It seems that the future classrooms could be modeled along the lines of khan academy.
I wish this venture all the best for its future endeavours
Khan's Rice address is really good pic.. Good luck.. dr mandi
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