[LINK] Online Learning, Personalized

[stephen at melbpc.org.au]

Online Learning, Personalized

By SOMINI SENGUPTA Published: December 4, 2011 
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/05/technology/khan-academy-blends-its-
youtube-approach-with-classrooms.html?_r=1&nl=todaysheadlines&emc=tha25


SAN JOSE, Calif. — Jesse Roe, a ninth-grade math teacher at a charter 
school here called Summit, has a peephole into the brains of each of his 
38 students. 

He can see that a girl sitting against the wall is zipping through 
geometry exercises; that a boy with long curls over his eyes is stuck on 
a lesson on long equations; and that another boy in the front row is 
getting a handle on probability. 

Each student’s math journey shows up instantly on the laptop Mr. Roe 
carries as he wanders the room. 

He stops at each desk, cajoles, offers tips, reassures. For an hour, this 
crowded, dimly lighted classroom in the hardscrabble shadow of Silicon 
Valley hums with the sound of fingers clicking on keyboards, pencils 
scratching on paper and an occasional whoop when a student scores a 
streak of right answers

The software program unleashed in this classroom is the brainchild of 
Salman Khan, an Ivy League-trained math whiz and the son of an immigrant 
single mother. Mr. Khan, 35, has become something of an online sensation 
with his Khan Academy math and science lessons on YouTube, which has 
attracted up to 3.5 million viewers a month. 

Now he wants to weave those digital lessons into the fabric of the school 
curriculum — a more ambitious and as yet untested proposition. 

This semester, at least 36 schools nationwide are trying out Mr. Khan’s 
experiment: splitting up the work of teaching between man and machine, 
and combining teacher-led lessons with computer-based lectures and 
exercises. 

As schools try to sort out confusing claims about the benefits of using 
technology in the classroom, and companies ponder the profits from big 
education contracts, Khan Academy may seem like just another product 
vying for attention. 

But what makes Mr. Khan’s venture stand out is that the lessons and 
software tools are entirely free — available to anyone with access to a 
reasonably fast Internet connection. 

“The core of our mission is to give material to people who need it,” Mr. 
Khan said. “You could ask, ‘Why should it be free?’ But why shouldn’t it 
be free?” 

For now, Mr. Khan’s small team is subsidized by more than $16.5 million 
from technology donors, including Bill Gates, Google, the Silicon Valley 
Community Foundation and the O’Sullivan Foundation. He intends to raise 
an endowment. And this summer, starting in the Bay Area, where he is 
based, he plans to hold an educational summer camp. 

It is too early to know whether the Khan Academy software makes a real 
difference in learning. A limited study with students in Oakland, Calif., 
this year found that children who had fallen behind in math caught up 
equally well if they used the software or were tutored in small groups. 
The research firm SRI International is working on an evaluation of the 
software in the classroom. 

Mr. Khan’s critics say that his model is really a return to rote learning 
under a high-tech facade, and that it would be far better to help 
children puzzle through a concept than drill it into their heads. 

“Instead of showing our students a better lecture, let’s get them doing 
something better than lecture,” Frank Noschese, a high school physics 
teacher in Cross River, N.Y., wrote on his blog in June. 

But in education circles, Mr. Khan’s efforts have captured imaginations 
and spawned imitators. 

Two Stanford professors have drawn on his model to offer a free online 
artificial intelligence class. Thirty-four thousand people are now taking 
the course, and many more have signed up. Stanford Medical School, which 
allows its students to take lectures online if they want, summoned Mr. 
Khan to help its faculty spice up their presentations. 

And a New York-based luxury real estate company credited Mr. Khan with 
inspiring its profit-making venture: the Floating University, a set of 
online courses taught by academic superstars, repackaged and sold to Ivy 
League colleges and eventually to anyone who wants to pay for them. 

“What Khan represents is a model that’s tapped into the desire that 
everyone has to personalize the learning experience and get it cheap and 
quick,” said Jim Shelton, assistant deputy secretary for innovation and 
improvement at the Education Department. 

Mr. Shelton predicted that there would be “a bunch of knockoffs” that 
would take the Khan approach and try to expand on it. “This is going to 
spread like wildfire,” he said. 

Mr. Khan grew up in a suburb of New Orleans, where his mother, who is 
from Bangladesh, raised him on her own by cobbling together a series of 
jobs and businesses. He went to public schools, where, as he recalls, a 
few classmates were fresh out of jail and others were bound for top 
universities. 

Math became his passion. He pored over textbooks and joined the math 
club. He came to see math as storytelling. “Math is a language for 
thinking,” he said, “as opposed to voodoo magical incantations where you 
have no idea where they’re coming from.”


The YouTube lectures got their start six years ago when Mr. Khan needed a 
way to help a cousin catch up on high school math. They are startlingly 
simple. Each one covers a single topic, like long division or the debt 
crisis, usually in a bite-size 10-minute segment. The viewer hears Mr. 
Khan talking, in his typically chatty, older brother sort of way. But his 
face is never seen, just his scribbles on the screen. More recently he 
has included two outside specialists to give lectures on art history 
topics like the Rosetta Stone and Caravaggio.

Today, the Khan Academy site offers 2,700 instructional videos and a 
constellation of practice exercises. Master one concept, move on to the 
next. Earn rewards for a streak of correct answers. For teachers, there 
is an analytics dashboard that shows both an aggregate picture of how the 
class is doing and a detailed map of each student’s math comprehension. 
In other words, a peephole. 

Diane Tavenner, chief of the Summit chain of four charter schools, said 
that at first she was ambivalent about using Mr. Khan’s software. It 
would require buying laptops for every student and investing in more 
Internet capacity. And she found the Khan Academy model of instructor and 
blackboard — albeit a digital one — to be a bit too traditional. 

In the past, math class at the Summit schools was always hands-on: the 
class worked on a problem, usually in small groups, sometimes for days at 
a time. But getting an entire class of ninth graders to master the 
fundamentals of math was never easy. Without those, the higher-level 
conceptual exercises were impossible. 

That is where the machine came in handy. The Khan software offered 
students a new, engaging way to learn the basics. 

Ms. Tavenner says she believes that computers cannot replace teachers. 
But the computer, she recognizes, can do some things a teacher cannot. It 
can offer personal feedback to a whole room of students as they work. And 
it can give the teacher additional class time to do more creative and 
customized teaching. 

“Combining Khan with that kind of teaching will produce the best kind of 
math,” she argued. “Teachers are more effective because they have a 
window into the student’s mind.” 

Ms. Tavenner’s students here inhabit a world that seems distant from the 
dazzle and wealth of adjacent Silicon Valley. Nearly half come from 
families where English is a second language. Forty percent qualify for 
free lunches. So pervasive is gang violence in the area that school 
uniforms have been mandated as a safeguard against the display of gang 
colors. Not all students have a computer at home, or parents who can help 
with homework. 

Math class at Summit on one afternoon this fall began like many around 
the country. Mr. Roe was at the whiteboard at the head of the room, 
explaining order of operations — the math concept that dictates the 
sequence in which calculations should be performed in a long equation. 
Handouts were passed out, and there was a series of questions and 
answers. 

In the second hour, the students were huddled over laptops, each working 
on a different set of exercises. Nicole Bermudez, 14, was on geometry. 
She had trouble with math in middle school. Her teacher, she said, had no 
time to help her, and her mother did not have the patience. “She would 
just yell at me. She would say, ‘You can’t get it? This is simple 
math.’ ” 

The Khan Academy software, she pointed out, offers hints and 
instructional videos to nudge her ahead. It waits until she has mastered 
one concept before she can move on to the next. She can ask Mr. Roe when 
she is really stuck. 

In the back of the class, two girls wearing headphones watched one of Mr. 
Khan’s videos. Moses Rodriguez plodded slowly through some exercises, his 
attention occasionally wandering until Mr. Roe came around and prodded 
him. The classroom was quiet, apart from the occasional eruptions of 
victory. 

“Is your brain hurting yet?” one girl asked her neighbor.

--

Cheers,
Stephen