I believe the future of learning will be based on the concept of personalised learning. The future schools will create rich learning experiences that are tailored to the learning profiles and needs of each learner.
One fine example of personalised learning that is already happening right now is the educational movement called Khan Academy. Khan Academy is a not-for-profit educational organization started out by Salman Khan, a graduate of Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Khan Academy started out in late 2004 when Salman Khan, a hedge fun analyst then, started tutoring his cousin in Mathematics using video tutorials and Yahoo!’s Doodle notepad. Soon, he posted his video tutorials on YouTube so that other relatives and friends can refer to it and the positive feedbacks he received strongly encouraged Salman Khan to quit his job and solely focus on creating the helpful tutorials.
From simple tutorial videos, Khan Academy now offers more than 2600 tutorial videos ranging from topics like simple mathematics to more complex ones, finance, economics, history, biology, physics, chemistry, astronomy and computer science. It also offers more than 200 interactive exercises. Khan Academy is living up to its mission where they aim to provide high quality education to anyone, anywhere and at anytime as all the video tutorials and infinite randomly generated exercises are provided without any costs.
The method that Khan Academy is adopting signifies that education can be extremely flexible and catered to the learning pace and needs of each learner.
Although the movement depends on donations for funding, it has recently received significant financial backing from the Bill & Melinda Gates foundation and Google.
One thing that sets Khan Academy apart from other tutorial videos on the Internet is the manner of how the video tutorials present the learning concepts to the viewers. The video tutorials explain these concepts in a way similar to sitting next to someone and working out the problem on a sheet of paper. Salman Khan personally believes voicing out every thought process while tackling a problem will make lesson more valuable and not as intimidating.
Khan Academy is the epitome of personalised learning and the virtual classroom where a learner can really “learn at their own pace”.
In my opinion, I believe Khan Academy is a revolutionary method of education as it allow students to learn at their own pace through detailed step-by-step video tutorials and interactive software that encourages a learner to fail but also expecting the learner to master the topic.
After reading up on his methods, I felt that the current education method is flawed. The way class is conducted now is more like the “one size fits all” approach. Student Z may be good in the first topic and ace the test on that topic. However, when the teacher moves to the second topic - a topic where Student Z can’t seem to get his head around the concept, the teacher notices that Student Z is not performing like the ‘A’ student he is. And the worst part is, at the end of the year, if you get a 60 percent grade, you move on to the next level of education. But what is the 40 percent that you do not understand?
The concept is like learning how to ride the bicycle without mastering the knowledge of braking or turning and then moving on to learn how to ride the unicycle.
I strongly believe that Khan Academy is a monumental step in the right direction. Watching the tutorial videos can be assigned as homework to students and the lesson can be conducted in a consultation manner where students can interact, clarify and get help with difficulties from either the teacher or peers who have “mastered the topic” creating a more engaging and humanize environment in the classroom. A student can start at a simple practice, jump to complex one or just go to whichever topic that he/she needs brushing up on. And the best part about video tutorials? One can always watch it anytime he needs a refresher.
With that, I shall hope the vision of Khan Academy turning into a real school will be reality in the future where Salman Khan’s outstanding method “could be the DNA for a physical school where students spend 20 percent of their day watching videos and doing self-paced exercises and the rest of the day building robots or painting pictures or composing music or whatever.
