The Khan Academy: MOOC meets the flipped classroom

The Khan Academy is innovating education, taking lessons out of the classroom, establishing mastery, and maximizing technological potential. The academy is a not-for-profit organization hosting an extensive video library on hundreds of subjects at various levels of complexity. Access to the clips is available via the organization’s site or on the academy's You Tube page.

This approach incorporates the concepts behind MOOCs,  massive open online courses, and the flipped classroom.  In Khan Academy’s method learning happens on the student’s time and online, interactive time is used to practice methods and co-teach. All lessons are free and self-paced where mastery is the ideal goal, but does not necessitate all students move at the same pace as in a traditional classroom. Khan Academy’s methods allow for infinite variation among students to achieve mastery level. An October 2nd article in Slate Magazine by the academy’s founder, Salman Khan (2012), explicates his belief in this system; he explains Khan Academy is a learning method for the future because it incorporates educational technology with high-quality teaching while maintaining such a low cost that the information is available to a wide audience.

Later in October, Wired Magazine ran a piece about one of Khan Academy’s teachers, Vi Hart, a self-proclaimed mathemusician. Although not trained in mathematics, Ms. Hart incorporates her passion for math with a penchant for music and catchy summary. However music is not her only means of conveyance. In a short You Tube clip on her website, Ms. Hart illustrates the Mobius Strip and symmetrical properties of a popular childhood candy treat: Fruit by the Foot.

Despite the media buzz, including laud in 2010 from Bill Gates, founder of Microsoft, and from Businessweek last year, Khan Academy has experienced some criticism in 2012.  A short series from July in the Washington Post by Valerie Strauss highlights some shortcomings of the academy’s methods, primarily focusing on a lack of rigor in the math videos produced by Salman Khan, the academy’s founder.  In some instances, Khan completely gets the math lesson wrong.

The debate surrounding Khan Academy remains pitted on whether or not Khan is a good teacher. No one debates the selflessness of offering free, online courses or the academic research-based focus on self-paced mastery; those are in line with current educational thinking. But how effective can a tool be when the experts in a subject make mistakes, which is not a terrible end, but then refuse to engage in a rational dialog to come to a consensus? Instead of focusing the debate on how to improve teaching and learning, the Washington Post instead deemed it more important to feature an argument between two experts. Further no one has made mention of how this potentially positive technology can be adapted or made available to those without internet connectivity or access to computing devices.

Source links:
http://www.khanacademy.org/
http://www.khanacademy.org/#browse
http://www.youtube.com/user/khanacademy
http://educational-technology-vub.blogspot.be/2012/10/mooc.html
http://educational-technology-vub.blogspot.be/2012/11/flipped-classroom-backwards-classroom.html
http://www.slate.com/articles/video/conversations_with_slate/2012/10/salman_khan_on_the_youtube_lectures_and_teaching_tools_that_power_the_khan_academy_s_mission_to_revolutionize_education_video_.2.html
http://www.wired.co.uk/magazine/archive/2012/10/start/maths-x-music-=-magic
http://vihart.com/
http://vihart.com/blog/fruit-by-the-foot/
http://www.khanacademy.org/talks-and-interviews/v/bill-gates-talks-about-the-khan-academy-at-aspen-ideas-festival-2010
http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/11_22/b4230072816925.htm
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/post/khan-academy-the-hype-and-the-reality/2012/07/23/gJQAuw4J3W_blog.html
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/post/khan-academy-readers-weigh-in/2012/08/02/gJQA83rW9W_blog.html

MOOC in 2012.

According to Wikipedia, a massive open online course (MOOC) is a type of online course aimed at large-scale participation and open access via the web MOOCs are a recent development in the area of distance education, and a progression of the kind of open education ideals suggested by open educational resources.
Though the design of and participation in a MOOC may be similar to college or university courses, MOOCs typically do not offer credits awarded to paying students at schools. However, assessment of learning may be done for certification.
Also Wikipedia shares that MOOCs originated from within the open educational resources movement and connectivist roots. More recently, a number of MOOC-type projects have emerged independently, such as Coursera, Udacity, and edX. The prominence of these projects' founders, contributing institutions, and financial investment helped MOOCs gain significant public attention in 2012. Some of the attention behind these new MOOCs center on making e-learning more scalable either sustainable or profitable.

According to Willey David MOOCS are Massive but not open, Open but not Massive, and they try hard not to be courses.

According to Educause’s ELI “7 Things You Should Know About MOOCs”, the first MOOC is widely thought to be a course titled “Connectivism and Connective Knowledge,” which was co-taught by George Siemens and Stephen Downes at the University of Manitoba, delivered to 25 tuition-paying students but offered at the same time to around 2,300 students from the general public who took the online class at no cost.

The  MOOCGuide finds 12 benefits of a MOOC

1. You can organize a MOOC in any setting that has connectivity (which can include the Web, but also local connections via Wi-Fi e.g.)
2. You can organize it in any language you like (taking into account the main language of your target audience)
3. You can use any online tools that are relevant to your target region or that are already being used by the participants
4. You can move beyond time zones and physical boundaries
5. It can be organized as quickly as you can inform the participants (which makes it a powerful format for priority learning in e.g. aid relief)
6. Contextualized content can be shared by all
7. Learning happens in a more informal setting
8. Learning can also happen incidentally thanks to the unknown knowledge that pops up as the course participants start to exchange notes on the course’s study
9. You can connect across disciplines and corporate/institutional walls
10. You don’t need a degree to follow the course, only the willingness to learn (at high speed)
11. You add to your own personal learning environment and/or network by participating in a MOOC
12. You will improve your lifelong learning skills, for participating in a MOOC forces you to think about your own learning and knowledge absorption

Possible challenges of a MOOC

1. It feels chaotic as participants create their own content.
2. It demands digital literacy.- Which in the digital age is still a persistent issue.
3. It demands time and effort from the participants.
4. It is organic, which means the course will take on its own trajectory (you have got to let go).
5. As a participant you need to be able to self-regulate your learning and possibly give yourself a learning goal to achieve. Researches show that with the development of blended learning, students still prefer a reasonable combination between face- to- face meetings and online learning.

If relate this information to information gained earlier, automatically comes the idea that this kind of innovation will require time and money to make it work. Also there will always be one who wants to earn money out of new ideas. (Or one who has to loose a lot of money because of new ideas). In next video see 0.26 " Innovation is turning ideas into money..."

 

Even though we'e reached a high level of humanism, there are higher values in the society that persist leading nations. Make education open will not be as easy as it seems. The expression " Elite education open for masses" is already in its deeper content discriminative and antidemocratic.

Indefinite amount of students will be the issue that will create further problems in the process. Taking in account that fact that students do not pay for it, there will definitely be a lot of student willing to do that. The question about quality& quality needs to be addressed then.

This idea then goes against the EU higher education policy and Bologna process, which students to have the same level after graduation in order to assure mobility throughout EU and outside EU and to assure quality of education.

Whether MOOC is a threat to the Higher Educational System worldwide, is being discusses.  George Siemens, the founder of the first MOOC, predicted during a speech about transformational change at Campus Technology 2012, "The top tier and elite universities will likely continue to have physical campuses; the midtier levels, on the other hand, are the ones that are going to suffer to the greatest degree."

As Washington post claims, lately MOOC providers include a fledgling nonprofit competitor, edX, which has drawn hundreds of thousands of users to free online courses from Harvard University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of California at Berkeley. On Oct. 15, the University of Texas system joined them.

MOOC students, for the most part, aren’t earning credit toward degrees. Educators say that before credits can be awarded, they must be assured that there are adequate systems to prevent cheating and verify student identities. 

Burck Smith, chief executive of Straighter Line, which sells low-price online courses, contends that MOOCs are overhyped. He said universities that give their product away are likely to face challenges similar to those newspapers confronted when they launched open-access Web sites.
                      “Free content has never really been a successful business model,” Smith said.


For extra info see:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Massive_open_online_course
http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/education/elite-education-for-the-masses/2012/11/03/c2ac8144-121b-11e2-ba83-a7a396e6b2a7_story.html
http://nation.time.com/2012/09/04/mooc-brigade-will-massive-open-online-courses-revolutionize-higher-education/
http://www.forbes.com/sites/sap/2012/09/06/massive-open-online-course-a-threat-or-opportunity-to-universities/
https://sites.google.com/site/themoocguide/
http://mobiliteitenopenonderwijs.wordpress.com/2012/09/22/weer-mooc/
http://opencontent.org/blog/archives/2436