Last week, I became completely intoxicated with the online videos of Vi Hart, a self-described mathematician. Her nerdy, entertaining videos about mathematics evoke the power of free-choice learning while poking mild fun at the drudgery of how mathematics is often taught in college. She’s amazing and funny and pushes visitors to get excited about higher mathematics and the big ideas behind it.
She would be the best research center educator ever. But Vi fails in a technology museum. She was a free agent for a long time, until the beginning of 2012, when she became a member of the teaching personnel of Khan Academy. Khan Academy, the free, nonprofit online source for educational instructional videos, is a powerhouse in the online learning space. It is multilingual videos reach 200 million audiences since it launched in 2006 almost. Its funding has skyrocketed as major foundations and technology companies have made multi-million dollar grants and investments in its growth.
Founder Salman Khan began by posting his own videos with a math and science to concentrate, and in the last 12 months, he has added new “faculty” including Vi Hart as well as Drs. Beth Harris and Steven Zucker, who are popular in museums for his or her excellent Smarthistory website and podcasts.
Khan Academy is interesting alone as an online learning space. However the participation of partners like Vi, Beth, and Steven places it in a new category for me personally. Salman Khan’s videos give people’s usage of good instructional content on standard (and frequently confusing or poorly taught) educational topics. How to solve a quadratic formula. How exactly to titrate acidity.
Test prep for the SAT. That is all fine, but it exists very much in the college and K12 framework. Vi Hart’s videos, on the other hand, are idiosyncratic, explorative, and a little subversive. Beth Harris and Steven Zucker’s content about art history are interpersonal and dialogue-based in format. These teachers aren’t teaching you the equivalent of a high college course in mathematics or art history. It’s no coincidence that Beth Harris’ last job was as Director of Digital Learning at MoMA.
Does this mean Khan Academy be competitive with museums? Maybe. More importantly, it means that people should be looking to their model to push ourselves in how we think about delivering the most participating, powerful content possible. We often talk about museums as leaders in providing substantive, essential alternatives to formal schooling.
- Save or share it on cultural media
- Naming the best Linux Distribution is difficult because they are designed for different
- Click on ACTIVATE on another screen
- Big Bill Haywood, with Frank Bohn
But museums are seldom seen as going after this promise in the innovative, aggressive, and publicized way that Khan Academy is highly. I asked Beth Harris and Steven Zucker about their experience working at Khan Academy after years in academia and museums. WHILE I asked them what’s in it for Smart history to be a part of Khan Academy, they outlined the extent to which Khan Academy symbolizes a revolution in education and high-quality online learning encounters.
-our mission is “a world-class education, for anybody, anywhere”-not to mention brilliant programmers and staff. That is an epic moment in the history of education, who wouldn’t desire to be a parted from it? We are finally leaving behind the 18th hundred years model of education where sets of students are expected to learn at a typical pace.
Every day we find out about techniques teaching, accreditation, and learning are being unbundled. New institutions and new, more personal settings of learning and teaching are being looked into. And we will soon know a lot more about learning, because of analytics, than we in the past have. Khan Academy is much greater than a huge library of high-quality videos, there are learning analytics, self-paced exercises, and most importantly perhaps, a committed learning community-even for art history! We’ve a great community of learners that ask and answer questions and our videos are being translated by volunteers all around the globe.
We are reminded of how much fun learning can be. There is a huge hunger for knowledge about art that is not being met. Both of us come from higher education and it’s always appeared impressive to us how little museums work together to support the analysis of art. Students throughout the global world want to comprehend the history of the artwork, not the annals of a specific collection always. We also wish that museums and universities worked more closely not only for research together, but also for learning. Learning is increasingly global and fluid and the fact that cross-institutional initiatives like the Google Art Project and Europeans are rare, factors to how much work still must be done.