Can Technology Humanize Teaching?

This TED Talk by the founder of the Khan Academy blew my mind for two reasons. It has given me an incredible online resource for helping my daughter with math homework. (I've been woefully inadequate  since 5th grade when the curriculum surpassed me.)  But even more amazing is that, with all the educational experts in America, it's taken a hedge fund guy to invent a new educational paradigm. Using YouTube, no less!

Salman Khan at TED

Here's the story in a nutshell. Salman Khan, living in Boston started tutoring his cousins living in New Orleans, remotely. As a supplement, he started posting video tutorials on YouTube as something they could refer back to. To his chagrin, his cousins told him that they preferred him on YouTube than in person. Kahn quickly understood the real lesson in this: they could learn at their own pace (stop, pause or fast forward) and didn't have someone breathing down their neck asking: "Do you get it?" all the time.


Since the video tutorials were posted publicly, students started finding them and then teachers too. Khan had never imagined that the tutorials would find their way into the classroom but the real insight is how the teachers were using them. "We use the lectures to flip the classroom. You've given the lectures, so now what we do is assign the lectures for homework. And what used to be homework,  we now have the students doing in the classroom."

Khan believes that technology - often accused of dehumanizing us - is actually humanizing the classroom. Instead of one size fits all lectures where kids have to sit still and listen, they can now learn at their own pace at home and have more teacher interaction at school. And, by monitoring their student's online progress, teachers know exactly the help each individual kid needs.

As he's grown his Academy to topics beyond math, Kahn has uncovered a whole host of other educational insights in the areas of mastery, motivation and measurement. His math lessons are now being tested in a school district in Los Altos but the global implications are staggering.

So, check out the video at this link while I quickly brush up on integer sums.
TED: Let's Use Video to Reinvent Education