For the past month, I have been a lurker in the Khan Academy Google Group. I've been reflecting on the constant flow of comments submitted by "users" of the Khan videos who include a wide mix of people but often are teachers and students. I am inspired but also saddened by the comments from students who share empowering stories of how the videos have enabled them to experience their capabilities to learn. And this experience is the catalyst that sparked my most recent GETInsight blog* post. I hope you enjoy it and feel inspired to leave a comment on the post or in the VoiceThread.
*The GetInsight blog is an integrated resource of GETideas.org, a community for education leaders. I am a paid consultant for GETideas and write a monthly post about a related topic. Everyone is welcome to participate in the conversation and I hope you'll join us!
The Khan Academy has received extensive and impressive press this past year. And recently, they've joined forces with Smarthistory -- signalling an exciting turn in open content and, more importantly, signalling a major shift in how we teach our students.
The "brainchild" of Salman Khan, the Khan Academy is fundamentally a rich repository of effectively designed video lectures anchored in visually compelling annotative descriptions. It's really good stuff -- and it's not just for math students/teacher. With extensive funding from Google and Gates, the Khan Academy has branched out into new disciplines including biology and history.
The compelling element of The Khan Academy is that its popularity is encouraging a rethinking of how educators spend class time with students. If you're a regular reader of my blog, you know that I'm a supporter and practitioner of the flipped classroom model. But I'm also an art historian -- and that's really what this post is about.
About four years ago, I made a fortuitous connection with Beth Harris who, at the time, was teaching art history at the Fashion Institute of Technology, SUNY. Beth shared a blog post about a little known tool named VoiceThread -- which knocked me out of my seat. It was Beth's willingness to experiment and share that inspired me to try VoiceThread and led to a spiraling of innovation and sharing in my own teaching practices. I reached out to Beth to say thank you and she responded by setting up a VoiceThread and inviting me to collaborate with her -- and then with her college Steven Zucker. Asynchronously, we conversed in a VoiceThread about Jan van Eyck's Arnolfini Portrait of 1434. It was amazing and opened my eyes to so many things -- but most compelling was the potential of technology to break open the medieval traditions of the art history lecture, a rethinking of the role of an "instructor."
Beth and Steven continued to follow this thread of intellectual curiosity and went on to create Smarthistory, a website based upon building a content resource for art history comprised of recording of unscripted conversations about works of art. It's different ... and it's great. Smarthistory describes itself as a "multimedia web-book about art and art history." On the one hand, it is explicitly challenging the traditional 40-pound, $100 art history "learning" resource. But it's so much more than that. Listening to a Smarthistory dialogue does not explicitly tell you what you will learn. Rather, it requires you to think critically about what you're hearing and synthesize and evaluate the content to form knowledge. Smarthistory fosters the skills we all need to effectively navigate the mangled web of content we are entrenched in every day.
Here's a sample:
"Modeling conversations" is what educators need to be doing more of today. And it's precisely that that I think is so fabulous about open content and the flipped classroom model. When we "unlearn" how to lecture, we are forced to learn how to model conversations with and between our students. This is a quote by David Weinberger shared on the Smarthistory blog:
“Educators therefore face a different set of challenges. Very different. Their authority is in question since we’ve learned that we can learn more from talking with others than by listening to any single expert. But, more important, if knowledge emerges from conversations, then just about all our educational focus ought to be on learning how to be good conversationalists: how to listen, how to kindle a conversation, how to evaluate claims, how to speak in a voice worth hearing… and, most of all, how to share a world in which knowledge is plural, for that’s what conversation and knowledge is about.”
Congratulations to Beth Harris and her "smart" team. Thank you for being bold, taking risks, and leading the way to new learning paradigms. Can't wait to see what the future holds!
As the educational landscape around us continues to transform, the usefulness of YouTube continues to impress. Today I read about a Harvard and MIT graduate, Salman Khan, who has focused his passion and talent for math tutoring into creating 8-minute video math lessons -- ranging from adding decimals to calculus, trigonometry and physics -- hosted on YouTube. Presented officially by the Khan Academy, the videos are intriguing for educators for many reasons.
First, college students around the nation are using them. As university students leave their classrooms bleary eyed they are able to dig into the treasure chest of math videos to fine tune their understanding of specific mathematical concepts. Further, the videos can be played over and over again without the fear of feeling "stupid" in a class of judgmental peers. Are these videos really being viewed? Well, their basic trig video, posted about a year ago, currently has over 72,000 views.
What's the motivation for the Khan Academy? Well, according to their YouTube channel their missing is simple. They're a "not-for-profit organization with the mission of giving access to knowledge to anyone, anywhere."
This topic reminds me of the student's comment I posted yesterday in which one of my online student critically scrutinized whether linear, lecture-based content should require students to attend face-to-face classes. Can't lectures all be deployed through podcasts or streaming video presentations? Hmmm. What I sense here is a generational shift in how face-to-face time is valued. Younger students have regular, immediate and frequently mobile access to high-quality content -- you name it, it's there. When Millennials attend class they want more then what a video can give them. They want interactivity. They want passion. They want a show. If they don't get more, the experience isn't going to hold their attention. It isn't going to engage them. And we know what happens when a Millennial isn't engaged ... later!
This is really an exciting moment in teaching and learning. We, as educators, now have a phenomenally effective way to channel our regular, consistent content that is typically delivered through lectures and deliver it through web-based technologies. What this does for a face-to-face class is free up time with students for the things that education is truly about -- debate, reflection, discussion, active inquiry, problem solving. Instructional technologies hold the key to unlock the pressures of "getting through content" and return the classroom time to teaching students how to think, how to innovate, how to create, how to be effective 21st century contributors.
Of course, in order for this significant change to occur, our institutions need to support faculty with training, strong IT support, accessibility needs (video captioning) and provide increased computer lab access for students who may not have internet access at home.
As for me, I know I would have used a Khan Academy video or two if I could have.
