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M.I.T. Expands Its Free Online Courses

#21 User is offline   y66 

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Posted 2012-May-07, 21:14

Khan Academy: The future of education?

Edit: Somebody should get this guy hooked on bridge.
If you lose all hope, you can always find it again -- Richard Ford in The Sportswriter
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#22 User is offline   kenberg 

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Posted 2012-May-08, 07:29

Pam (i.e. Onoway) had given a link to his academy earlier. It seems to be growing.

As I have mentioned, I am sort of retired but with exceptions. This spring a colleague developed long term medical issues and I took over his class, a large lecture (180 students) in Calculus II. I would really find it difficult to explain why it would not be at least as worthwhile for the student to sit at home with a cup of coffee, ok maybe a glass of beer, and watch Khan on his computer screen. Yes, I interact with students, I ask questions, I answer questions, I encourage them to focus oncertain key points, and sometimes we just interact with some good humor. I think human interaction is not yet passe. Still, there are 180 students. A colleague has a statistics lecture class with almost 300 students. It is his view, I think only half jokingly, that the class is scheduled on the assumption that on any given day enough students will skip class so the students who come that day can sit far enough toward the front so that they can see the board.

We humans still have a role to play. There is an immense amount of information out there, and one of the perhaps under-appreciated things that we do is to select the important items and tell students "Think heavily about these items, these are the important parts". Some types of correction are best done face to face. One student who plans to be a math major comes by to see me at times. I am working on him to think a little before speaking. It is human nature that first formulations of an idea are often imprecise, but if we are to get anywhere with a thought then the formulation often needs sharpening, and often this gets done best with the teacher forcing (encouraging strongly?) the student to do this reformulating.

But clearly Khan not only agrees with this need for human interaction, he intends his videos partly as an enabler of this interaction by freeing up time.

I wish him the very best with this project. Apparently it is going very well.
Ken
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#23 User is offline   y66 

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Posted 2012-May-08, 20:27

Thanks for mentioning Pam's thread. Don't know I missed that.
If you lose all hope, you can always find it again -- Richard Ford in The Sportswriter
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