SALMAN KHAN AND THE KHAN ACADEMY
CREATING A NEW PARADIGM FOR LEARNING
I will not rewrite his story here, as you can read it on Wikipedia..
While working for a hedge fund, he started tutoring his niece in math. She was having a difficult time of it and Sal could not understand why, as his interaction with her proved her to be highly intelligent. What he discovered is that she had a Learning Gap that needed to be closed. She was simply missing a piece of understanding of an earlier concept in the sequence of learning. Once he discovered that, he taught it to her and all of a sudden it all fell into place and his niece could excel in the subject (math).
However, they were in different states, so they had to communicate over the phone or on the internet. Eventually, he started doing short (10 minute) videos to teach concepts. Then other members of his family sought his tutorship. Eventually, he got the idea to just make the videos (so he wouldn't have to re-teach the lessons) and to post them on the very accessible YouTube. Then, others discovered and started using his videos to learn - and it mushroomed from there.
Eventually, he was able to gain sufficient funds, from such supporters as Bill Gates, to quit his job and do the video teaching full-time, with enough money to hire highly qualified individuals to help build the (free) Khan Academy. At over 2000 videos and more than 26 million hits a month, it is having an impact that is far beyond any he could have originally even conceived of.
And now they have implemented video learning and testing to be used in the schools, where the teachers do not have to be the lecturers anymore but can be the one who is able to help students progress at their own levels. The teacher gets feedback on how the students do on the tests online and is able to see how to help each student and where to plug the gap in learning. This is called "flipping the classroom", as much of the learning is actually done on the computer outside of class and the interaction and homework is done in the class. (Video, YouTube, Salman Khan on Liberating The Classroom For Creativity; if the link gets broken, enter the title into YouTube's search engine.)
