Sal Khan's Academy
My friend Diana Rhoten wrote this about Waiting For Superman:
I don’t believe the solutions to today’s education crisis are going to come in the form of traditional policies alone. I believe we need to reframe the problem and the conversation, from one about re-forming schooling to one about re-thinking education and re-imagining learning.
This is a massive, radical design challenge.
The title of her post is We are not Waiting for Superman, We are Empowering Superheroes.
Certainly one of the Superheroes of Diana's "massive, radical design challenge" is Sal Khan. For those of you who are not familiar with the Khan Academy, please go visit it. It is the ugliest website this side of Craigslist, but don't get hung up with that. Behind an ugly front end lies something incredible.
Sal has pretty much single handedly created over 1800 videos on all sorts of subjects (but with a heavy bent on math and science). At this very moment there are >2500 people learning at the Khan Academy. The chartbeat for the Khan Academy is here.
This is a worldwide classroom. The >2500 people learning at Khan Academy right now live here:
I am not suggesting that Sal Khan's Academy is "the solution" to education problem. But it is an awesome hack and one that I am certain will turn into a hugely valuable web service in time. It is entirely possible that Khan's Academy will be a kind of Wikipedia for education. In a way it already is.
