Design Experiment 3: Khan Academy

What I decided to do with Week Three's experiment, is that I would evaluate a new program, Khan Academy, and then compare it with the other applications I have used in the prior weeks. (Those two others being Google Classroom and Edmodo.)

I can see why Khan Academy was chosen for the "flipped classroom" experiment. This website has one of the most expansive lists of tutorials I have ever seen. The only other two websites I can think of that would rival it in volume might be Lynda.com, or YouTube. The primary subjects that Khan Academy excels at are math, science, computing, history, and economics. In addition, though, it also has several videos on test preparation, and materials on college enrollment, job searching, and personal finance. One of the great features about Khan Academy is that the format is extremely interactive. For instance, you might watch one video, and then subsequently work on an exercise, followed by another video, etc. All of this leading to a final mini-project at the end of the project that sums up the entire tutorial in a nutshell.

Though it seems mostly to be a site devoted to individual instruction, it also serves as a hub that teachers can use to administer their learning programs. There's no need to set up a separate account for the teaching side, either. I was able to create a 2nd grade class with three students: Bell, Biv, and Devoe.

Then, I called the class "Times Tables", because I distinctly remember learning my multiplication tables at that time in my life. At this point, you can access the teacher's dashboard, where you can keep track of each student's progress, make recommendations for the student, see which tutorials they have made it through, and which badges they have earned. As I had spoken about earlier, Khan Academy works best in a flipped classroom format, because it specializes in tutorial and lecture videos.

The Academy doesn't work as well in the Content Management System format, though, in my opinion, because most of the content is created by the website, not the teacher. If you hold it up to Google Classroom and Edmodo, this would give you an idea of the some of their differences:

I think the biggest achievement Khan Academy can boast is the format of "blended learning". In this type of learning style (or pedagogy) the student learns partly at home, partly in class, and then the two halves are blended into a completed whole. The technology that is introduced in this sort of learning system is vital to the blended learning, because it is used by the teacher to track the student's progress. An example of blended learning in action? Let's assume our 2nd grade math instructor has the students access their Khan Academy account and go through the 8 steps of the Multiplication Intro on their own. This starts with three videos, a short reading excerpt, and then four practice exercises. The following day, the teacher would go over the videos and reading excerpt with the students, asking the students if everything was clear, and if not, demonstrating the definition of multiplication on the board with examples. The blended / flipped lesson could be further accentuated with the students working on multiplication exercises in small groups. Some of the biggest benefits for the teacher using Khan Academy for this kind of lesson are: the ability to accentuate the existing lesson with pre-developed content & exercises, and the ability to track students' progress online and provide support through the web, as needed.

REFERENCES

TeachOnline.CA. (2012, Nov. 13) A New Pedagogy is Emerging... Retrieved from https://teachonline.ca/tools-trends/how-teach-online-student-success/new-pedagogy-emerging-and-online-learning-key-contributing-factor