Salmaan Khan from khanacademy.org takes part in Stanford's panel focusing on education reform. I really admire his initiatives and vision for quality education based on data where all students can have a solid foundation so that they can focus on being creative and solving problems. Once you continue with the "hole" in your foundation, it drags on for the rest of your life and really prevents you for being your very possible best. Technology does not judge, which is why it creates the safe learning environment where true differentiation can take place.
"No one perhaps has crossed international borders the way Khan's academy has. He called for a focus on nontraditional learning measured by achievement, not "seat time" in a classroom.
"Twenty-first century jobs are all about creativity. Can you start with a blank slate and create something that never existed?" he challenged the audience.
He called for education to "decouple the credential from the learning experience," and validate student learning at whatever age it occurs, and whether it comes from a parent or a university.
Khan noted that a key to his academy's success was that the style of learning was "old school lectures – what Aristotle did with Alexander the Great."
He began by coaching his cousins, so the approach to teaching "wasn't coming from a publishing house or committee."
Because he uses YouTube videos, students are free to learn at their own pace. Khan recalled one student who watched a video 30 times. "There's no tutor you could hire that wouldn't be judgmental," he said, but such are the advantages of learning via technology."
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