LE02- The Khan Academy

Oh! That’s another mail from Dr. Mandi, now what is the issue! But out of all wild nightmares going thru my mind, this assignment would be a true test of inquisitiveness of a person. The Khan’s Academy. I came to know about this academy when I was preparing for my GD PI for MBA interviews. This one is going to be a good experience, a real innovative one.

The education is the most unexplored sector in Indian Society; this is the sector where real innovators have to bang their head to strive something. The system that needs to be explored should be such that it should be in everyone’s reach. No one should feel secluded in that system.

Being in a management college right now, I always feel that there is a need that is required to be imbibed in the batch i.e. students from all sections of the society should be given an opportunity. But how? This is the real issue needed to be considered by the real innovators. If the core Indians are not getting what is required to be in a top notch b-school then the entire purpose gets defeated.

Ever wondered why there are so many engineers in the top b-schools? See the way an engineer is trained, or at least tested, ingrains to some extent what I like to call "Angular Thinking" within the student, whether he knows it or not. But what about those who are never trained this way? Or worse still, those who pass out of our school system.
Please bear with me a little bit before I return to talking about Khan Academy.

The New System of Education:

The Khan Way

I could make out the fact that the only education system that can attract our dear Dr.Mandi could not be anything less than the system imbibed by “The Khan Academy. Started  by a born educator Mr. Salmaan Khan (Not talking about the bollywood hunk!!),in the year 2006 The Khan Academy is a non- profit education organization. Mr. Salmaan Khan is a graduate of the prestigious MIT, born as a Bangladeshi and Haward Business School. Today his video tutorial library has more than 3500 video lessons encompassing lessons ranging from basic arithmetic to hard core complex functions and calculus, from biology to economics, from astrology to physics and what not. Basically you find it all. Today this visionary educator is teaching more than 10 crore students globally that to freeof cost.

 A few pages from the History:

The Khan Academy started with Khan remotely tutoring one of his cousins interactively using Yahoo Doodle images. Based on feedback from his cousin, additional cousins began to take advantage of the interactive, remote tutoring. In order to make better use of his and their time, Khan transitioned to making YouTube video tutorials.

Confused!!! Questions like how this is even remotely possible? How video tutorials can takes the place of a real teacher? Queries like you haunting your mind? Find every query replied in this simple video. This is simple answer of a genius.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nTFEUsudhfs

 Here is a small demonstration of the genius brain in pictorial form:

 A Snapshot of the website. http://www.khanacademy.org/

                                      An Innovative Dimension to online teaching!

Our schooling system never treates a student to the amazing world of logic. Millions of children don't know that something like this exists. I was one of them until recently. But when I came in contact with it, it was amazing!! I was amazed to discover the extent to which logic decides every moment we spend the way we spend it. 

Now let's talk about the IITs. The institutions really grill the student. It's so tiring and stressful that students go into depression if they don't get a seat. But who's to blame? I say it's our schooling system. The IITs essentially test the student on the application of concepts. I never thought that I was applying when I was in my school. It's what Mr. Salman Khan, founder of the Khan Academy, says - our teaching system at present follows "one size fits all" rule.
This system needs to change, and Khan Academy has done wonderful job in at least moving in that direction.

The Concept of Theory Y: Used Here!

In the video shared above, you can clearly hear him speak, that students are internally willing to learn new things. They have inquisitiveness to learn new fundamentals everyday. But this is also a bitter reality that the way education is presented in front of students is a dismal story. So here is a great way, he presented the education in such a lucid manner that it acted as a kick for already motivated students.

How the students gain recognition:

The fact is also mentioned in the video by Mr. Educator that they use the concepts like:

1.     Hall of fame wall.

2.     Appreciation wall.

3.     Student of the month.

This is further aid to the motivation of students.

Conceptualization concept:

Conceptualization concept states that how we can integrate small parts and creates something much bigger. Here is the biggest example that I have come across in recent time, which elaborate this concept further.

Khan has stated a vision of turning the academy into a charter school:

This could be the DNA for a physical school where students spend 20 percent of their day watching videos and doing self-paced exercises and the rest of the day building robots or painting pictures or composing music or whatever.

A November 2011 grant of $5 million from Ireland-based The O'Sullivan Foundation, founded by Avego MD and cloud computing pioneer Sean O'Sullivan, will be directed to three initiatives:

1.    Expanding the teaching faculty

2.    Extending content through crowd-sourced contributions following a Wikipedia-style model

3.    Developing curricula to help users blend the content with physical teaching through STEM learning

Recent teaching appointees as a result of the grant include Dr. Steven Zucker, formerly of Pratt Institute and Dr. Beth Harris, from the Museum of Modern Art in New York, to produce art and history content. YouTube video creators Vi Hart and Brit Cruise have also joined the teaching faculty.

A series of summer school camps are planned to start in Northern California from June 2012 to test curricula for real-world schools.

                                                                 The variety of videos available.
Conclusion:

The conclusion part would be this that in case you wishes to actually do something that as a visionary educator like Mr. Salmaan Khan, then make sure that you follow the few principles mentioned below:

1.     BOUNDED RATIONALITY: As a manger one must always make sure that no crude data in full form will ever be available, you must have a visionary leader and a forecaster to make sure that with limited information one must be able to make sound decisions.

2.     Management by objectives: In organization every bit of planning is done by keeping by keeping objectives in mind. Vision must be Impossible, Crisp, Rosy, kick for anyone who reads it.

3.     Believe in Hawthorne Effect: A term referring to the tendency of some people to work harder and perform better when they are participants in an experiment. Individuals may change their behaviour due to the attention they are receiving from researchers rather than because of any manipulation of independent variables.