education – Creative Busyness

As you may have noticed I did not add the word Photo at the title of this post.

That’s because the uniqueness I’m going to talk about is something I don’t have any pictures of my own to showcase. I can add some created by taking captures of websites, but no real picture that I took on the subject.

Today I attended a talk by Sal Khan, how was here to talk about his Khan Academy.

I had seen Khan Academy apps for Windows Phone and Windows 8, but I never paid too much attention to it so I did not know exactly what it was and what was their motivations.

So today, I went to his talk to learn a bit about it.

And I loved the concept!

Their idea is to provide people with free educational videos, that people can watch over and over in order to master a subject on their own pace and rhythm The idea behind it was that on a classic classroom environment all students are supposed to learn an x amount of subject on a y period of time. But this may not be the greatest approach since each person learn on a different way and pace, so setting this strict timeline could make someone have a bad score or even fail a subject not because that person is not able to learn it, but because there was no time for that student to learn on his/her own pace. Then the student goes on to the next school year, with a weak foundation and tend to continue failing, because he/she still misses that fundamental idea that he/she did not had a change to master the year before… He makes an analogy with games. You only go to level 2, once you master level 1. And that’s how he thinks it should be with education: you only take Calc 2 once you master (not just pass with a C) Calc 1.

To me it totally makes sense!

And that’s a unique way of seeing and thinking about education, which I hope may become the standard in a few years, but that for now, it’s just a crazy, unique, but wonderful, idea!

And now, just because the subject was introduced as a Photo Challenge, here are some images: