Khan Academy

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Khan Academy
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A free, world-class education for anyone, anywhere.
Free, free education
languages English , translations in five languages, including German
operator Foundation in the form of a 501 (c) (3) organization
editorial staff Salman Khan
Registration optional
On-line October 2016
https://www.khanacademy.org/
Salman Khan

The Khan Academy is a non-commercial site with teaching materials. It contains over 4000 educational videos from the fields of math, science , history and economics and has an extensive channel on YouTube . The website was founded by Salman Khan , an American with parents from India and Bangladesh. The videos are licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0. The Khan Academy has been covered by numerous media outlets in the United States . Even Bill Gates spoke positively about the Khan Academy. The Khan Academy received the prize of 10 100 -Project of Google , which is worth two million US dollars. In 2019, Khan and his Academy were awarded the Princess of Asturias Prize .

history

Salman "Sal" Khan, the founder of the organization, was born in Metairie , a suburb of New Orleans . He holds three degrees from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology ( Bachelor of Science in Mathematics and Electrical Engineering and a Masters in Computer Science) and an MBA from Harvard Business School .

In late 2004, Khan began tutoring his cousin Nadia in math using Yahoo's Doodle Notepad . When other relatives and friends asked him for similar tutoring, he decided to put the tutorials on YouTube . Due to the popularity of his videos and testimonials from students who learned with his videos, he announced in 2009 his job as a hedge fund - Analyst at Connective Capital Management and focused fully on the tutorials that since then under the name of Khan Academy are published.

financing

The project is financed by donations . The Khan Academy is a 501 (c) organization / non-profit organization , which is strongly supported by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and Google . Several people donated money; Ann and John Doerr donated $ 100,000 ; total donation revenue is approximately $ 150,000. In 2010, Google announced that it would be supporting the Khan Academy with two million US dollars as part of their 10 100 project (see also Googol ). This money will be used to create more courses and to translate the core tutorials into the world's most widely spoken languages.

Technical format

A sample video from the Khan Academy Germany

For his first video tutorials on YouTube, Khan used a graphics tablet from Wacom in connection with the free drawing program SmoothDraw 3 to make drawings. The capture is done using the Camtasia Studio screen capture software .

All videos available on the YouTube channel can also be found on the Khan Academy's own website. This website provides a variety of tools for public school teachers, hands-on exercises, and the ability to monitor learning progress. In order to save your own learning progress, you can create your own user account or alternatively connect it to a Google or Facebook account.

Khan avoided a format in which one person stands at a blackboard. "I think it is more encouraging and more productive if you watch someone solve a problem while they are thinking out loud." Offline versions of his videos have been distributed through non-profit organizations in rural areas of Asia, Latin America and Africa.

The website also offers an exercise system that generates tasks for students based on their level of knowledge and previous performance.

Service and Vision

The main components of the Khan Academy are:

  • a collection of videos on various topics (currently there are more than 3300 videos)
  • software with exercises that go with the videos. The tasks are generated automatically. If a student correctly answers 10 tasks one after the other, he will proceed to the next level of difficulty. When working on the exercises, data is collected. B. Enable a teacher to see which students are having problems with what type of tasks. (There are currently 314 exercises)
  • a mentoring process called peer-to-peer tutoring , in which weaker students receive individual support.

Not-for-profit organizations that are partners of the Academy publicize the content outside of YouTube. World Possible creates e.g. B. Snapshots of the content to distribute in rural, developing regions with limited or no internet access.

In March 2012 the Academy released an iPad app that can be used to access more than 2,700 free instructional videos. Since January 2015 this also includes all exercises.

German

The translation of the videos and exercises into German is being carried out by some committed volunteers from the KA German Community. They founded a non-profit sponsoring association in September 2015 to promote the translations. At the beginning of November 2015, more than 600 videos, 500 subtitles and around 650 exercises were completely translated into German. For an official version of the Khan Academy, which is planned for summer 2016, some videos, subtitles and exercises are still missing.

criticism

Some critics complain that the position of the teacher is impaired if the learners obtain their knowledge via learning video and the teacher only takes on a complementary role. In addition, the system of learning videos induces the students to adopt a passive attitude. Another point of criticism is the fact that the content disseminated by the Khan Academy is subject to the sole control of Salman Khan, which is less problematic for mathematical or scientific topics, but all the more problematic for potentially controversial interpretations of history, for example.

Another criticism is based on research results, since scientifically correct teaching videos often even solidify existing misconceptions, as they are often perceived with less attention by the learners than those that provide contradicting or irritating information and thus lead the viewer to a critical examination of what is presented and encourage your own misconceptions.

An example of tutorial videos that leave solid basic math and enter the realm of hypotheses is a series on Black and Scholes' formula and the importance of implied volatility . The assumptions made by Black and Scholes (normally distributed returns and stationary volatility), which are very restrictive in reality, are ignored.

literature

Web links

Commons : Khan Academy  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ^ About Khan Academy. In: Khan Academy. Retrieved August 15, 2013 .
  2. ^ Khan Academy . Khan Academy. Retrieved June 1, 2012.
  3. ↑ The team . Khan Academy. 2010. Retrieved March 12, 2012.
  4. ↑ James Temple: Salman Khan, math master of the Internet , sfgate.com. December 14, 2009. Retrieved March 12, 2012. 
  5. ↑ $ 10 million for Project 10 ^ 100 winners . The Official Google Blog. September 24, 2010. Retrieved March 12, 2012.
  6. ^ Salman Khan: Khan Academy FAQ; How Did You Get Started? . Retrieved March 12, 2012.
  7. ↑ Need a tutor? YouTube videos await , USA Today . December 12, 2008. Retrieved March 12, 2012. 
  8. ↑ a b Khan Academy. Retrieved August 5, 2017 .
  9. ↑ Partners . Worldpossible.org. Retrieved March 12, 2012.
  10. ↑ Free instructional videos: Khan Academy iPad app published ( memento of March 14, 2012 in the Internet Archive ), t3n, accessed on March 12, 2012.
  11. ↑ Khan Academy exercises now also on the iPad! , KADeutsch, accessed January 24, 2015.
  12. ↑ Translation status , KADeutsch, accessed on November 5, 2015.
  13. ↑ Christoph Gurk: Thumbs up for Khan. In: The time . September 1, 2011, accessed March 30, 2012.
  14. ↑ Khan Academy and the Effectiveness of Science Videos YouTube video from the science blog Veritasium, March 17, 2011, accessed April 1, 2012.
  15. ↑ B&S introductory YouTube videos , accessed May 28, 2015.