21st Century Resources: Khan Academy

When we think about the options available to a 21st century school, the Khan Academy has to be considered. It may continue to grow or it may be replaced with something better in a few years; we don't know. We do know, as I've noted before, that it offers a model of education which has considerable research support; a model of education where we begin with supplemental and review  material and student-tracking tools for ordinary classes, but in which there is ultimately no requirement for any such thing as "class size", no requirement for any such thing as a "grade level". Many schools are making decisions such as "we can't offer class X, there aren't enough students who want it" (on the grounds suggested by the Javascript widget at the bottom of this page), and that kind of decision can become obsolete. One way or another (with Khan's vision or somebody else's improvement) it will become obsolete for those schools which want it to.

It isn't obsolete yet, but things are changing fast; on August 30th, the Academy announced that "We just launched the biggest change in the history of the Khan Academy. It’s a new learning experience that will figure out where you have gaps and help you fill them. Check it out:..." What they mean is that the software now tracks not only the specific lessons you've mastered but the relationships between lessons, so that it can say what lessons you definitely don't need (because you have the skills) and what lessons you're just ready for. A limited kind of academic counselling, but a useful one...and you don't have to get an appointment with a counsellor.

Every week or so I get emails mentioning new lessons, from Finding factors and multiples on to Late Classical: Lysippos, Apoxyomenos (Scraper), c. 330 B.C.E. (Roman copy) | Ancient Greece , on to Overview of Chinese History 1911 - 1949 and on to Fun with a Spider Bot. People thinking about educational options and costs and decisions, though, may prefer to look at teacher's perspective videos. Here are three:

First, from a fairly abstract perspective, about the tools that they make available: How I use Khan Academy data - An educator's perspective .

Teachers' views of kids, reported at Student ownership of learning in my classroom.

More concretely, here's a case study of a math classroom: Shelby Harris' classroom (Idaho, 2013) | Khan Academy in K-12 classrooms

Generalities are available at many places, e.g. Five Lessons from Salman Khan on the Future of Education | Psychology Today:

Salman Khan needs no introduction.  He was recently on the cover of FORBES and was named one of TIME magazine’s 100 most influential people.  And he just published a book—The One World Schoolhouse—which is already a bestseller.
I recently interviewed Sal to get his thoughts on the future of education.....

Still, if you have 12 minutes handy, you might prefer to watch  Sal Khan on Digital and Physical Learning | Our vision , explaining the current "supplemental" use of Academy videos, and the transitional "flipped classroom" model, and the on-beyond-classrooms self-paced instruction he expects beyond that. And if you have 16 minutes in addition, you might try his Year 2060: Education Predictions | Our vision where he begins with "In ten years, this [traditional lecture-based] classroom model is going to completely go away..." (update: and 11 minutes in, says "I think the role of the teacher is going to go up dramatically.")

  I'm not sure I believe that; it might be that replacement will be blocked by institutional resistance, which is always a strong factor. But it certainly can happen, and there's a good deal of evidence (anecdotal and data) suggesting that the replacement will be a good thing.