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.

Online Option$

At the college level, a lot of commercial development is going on. Online Education Startup Udacity Raises $15 Million in Funding

This year alone, Coursera, which offers free online college classes raised $16 million in April; 2U, another online education technology company, raised $26 million that month; and Codecademy, an online, basic programming educator, raised $10 million in June. Furthermore, National Venture Capital Association statistics showed venture investing in education technology jumped to $463.1 million so far this year from $457.2 million for all of 2011.

Actually, 2U has raised a total of $96M, as a technology company helping universities go online. Meanwhile, free resources are growing. New NASA Online Science Resource Available for Educators and Students

Called NASA Wavelength, the site features hundreds of resources organized by topic and audience level from elementary to college, and out-of-school programs that span the extent of NASA science. Educators at all levels can locate educational resources through information on educational standards, subjects and keywords and other relevant details, such as learning time required to carry out a lesson or an activity....

Faster, please.
Or then again, maybe not.

Rocketship charters

This summer, the Washington Post asked Is a charter school chain called Rocketship ready to soar across America? - The Washington Post

After their first week at Rocketship, the children woke up early on Saturday morning to do their homework unprompted. The boys made progress. And Vivian had a math breakthrough. “She said, ‘Dad, I finally get it,’ ” Martinez said. “I asked how did your teacher show you?’ She said it wasn’t the teacher. It was the penguin.”
An animated penguin is featured in the math software used by Rocketship.
Computers cannot replace good teachers, Danner said. But rote tasks — math drills, for example — can be offloaded to computers, freeing teachers to focus on more creative work, he said.
Computers cut roughly $500,000 annually from Rocketship’s labor costs for each school, which has an average enrollment of about 500. The savings means Rocketship can finance its own new school buildings — a luxury in the charter world, where facilities pose the greatest obstacle.

In fact what Rocketship brings to the table that's new may be mainly financial. Back in February, Larry Cuban had asked and answered: Are Rocketship Schools the Future? Part 3 | Larry Cuban on School Reform and Classroom Practice

The answer is maybe. But not for all schools.
Like KIPP, Aspire, YES Prep Schools, Uncommon Schools and other charters including regular schools that have aimed at enrolling low-income minority children and youth...–hybrids like Rocketship are the latest generation of the “effective schools” movement that began in the late 1970s. Aimed at urban failing schools, Ron Edmonds’ work on whole-school reform energized districts across the country as they replicated his five features (strong principal leadership, climate of high expectations for students, focus on basic academic skills, etc.) that seemingly accounted for high-achieving slum schools. ....
What the standards,testing, and accountability movement has done for the past two decades is create different models of “effective schools” to rescue students from toxic urban schools. Rocketship schools founded just before the recent economic recession offers a less expensive hybrid model...

It's certainly plausible that parts of that may carry over to schools that really aren't failing and are very far from urban...but there's no special reason to think that the solutions of "toxic urban schools" will work for us. Maybe we're already doing what they do, just not as cheaply. On the other hand, I'm not knocking cheap. Cheap is good, cheap frees up resources for other things, cheap is a quantity having a quality all its own. (Yes, quantity having a quality all its own is supposedly Stalin.) I find it very plausible that each of us, whether six or sixty, of whatever income and linguistic background, can have a collection of things to be learned by computer games, and that's where Rocketship comes in; and a collection of things to be learned in self-assembling study groups (mostly of people in your own time zone, but video between Greece and the US does work), and a collection of things to be learned with the individual assistance of actual teachers, with teachers preferably being certified by students rather than by officials... It might work.
Or then again, maybe not.

Higher EdX gets Bigger...Texas Size

It's higher education, but the more MOOC (massive online etc) technology grows at the upper level, the more available it will be at all levels. Anyway, Texas is in; U. of Texas Plans to Join edX | Inside Higher Ed

The University of Texas is planning today to officially join edX, which offers massive open online courses or MOOCs. Because the Texas announcement involves an entire system, it represents a major expansion of edX, which was founded by two universities (Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology) and was later joined by one other (the University of California at Berkeley). Coursera, another major MOOC provider, has been adding universities at a rapid pace. The Texas system plans to focus on general education and introductory-level courses for its MOOC offerings. Bloomberg reported that the University of Texas is paying $5 million to join edX.

So we link to EdX and incidentally to Coursera and we say: Faster please, this is good.
Or then again, maybe not.

Online Resources from/for Teachers

Most of my notes are about resources coming from outside the current educational system, but this morning I noticed Teachers Make Money Selling Materials Online - ABC News

Teachers like Nannini are making extra money providing materials to their cash-strapped and time-limited colleagues on curriculum sharing sites like teacherspayteachers.com, providing an alternative to more traditional — and generally more expensive — school supply stores. Many districts, teachers and parents say these sites are saving teachers time and money, and giving educators a quick way to make extra income.

They're talking about TeachersPayTeachers.com - An Open Marketplace for Original Lesson Plans and Other Teaching Resources and about Share My Lesson - Free K-12 Resources By Teachers, For Teachers, and about the more institutional approach of Membership, policy, and professional development for educators - ASCD, with its ASCD InService Blog.

As a total outsider, I feel some hope that teacher developments can grow to meet the Khan Academy and its ilk somewhere in the middle, but wonder if our educational system (The System™) actually has the flexibility to allow that growth; I remember the hope of Papert's MindStorms, long ago, and then his later book, The Children's Machine: Rethinking School In The Age Of The Computer. I remember my eldest and his high-school friends in our kitchen, talking excitedly about the "Children's Machine" and about how School™ had absorbed the promise of Logo in spite of all the good teachers, just because of the kind of system it was. It's likely that change will have to be pushed from outside.

Or then again, maybe not. Hope springs eternal, and all that.

Open Textbooks

If I were in charge, there'd be a lot of this going on... Teachers Write an Open Textbook In a Weekend Hackathon

"A group of Finnish mathematics researchers, teachers and students write an upper secondary mathematics textbook in a three-day booksprint. The event started on Friday 28th September at 9:00 (GMT+3) and the book will be (hopefully) ready on Sunday evening. The book is written in Finnish. The result — LaTeX source code and the PDF — is published with open CC-BY-license. As far as the authors know, this is the first time a course textbook is written in three-day hackathon. The hackathon approach has been used earlier mainly for coding open source software and writing manuals for open source software. The progress can be followed by visiting the repository at GitHub or the project Facebook page."

Free information-resources for education ought to be something everybody could get behind...
Or then again, maybe not.