The Khan Academy: A Game Changer?

According to its web site, The Khan Academy "is a not-for-profit organization with the mission of providing a high quality education to anyone, anywhere." The driving force behind this academy is Salman (Sal) Khan (see clip above). According to his bio, Sal has BS and MS degrees in electrical engineering and computer science, a BS degree in mathematics and a MBA from Harvard Business School. More recently, he was senior research analyst at a Bay Area investment fund. Sal has generated over a thousand instructional videos (available on YouTube) in areas such as mathematics, biology, chemistry, physics, economics, and various areas of finance. The vision of the academy outlines its goal of providing high-quality instruction that can be delivered online (and offline) and at the pace of individual students.

I have watched several of the chemistry videos and generally found them to be of high quality and engaging. Many of the videos at the Academy web site are appropriate for college-level classes and raise important questions about how these videos (or similar videos found on the web) should or could be used in our courses. I invite you, if possible, to view a few videos in your discipline, or a related discipline, and consider the questions below. If you have any comments, please click the link below and give us your thoughts.


1. What are your thoughts on having these types of instructional videos available on YouTube? Can they make an impact on K-12 or higher education?

2. Is there a place for these videos in your courses at Murray State?

3. Should we be thinking about how to design our courses around the availability of these and other quality instructional materials available on the web?

A Vision of Students Today (by Michael Wesch)

Dr. Michael Wesch is a cultural anthropologist at Kansas State University. His work in digital ethnography has gained national and international attention. The most visible project is his work on YouTube and a video entitled "A Vision of Students Today" that was a collaborative project with 200 of his students. According to YouTube, this video has been viewed close to 3 million times and certainly raised the visibility of Dr. Wesch's work. In fact, he was recently named the US Professor of the Year for Doctoral Universities by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching and the Council for the Support and Advancement of Education.

The point of this blog post is to call your attention to the work of Dr. Wesch as I do feel it has a great deal of relevance in the current environment of higher education. After watching the video above, or visiting links to the Digital Ethnography project at Kansas State, I hope you will click "COMMENTS" below this post and give us your thoughts on this work and describe how it does or does not impact your teaching.


A VISION OF STUDENTS TODAY (also see above):
YouTube Video

Digital Ethnography Blog:
Visit Blog

Article written by Dr. Wesch at Academic Commons:
From Knowledgable to Knowledge-able: Learning in New Media Environments

The Open Course Initiative

The Open Course initiatives at universities such as MIT, Yale, Berkeley and Carnegie Mellon have gained a great deal of attention in the higher education community. I must admit that I have recently become a big fan of Professor Paul Bloom and his Introduction to Psychology course at the Yale Open Course site. Whether the topic was Freud, Skinner or happiness, I found myself completely engaged in his lectures and I felt like I learned a great deal by just "eavesdropping." The Chronicle of Higher Education has called Berkeley Professor Marian Diamond a YouTube star because her Integrative Biology lectures have been viewed well over 100,000 times. It seems she has quite a large fan base consisting of students from around the world.

The availability of these open courses raises numerous questions about who these courses were designed for, how they should be used by students at other universities and whether these courses are putting forth best practices in teaching. Indeed, for better or worse, it has made teaching more visible.

I hope you will click "comment" and provide your thoughts on the questions below or other issues concerning open course initiatives.

Questions:

1. What is your general impression of the open course movement and would you be willing to put one or more of your courses in a similar system?

2. Have you ever sent your students to open course sites to get additional information in one or more of your courses?

3. What is likely to be the future of open course initiatives and how does this align with the growth of online courses at many universities?