Khan Academy

                                                                                                                                               

Free! Free!  Free!

The Khan Academy is an organization on a mission. It’s a not-for-profit organization with the goal of changing education for the better by providing a free world-class education to anyone anywhere.

All of the site's resources are available to anyone. It doesn't matter if you are a student, teacher, home-schooler, principal, adult returning to the classroom after 20 years, or a friendly alien just trying to get a leg up in earthly biology. The Khan Academy's materials and resources are available completely free of charge.

Components of Khan Academy

• a video library with over 3200 videos in various topic areas and over 165 million lessons delivered. These videos are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 License.
• automated exercises with continuous assessment; there are 320 practice exercises, mainly in math.
• peer-to-peer tutoring based on objective data collected by the system, a process that will be projected in the future.

The stated vision of Khan Academy is

“turning the academy into a charter school”

How it all started (The innovative Idea)

Khan Academy is the brainchild of Sal Khan who was working as a hedge fund manager when he started tutoring his younger cousin in math. The young girl could answer harder, logic-based questions, but was held back by her inability to understand units. After writing small programs to help her practice their tutoring sessions, he decided to create full-out YouTube videos for her to watch on her own. That’s where the idea took off, and soon he was tutoring up to 25 of his family members.

How are Khan Academy Tutorials different from classroom training?

Creative problem solving

Kids and teens can learn a wide variety of topics in math and science (as well as art history, economics, and more) from simple arithmetic to calculus and organic chemistry. Kids can watch thousands of video presentations created by experts, do math exercises, and keep track of their progress with tools that show what they've mastered and what they might want to try next. With high-quality lectures and an interactive format, Khan Academy empowers kids to set goals and learn at a comfortable pace

Khan Academy tutorial on smart phone

Motivation

The real gem is the Practice interface. When you click the Practice link, you face a constellation of skills, with Addition 1 at the top. As you demonstrate proficiency, you earn a star in that constellation, and the graphic indicates the suggested skills to work on next.

Simple Interface Design

The interface is simple but effective. When you start to practice, the problems show up as images, and you enter the correct answer in a text box. What’s great about it is that it’s Flash-free, meaning it works on iPhones, iPads, etc., making fun math practice freely, and widely, available.