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industrial complex easy to run; it’s to create a better generation of workers and citizens.
71. Lectures at night, homework during the day
Sal Khan, founder of the Khan Academy, has a very different vision of how school can work.
He’s already raised millions of dollars from Bill Gates and others, and his site currently offers
more than 2,600 video lectures that (for free) teach everything from Calculus to World History.
To date, the lectures have been delivered almost a hundred million times.
None of the videos are as good as they will be in two years, just as Wikipedia, Google, and
Amazon started as mere shadows of their current selves. But as each video is replaced by a better
one, as others start competing to increase the quality, here’s what will happen:
There will be a free, universal library of courses in the cloud online, accessible to anyone with
an Internet connection. Every lecture, constantly improved, on every conceivable topic. This
means that students will be able to find precisely the lecture they need, and to watch it at their
own speed, reviewing it at will.
The next day at school, teachers can do what they want to do anyway—coach and help students
in places they are stuck. In a school like this, the notion that every student will have to be in
sync and watch the same (live!) lecture at the same time will become absurd. And for good
reason.
The most visible symptom of the death of traditional schooling is going to be the rise of online
video lectures. Not just online, but specific. Specific to a topic, to a problem, to a student’s
status. With the long tail of the Internet at our disposal, why settle for a generic lecture, the
local lecture, the lecture that everyone else needs to see?
And most important, why settle for an amateur lecture, not very good, given by a teacher with a
lot of other priorities? It’s a bit like requiring teachers to write their own textbooks.
72.Beyond the Khan Academy
Check out Udacity.com, co-founded by Sebastian Thrun, who until recently, was a tenured
professor at Stanford. His goal is to teach courses that have 200,000 simultaneous students. And
why not?
He reports that in the last class taught at Stanford, every single person in the class who got a
perfect grade wasn’t in the classroom at all—all the A students were remote, some as remote as
Afghanistan. Many of the students would watch a lecture twenty or more times because they
were so focused on learning what he had to teach.
I’ve shared one example after another of what happens when we combine motivated students
with specific and refined educational assets delivered digitally. It’s easy to see how it works for
computer programmers and math students, for those that want to learn a craft or understand a
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