Are 10-minute lectures the future of education?

The most popular educator on YouTube does not have a PhD. He has never taught at a college or university. And he delivers all his lectures from a bedroom closet.

This upstart is Salman Khan, a 33-year-old who quit his job as a financial analyst to spend more time making homemade lecture videos in his home studio. His unusual teaching materials started as a way to tutor his faraway cousins, but his lectures have grown into an online phenomenon – and a kind of protest against what he sees as a flawed education system.

“My single biggest goal is to try to deliver things the way I wish they were delivered to me,” he told me recently.

The resulting videos do not look or feel like typical college lectures or any of the lecture videos that traditional colleges put on their websites or YouTube channels. For one thing, these lectures are short — about 10 minutes each. And they are low-tech: viewers see only the scrawls of equations or bad drawings that Khan writes on his digital sketchpad software as he narrates.

The lo-fi videos seem to work for students, many of whom have written glowing testimonials or even donated a few bucks via a PayPal link.

The free videos have drawn hundreds of thousands of views, making them more popular than the lectures by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), famous for making course materials free – or any other traditional institution online, according to the leaders of YouTube’s education section.

Khan calls his collection of videos “The Khan Academy”, and he lists himself as founder and faculty. That means he teaches every subject, and he has produced 1 400 lectures since he started in 2006. Now he records one to five lectures per day.

He started with subject matter he knows best — maths and engineering – which he studied as an undergraduate at MIT. But lately, he has added history lectures about the French Revolution and biology lectures on “Embryonic Stem Cells” and “Introduction to Cellular Respiration”.

If Khan is unfamiliar with a subject he wants to teach, he gives himself a crash course first. In a recent talk, he explained how he prepared for his lecture on entropy: “I took two weeks off and I just pondered it, and I called every professor and everyone I could talk to and I said, ‘Let’s go have a glass of wine about entropy.’ After about two weeks, it clicked in my brain and I said – now I’m willing to make a video about entropy.”

Some critics have blogged that this learn-as-you-go approach is no way to run an educational project; and they worry that the videos may contain errors or lead students astray.

But to Khan, occasional mistakes are part of his method. By watching him stumble through a problem, students see the process better, he argues. Sometimes they correct him in comments on his YouTube videos, and he says this makes students more engaged with the material. “Sometimes when it’s a little rough, it’s going to be a better product than when you overprepare,” he says.

The Khan Academy explicitly challenges many of higher education’s most sacred assumptions: that professional academics make the best teachers; that hour-long lectures are the best way to relate material; and that in-person teaching is better than videos. Khan argues that his little lectures disprove all that.

Watching his videos highlights how little the Web has changed higher education. Many online courses at traditional colleges simply replicate the in-person model — often in ways that are not as effective.

That which happens in most classrooms varies little from 50 years ago (or more). Which is why Khan’s videos come as a surprise, with their informal style, bite-sized units, and simple but effective use of multimedia.

The Khan Academy raises the question: What if colleges could be retooled with new technologies in mind?

College from scratch

Khan is not the only one asking that question these days.

Clay Shirky, an associate teacher at New York University and a popular Internet guru, recently challenged his more than 50 000 Twitter followers with a similar thought exercise: “If you were going to create a college from scratch, what would you do?” Bursts of creativity quickly Twittered in, and Shirky collected and organised the responses on a website.

The resulting visions are either dreams of an education future or nightmares, depending on your viewpoint:

• All students should be required to teach as well, said @djstrouse.

• Limit tenure to eight years, argued @jakewk.

• Have every high-school senior take a year before college to work in some kind of service project away from his or her hometown, said
@alicebarr.

Some Twittering brainstormers even named their fictional campuses. One was called FailureCollege, where every grade is an F to desensitise students to failure and encourage creativity. Another was dubbed LifeCollege, where only life lessons are taught.

When I caught up with Shirky recently, he described the overall tone of the responses as “bloody-minded”. Did that surprise him?

“I was surprised: by the range of responses, but also partly by the heat of the responses,” he said. “People were mad when they think about the gap between what is possible and what happened in their own educations.”

Shirky declined to endorse any of the Twitter models or to offer his prediction of how soon or how much colleges will change. But he did argue that higher education is ripe for revolution.

For him, the biggest question is not whether a new high-tech model of higher education will emerge, but whether the alternative will come from inside traditional higher education or from some new upstart.

Voting with their chequebooks

Lately, several prominent technology entrepreneurs have taken an interest in Khan’s model and have made generous contributions to the academy, which is now a non-profit entity.

Khan said that several people he had never met have made $10 000 contributions. Ann and John Doerr, well-known venture capitalists, gave $100 000 – making it possible for Khan to give himself a small salary for the academy so that he can spend less of his time doing consulting projects to pay his mortgage. Overall, he says, he has collected about $150 000 in donations and makes $2 000 a month from ads on his website.*

To find out what the attraction was, I called one of the donors, Jason Fried, chief executive officer of 37signals, a hip business-services company, who recently gave an undisclosed amount to The Khan Academy.

“The next bubble to burst is higher education,” he said. “It’s too expensive for people; there’s no reason parents should have to save up a hundred grand to send their kids to college. I like that there are alternative ways of thinking about teaching.”

No one I talked to saw The Khan Academy as an alternative to traditional colleges (for one thing, it does not grant degrees). When I called a couple of students who posted enthusiastic posts to Facebook, they said they saw it as a helpful supplement to the classroom experience.

Khan has a vision of turning his website into a kind of charter school for middle- and high-school students, by adding self-paced quizzes and ways for the site to certify that students have watched certain videos and passed related tests. “This could be the DNA for a physical school where students spend 20% of their day watching videos and doing self-paced exercises, and the rest of the day building robots or painting pictures or composing music or whatever,” he said.

The Khan Academy is a concrete answer to Shirky’s challenge to create a school from scratch, and it is an example of something new in the education landscape that was not possible before. And it serves as a reminder to be less reverent about those long-held assumptions.

*The Khan Academy has recently received high-profile donations from both the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and Google.

Jeffrey R. Young

Reprinted with kind permission from “The Chronicle of Higher Education” (http://chronicle.com)