The Flipped Classroom

I have to admit that when I first saw one of the videos from the Khan Academy I was not wowed.  It was light, it was casual, it got the message across but it was nothing spectacular. It was certainly no more powerful than a lesson given by a typical teacher in a typical classroom. With the availability of presentation tools like Prezi, the production quality was primitive at best. But then I heard the TED talk which the founder of the Khan Academy, Salman Khan, delivered and I
was hooked. What a wonderful idea to enhance student learning.

Salam Khan started creating videos to help support his cousins who were struggling with some concepts in Math.  They were in New Orleans, he wasn’t so once the videos were created, he simply posted them to Youtube, thus the simplicity.  Khan choose to keep them simple and casual as he produced more and more and I am glad that he has.  This simplicity is part of the draw for the students.  The lesson is not lost in the bang and flash of the font and the picture but rather focuses on the learning.  What started as a few simple videos for his cousins is now a site which holds up to 2700 lessons which have been viewed over 89,000,000 times.  That’s a lot of learning.

Khan’s videos can be used in a few great ways.  Firstly, students now have home access to quality instruction when they are stuck in a subject.  Having a child in High School Physics, I am past the point of being able to help her when she’s stuck.  Now however, I can direct her to the Khan site where there is hundreds of physics lesson ready to be accessed.  While the lessons are not aligned with our Alberta curriculum, they certainly cover the core concepts of the field all the
way to University level.  These videos allow students to have access to the lesson at their convenience should they need refreshing.

Using the site more radically, Khan refers to the flipped classroom. In typical high schools today, teachers deliver a lesson and students work through their learning for the remainder of class and may well have homework to
do that evening.  In a flipped classroom the student is assigned a lesson from the academy to watch at home.  When they enter the class the next day, an assignment on the learning is given and the teacher has an opportunity to work
with the students more intimately, clearing up misconceptions.

I highly encourage teachers to watch the following video and give the Khan Academy a look.  Tinker with it and see some of the value for learning.  I’d love to hear your feedback.

Salam Khan – TED talk

Keep on learning,

Dave