Viewpoint: What the success of Khan Academy says about future learners
A few days ago, after musing about how soon I would be graduating and how little I knew about personal finance, I asked my dad if he thought it would be a good idea to take a finance class during my last semester at Penn State.
His answer?
“Just go online to Khan Academy.”
I rolled my eyes. If I have a question about anything lately, my dad’s solution is to consult one of Sal Khan’s thousands of faceless video lectures on his online educational non-profit.
I was having trouble understanding my statistics homework.
“Khan Academy.”
My boyfriend was failing organic chemistry.
“Khan Academy.”
I wanted to learn about the role of the sarcoplasmic reticulum in muscle cells.
Well, no I didn’t.
But if I did, Khan could teach it to me — for free. With more than 3,200 videos on the Khan Academy website, I could learn American civics, calculus and cryptography among a variety of other subjects, all while sitting in the comfort of my own home.
Khan began making videos in order to tutor his cousin, and now his website has 6 million visitors per month and the support of people like Bill Gates.
A recent USA TODAY article profiled Salman Khan and explored the tech world’s growing influence on education.
But I think the popularity of Khan Academy says something more interesting about the future of education than simply whether or not the Internet is changing the institution.
Khan Academy reinforces the idea that the pursuit of knowledge and problem-solving skills is something that should not end once you take your final college math exam. Rather, learning is a life-long process. We should constantly be learning new skills and concepts to help us in the workplace and everyday life, and they can be obtained in many different ways.
I don’t think that Khan Academy is necessarily revolutionary, nor is Khan an evil tech villain trying to reform traditional ways of teaching.
After all, if I wanted to learn about interest rates and hedge funds before, I could have Googled the topics and found information somewhere on the Internet. Or I could have asked for lessons from my friend who is majoring in finance. Or I could have headed over to my local library and checked out a book on economics.
The point is if you want to learn something, there have always been ways for you to learn it, without sitting in the confines of a classroom with someone lecturing in front of a Powerpoint presentation.
The important thing about Khan Academy is that it proves that people have the desire to learn concepts and skills, sometimes without the incentive of earning an “A” in a class or a being handed a diploma, although many students use the videos as a supplement to their high school or college curriculum.
A December Inside Higher Ed article discussed Khan’s qualms with higher education.
“Khan sharply criticizes the buffet approach to curriculum that leaves graduates with general impressions about many different topics but few applicable skills. Teaching students ‘how to think’ is not good enough, he says,” Steve Kolowich writes.
Khan goes on to say that too many college students are graduating with a “broad and very shallow experience base.”
This is the part when we liberal arts students are supposed to throw are arms up and cry out in opposition, “But critical thinking is important! It’s a desirable skill!”
But I think Khan may have a valid point.
It happens in many classes, but perhaps most especially in liberal arts classes that we think “being there” is enough. We pat ourselves on the back for writing a brilliant paper when we only half read the novel, and we skip our general education classes because we can just get test answers from a friend.
It’s not a just a problem for the humanities majors either.
I know plenty of engineering and math majors who can cram for a test, but they forget about all of those important concepts once they leave the classroom. And perhaps if you ask them five years from now to apply that concept to a real world problem, they won’t know how.
Khan Academy, on the other hand, can make people truly learn things. Because when you’re learning a skill just for your own sake, there is no point in taking shortcuts or skipping class.
I don’t think college is a useless place. College is a place where I’ve met best friends, networked, written for my student newspaper and been taught by brilliant professors who have opened my eyes to incredible new ideas.
These are things you just can’t get from watching a video.
But there are plenty of people who go to college classes just to go through the motions. We take the bare minimum classes to get our degree and come out with a piece of paper that somehow validates us in the world as “knowing how to think,” even if we don’t necessarily have any great skills or factual knowledge.
Yes, universities are important places.
But I think curiosity and the desire to learn information everyday is more important.
It doesn’t really matter whether you obtain that information from a college professor, an Internet video, a book, or a mixture of all three. At the end of the day, you will have learned something new. And that is invaluable.
Lauren Ingeno is a Summer 2012 USA TODAY Collegiate Correspondent. Learn more about her here.
This story originally appeared on the USA TODAY College blog, a news source produced for college students by student journalists. The blog closed in September of 2017.