Khan Academy & The Future of Education

I've always enjoyed listening to the few future gurus that seem to have an intuitive feel of certain trends that will persist, Ray Kurzweil is my fave when it comes to Technology but Sal Khan is my fave when it comes to the future of Education.  While watching his TED talks I find myself repeating "exactly, that's what I thought too!".

Education became an important topic to me when in Grade 12 (I was coasting thru school in General level, I guess now they call it Applied) my Guidance Counselor said "This is your last year of school...what are your plans for the future?"...I said "dunno", so he said "Well let's look at a Community College course catalog", I saw programs like "Retail Meat Cutter", then I had an epiphany, a flash of light in my brain that reminded me I didn't enjoy the physical labor type part-time jobs I did up till then and I wanted a career that uses my brain/intelligence!  I don't have anything against Comm. College, I think for many people they'd actually have a better career with a Comm. College diploma than a University degree but it just wasn't for me.  So long story short, after that day I became obsessed with my education, I had to take many aptitude tests (& score high) just to join Advanced (now called Academic) then I had to take courses at Summer & Night school to catch up and graduate on time from OAC and get into University.  My plan was to become a Professor of Mathematical Physics.  I also regularly brought back a dozen or so books from the Library and devoured them all, books on Science, Philosophy, Fiction, Non-Fiction etc.

Of course that's not the road I envision for my daughters, Chiara & Aria, they will have extra tutoring here at home from us but focusing on increasing their interest in virtually everything, not via rote learning though.  They'll have Science/Robotics/Computer Programming (making video games) camps, then at home I can use the computer, telescopes, microscopes etc...to show how cool Nature & learning is (Carol will focus on passing on her amazing study skills)!  Of course, to be well rounded they participate in Sports & Arts activities as well.

Finally, my main point here is to introduce people to the wonderful Khan Academy, if you watch Sal's TED talks first (especially his latest one) you'll see there are 2 major ideas behind the Academy

1.  While Teachers range form amazing to terrible and of course many average ones (think Normal Distribution), we can put everyone on a level playing field by Teaching via a video that has already researched the most effective way of teaching a particular topic and have someone clearly demonstrate that visually.  Incidentally, Sal's idea for the Education system is to invert the current process, meaning Teachers assign video lessons for homework then the next day the kids do the exercises under the Teachers supervision, where they can ask question relating to the video or the exercises!
2. Mastering a topic before moving on, this most often happens in math but it applies to virtually all subjects, Sal's analogy is building a house, start with the foundation have a housing inspector come in and say...I'll give it a C- but it's a passing grade go ahead and keep building on this somewhat solid foundation!  You have to master (basically ace the test, not with good guesses but a perfect understanding of the material) the material before building on that and moving on to more advanced topics!

Some people think the Khan Academy is just for kids who've fallen behind, need tutoring.  It is great for that yes but it is so much more, many bright kids get bored with the current school system (especially K-8) where they feel the pace of learning is so slow and the interesting topics aren't delved into deeply enough for them, the Khan Academy can help here as well!

I recently started an account for Chiara, she's doing the "Early Math" section, she can watch the teaching videos by herself on her Tablet and then try to earn points, badges and unlock secret functionality (just like video games!) and we're always nearby if she has questions or needs help. We were on it last night and it was so much fun to see Kiki have a breakthrough and count to 100 by herself (she still has to practice more to crystallize)!  So, I highly recommend signing up for FREE on their website (I created an account for me as a Parent then sub-accounts for the kids) no matter what subject you and your kids are interested in to explore further!  They also have an App for both Ipad and Android I believe!

PS Thinking about all this stuff recently, out of curiosity I looked at the kind of courses kids take in High School these days vs. back in my day, it's really amazing the differences!  I looked at a Private School we have here in Whitby called Trafalgar Castle School, they can learn Mandarin which is cool but I saw almost zero Computer Science type courses (I won't go off on a long tangent here but Carol & I are quite sure that almost any career in 20 years will have CS as it's core) which shocked me...anyway I found this accredited Virtual Private High School online and they had at least 3-4 Comp Sci classes which was more assuring!  Check this course on Data Science which is a hot topic these days, the syllabus is amazing, will prepare the kids very well!

PPS  A tangentially related article I just read on LinkedIn, it is thought provoking (and adds some unique points to this topic that is gaining momentum in the media).  I definitely agree the jobs of the future will tilt more towards higher IQ jobs, probably the last frontier of jobs I see AI replacing is Theoretical Physicists working on Grand Unified Theories, the top ones have IQ's in the 180-200 range!  Also, areas in Pure Math that require similar IQ's just to even grasp much less do research in!  I keep up on this stuff, since I left Grad School and it's truly humbling how high these sky scrapers of human ingenuity are...I think the stars of these fields are definitely 2-3 levels higher than me on the IQ scale (and I've never been accused of being overly humble ha)!  Nonetheless, AI once created will quickly reach these levels and just as quick surpass them (just think about how much more powerful computers get each year)!