Recently there have been some discussions going around the Internet concerning Kahn Academy and other Internet-based “teaching tools” and their applicability or acceptability in terms of pedagogically sound classroom use. You can check out Dan Meyer’s blog or tweets about the MTT2k project, which I find pretty amusing actually, or Kate Nowak’s blog entry where she stated “Enduring learning requires productive struggle and time to noodle out unfamiliar problems, posed by a teacher who knows what you’re ready for, and can provide expert scaffolding. Lecture-only instruction focused on mastering procedures is an impoverished substitute for doing mathematics, and it doesn’t matter if that lecture is in person or in a video.” To that, I, of course, say, “here, here.” I spent some time going over the Kahn Academy website this past spring when my son was having some trouble studying for his science final exam and he was looking for some review materials and I actually thought it was something of a helpful resource for him. However, I’m not quite sure that it would’ve been a helpful way for him to have learned about genetics the first time around.

On the website, Kahn Academy has a great mission of having open-source curriculum for everyone, everywhere, which I am wholeheartedly in favor of. I believe that education needs to be the great equalizer and one of the best ways to do that is to actually allow everyone equal access to the same quality of education. However, they also seem to take pride in the fact that there are now “5th graders relentlessly tackling college-level math to earn Khan Academy badges” perhaps at the detriment of their understanding or even at the skills that they should be learning at their grade level (and I am definitely not against kids exploring interesting advanced topics or even discussing non-Euclidean geometry before they get to college, for example). So it’s important for there to be balance, as I always say, between content and process.

So overall, I would say, I have no problem with Kahn Academy’s (or any online institution of learning’s) pronouncements that they are helping to “spread the wealth” of education, but I do wonder about the quality of the instruction. They have some very, very smart people working there with very good goals about making education accessible, with which I totally agree and for that I commend them. However, there are lots of theories of education – both online and face-to-face that need to be considered in order to claim that any actual learning (whatever definition of that you are also claiming) is actually happening.

Before educators who are within F2F classrooms move to using online tools to “flip” classrooms in order to substitute for other methods of instruction and claim to be using Project-based or Problem-Based Learning, I encourage everyone to really explore the pedagogical methods of that online tool. Is it congruent to what you would do in the classroom? Does it actually help facilitate the type of learning you would want your students to experience? Does it ask the questions or help with the explorations that you would want them to grapple with themselves? Do they get to the confident explanation and security in the knowledge that they would in a discussion? If not, look for something else. Or even better, ask the questions or pose the problems yourself or get the students to ask each other.