Let's use video to reinvent education, a Ted Talk by Sal Khan

TED Talk Tuesday #138: Let’s use video to reinvent education

Watching TED Talks is a popular pastime at CN&CO. We visit TED.com regularly to clear our heads, have a laugh or get inspired. TED Talks open our minds, spark new ways of thinking and can lead to some very interesting conversations. Each week we pick a favourite and publish it on a Tuesday, because we like how “TED Talk Tuesday” sounds. This week’s talk was posted by Joshua Nuttall. Here’s a bit about why he chose it:

The world is changing. In some spaces change happens faster than others. To develop with the changes we need to think about things differently and understand how new tools at our disposal could be used.

Education and learning plays a large role in our lives. A mistake would be to classify education as merely time spent in a classroom, we all learn differently –from real life experiences, reading a book, watching a video, or traveling the globe.

The Khan Academy is a non-profit educational organisation created in 2008 by Salman Khan with the goal of creating a set of online tools that help educate students. If you haven’t checked it out I strongly recommend you do.

At the time of writing this blog, the academy’s YouTube Channel has over 5.7 billion subscribers and over 7400 videos that have been viewed more than 1.6 billion times.

Salman Khan, started this journey in 2004 by making videos for his cousins. Fast forward a couple of years and there are over 48 million registered subscribers.

In this talk he shares how and why he created the remarkable Khan Academy.  He shows the power of interactive exercises, and calls for teachers to consider flipping the traditional classroom script – give students video lectures to watch at home, and do “homework” in the classroom with the teacher available to help.

This talk highlighted a number of things for me, but the two most important things were:

1)Sometimes by solving an immediate problem you are contributing to changing a bigger model.

2)Don’t categorise people into boxes or groups – self paced learning has allowed millions of people to unlock their potential.

Enjoy the talk!