Monday, July 25, 2011

Links:

1. Khan Academy: Wired has an article on the implications of Khan academy for the traditional classroom.
Initially, Thordarson thought Khan Academy would merely be a helpful supplement to her normal instruction. But it quickly become far more than that. She’s now on her way to “flipping” the way her class works. This involves replacing some of her lectures with Khan’s videos, which students can watch at home. Then, in class, they focus on working problem sets. The idea is to invert the normal rhythms of school, so that lectures are viewed on the kids’ own time and homework is done at school. It sounds weird, Thordarson admits, but this flipping makes sense when you think about it. It’s when they’re doing homework that students are really grappling with a subject and are most likely to need someone to talk to.
2. The Engineer Guy: What Khan academy tries to do with high-school topics, this site tries to do with engineering/technology topics.

2 comments:

Raghu said...

You might know this already, but Peter Woolf (my advisor) did some interesting things with the senior Controls course at UM -- including video lectures that could be viewed/downloaded beforehand turning lectures into discussions and an open-access text book that was compiled by the students in the course.

Not sure how the dept. reacted to this newfangled technology though.

Sachin Shanbhag said...

yeah, i thought doing the wiki-based text was great idea. peter was always up to something different.