• Leaders: This is the best teacher in the world: he left Microsoft to open a university in Ghana

The origin of the Khan Academy is in a 12-year-old girl named Nadia who in 2004 suspended Mathematics. His cousin, Salman Khan , gave him private lessons by phone: he lived in Boston and she lived in New Orleans. Other children in the family also asked for help and spread the word, so Khan began doing Skype sessions of three or four students. As the thing was getting out of hand, someone suggested trying it on YouTube so that students could see the lessons when it suited them best. His response was: «YouTube? But if there are only videos of kittens ... ».

Today Salman Khan (New Orleans, 1976) is in charge of the Khan Academy, a non-profit organization that provides free online education in 36 languages ​​and has won the Princess of Asturias Award for International Cooperation. You will receive it on Friday in Oviedo.

This MIT graduate, son of an Indian mother and a Bangladeshi father, left in 2009 his work as a risk fund analyst to record classes in videos in which at first his children were heard screaming in the background. He was his only employee and spent the day in tracksuit. Now it has 200 workers and 72 million students study on its platform. Bill Gates once said that he used his website to help his children with Mathematics and since then he has not stopped.

What happened to Nadia? She is 28 years old and lives in New York. He has graduated in Neuroscience and is currently conducting research on posttraumatic stress disorder in war veterans.

Khan, who has just published in Spanish The school of the world (Ariel), explains that the main problem that has been found in class is that learning is "emmental type": "Although it seems solid on the outside, education is full of holes », He warns.

Why? We are governed by a system based on the time that students remain seated in the classroom and, if they do not learn something, they accumulate gaps and fall behind. Taking an 8 means, in reality, that there is 20% of the contents that are not well known. It would be necessary to go back over that 20% and review it until learning it, but the current model does not allow something to be understood later.

Khan censures the "one size school" that separates the groups by age and has a single agenda , lessons at school and homework. In this classroom there is only one rhythm and the teacher marks it: the fastest students get bored and the laggards are left behind. That is why he proposes "a system based on the time it takes for students to master the concepts, where they can progress at their own pace, go back and improve their grade, to fill those holes and not get bigger." It summarizes, in summary, an education that can be rewound, like its videos, and in which it does not go to the next stage until the above has been mastered.

This implies reorganizing the entire structure, from the duration of the classes and the school day until the conception of the subjects. "Why do the classes last one hour if the attention of the students is only kept 10 or 15 minutes?" Khan asks.

Should we change the subjects? The subjects that are important were decided 100 years ago, when there was no internet. Then the school was oriented to prepare for college, which was only for some elites who didn't have to make a living. The Industrial Revolution expanded the middle class and more people began to go to university, so employers decided to use it as an indicator of what they qualified to have a non-manual job. The purpose of the school has been changing, but what is taught is not. In traditional curricula, computational thinking, entrepreneurship or personal skills are lacking. There is a big gap between what exams ask and what students need to know for life. You propose ending summer vacations ... They are, with extracurricular ones, the main source of educational inequality. If they are used to go to museums or camps, they enrich, but most families cannot afford it and the children start watching TV or being on social networks. I would propose that the school year last all year, and that would allow time for the students to master all the contents and not do so many homework. What do you think of the homework? In the Khan Lab School, which is face-to-face, the classes are 8.30 to 18.00 hours and all homework is done in class. There is a pendulum effect on social attitudes towards homework. During the Cold War, when the Soviets launched Sputnik, they suddenly began to get more homework, especially science, because it was thought that the young people were falling behind. What happens in the US, and I suppose that it is the same in Spain, is that the anxiety and stress of the students are very high, and that is because they do not have time for themselves, to discover what they like. A correlation between homework and academic results cannot be established. On the other hand, students who get enough sleep and have dinner with their parents do get better. Isn't it boring to learn with videos? The vast majority of those who sign up for a 'mooc' do not finish it ... Videos can help communicate, interest and involve in a way that the text does not, especially if they last three, five or 10 minutes and the You can repeat as many times as you want. What role does the teacher have before a recorded class? I do not think that online education makes interpersonal experience less valuable. If it makes it more valuable. The online does not replace the classroom, but allows you to release it for higher tasks, such as the teacher working individually with the student and students interact and ask questions.

Khan defends that you have to think more, memorize less and, above all, apply what you have learned. “In the traditional way of math, they teach kids to use the hammer in one lesson and how to use a screwdriver in another. If they are told to nail a nail, they use the hammer; If they are told to put a screw, they use the screwdriver. But if they are told to build a shelf, they are paralyzed.

Should we learn less? Most educational systems have a long list of content that must be given, but most students do not retain them. And that produces the gaps I talked about before. What I would do is concentrate on less things but better known, and those that were really important for life.

THE KHAN ACADEMY DECALOGUE

  • Each student can learn at their own pace. "The current model does not allow something to be understood later."
  • Portability. Students should be able to choose where and when. There are people who perform better in the morning and others at night.
  • Lessons of 10 minutes, because the attention span of students is limited.
  • Knowledge must not be fragmented. The brain works best with the help of associations.
  • Education should be eminently practical, aimed at providing the skills and information they need for a living.
  • «The smaller classes do not solve the failure, we must improve the time each student spends with his teacher».
  • Spending more does not produce better results, a rigorous and quality education for less money is possible thanks to technology.
  • Summer vacations are very long. «In them children unlearn». Nothing happens because they are removed.
  • Classrooms of 75 students of different ages with three or four teachers You have to mix students of different ages and put more teachers. Teaching as a team sport.
  • It is approved with a 10. You have to wait more for the students and raise the bar. Until all the matter is mastered, the next stage is not passed.

    • According to the criteria of The Trust Project

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