Providing all of the world’s children with a quality primary, secondary and higher education is no small task. With limited teaching resources, educating the youth is particularly big problem in the developing world. Progress has been made, and as the fourth UN sustainability goal, education does receive a lot of attention, however there is still progress to be made, especially in the poorest regions of the world. In order to combat this educational problem and help student from all over the globe, Salman Khan, the founder of Khan Academy, set up a not for profit free education site, which teaches students everything from basic math, to programming and quantum physics. The goal of this piece is to look at the opportunities, limitations that this approach to world education brings, as well as mentioning possible solutions to some of the problems posed.
Some of the main advantages of Khan Academy lies within its coherent platform and with its cost cutting opportunities. By not having to purchase other educational products, a school could theoretically spend more money on teachers, allowing them to increase the number or the quality of the teachers available. When the staff at hand aren’t knowledgeable about certain content, Khan Academy can also be used to increase the information and topics available for the students. The coherence of Khan Academy also allows teachers to rely solely on the platform for teaching certain subjects. As a user myself, I can confirm that the quality of the study material is excellent, and the fact that the platform has millions of users worldwide, suggests that people do find it useful. From extensive personal experience, Khan Academy is best used as a package solution. This as Khan Academy strives to master the subjects to a higher degree than many schools, who more often focus on memorisation. It does however also work well as a supplement to normal coursework, but then mainly as a way to understand certain topics not covered well in lectures. This brings us to some of the complicating factors as to how Khan Academy has been used in schools in practice.
Khan Academy has been used officially in schools for a number of years, for example as a part of a Californian experiment. Research suggests that the way in which Khan Academy was implemented, varied widely from school to school. Some integrating Khan Academy as a core part of the curriculum (more like the packet solution style of integration), with others just integrating parts of the platform into the learning process. (https://www.sri.com/work/projects/research-use-khan-academy-schools). Khan Academy was originally intended as a way to “flip” the classroom. By first watching the videos and then completing the related exercises, Khan Academy wishes to provide students with a way to fully understand a topic. However, it turned out that the educational video were often less used, than the available problem sets. Some of the reasons for this might stem from lack of trust in the technology or in belief in their own ability to teach the subject during lectures. Similar results were found in Chile. This suggests that the cost cutting powers and coherence of the Khan Academy curriculum might not have seen its maximum use potential with its current implementation. Interestingly, research conducted alongside the experiment showed that results of students at schools who used Khan Academy to a higher degree, tended to score higher on standardized tests, than those from schools implementing it to a lesser degree, which again suggests that higher integration tends to give better results. The study also discovered that Khan Academy education tended to be better tailored to each student, than normal teaching and allowed them to study more at their own pace. If you did not understand a topic, you could just rewatch parts of the video, or ask the questions target questions at the relevant area, leading to more efficient use of teachers’ time. So there is significant evidence pointing at the benefits of implementing Khan Academy into the teaching experience.
As Khan Academy seems to be a useful teaching tool (both cost effective and efficient), it seems reasonable to try to implement it in developing countries to improve educational standards. For example, in the words of Tom Vander Ark, a head of a venture capitalist who once headed the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation’s educational programs: “When you combine mobile devices, free content and an inexpensive, blended learning model, you can serve kids in the slums of Nairobi for $4 a month and you can start to imagine a $100-a-year high school that is quite high quality.” However its implementation in less developed countries comes with its own set of problems. Two of the main ones are internet infrastructure and access to computers. Intel, Google and several other companies, have launched programs to give out free inexpensive laptops to school children in developing countries. Laptops and tablets have also become cheaper, to the point where for example Akash tablets only cost around $40, so access to hardware might become less of a problem in the future. At the same time, the world has also seen an incredible increase in internet connectivity, with developing countries like India being at the center of attention (Mikael Johansson, “Investing in Indian Internet”, 2018). Realizing the issue associated with lack of internet connection, Khan Academy has developed a platform called Khan Academy lite, which does not need internet to work. It basically functions as a local server, hosting Khan Academy content, which others then can access locally. Khan Academy has also helped distribute its content in offline other forms, to make its content more accessible. There are however other difficulties standing in the way of worldwide implementation.
Even though English is the lingua de franca, there are still many, especially very young people, who are not yet fluent, or even semi-fluent in the language. This poses a problem as most of the content produced is in English. However, through the help of volunteers and automatic closed captioning systems, many videos and much content have been subtitled. The website is also available in a multitude of languages as to minimize the linguistic barrier of entry. As of right now it might therefore be simpler to implement Khan Academy into everyday education in English speaking developing countries. However as time progresses and more content is translated, it should become more readily available to other countries as well. If this problem too is solved, then the only real remaining problem is that of packet implementation correlation to local curriculum.
In both the Chilean and Californian study, Khan Academy was mainly used as a supplement, rather than core element of the education process. This partly a result of teachers not being confident with the system in one way or another, and partly as a result of mismatches between the Khan Academy curriculum and the local curriculum. As a Swede I can attest to the difficulties with using a system based on another countries educational standards and trying to figure out exactly what to study, as to fit with my local needs, and so did even the Californians. As stated earlier, the packet solution is the most efficient way to implement the system, so in order to solve this issue, there are really two main ways to go about it. 1 The local government tries adapt its educational standards as to fit those of Khan Academy, such that it can be at its most effective whilst used in classrooms. However, this is extremely unlikely to happen, and even if Khan Academy or similar institutions gained the ability to affect educational policy, changes that they could make to educational policy would likely be minor. Alternative number 2, that Khan Academy tries to make its content to fit with the educational standards of different areas, therefore sounds like a much more reasonable alternative. One of the more efficient solutions to this would likely be to just create “playlists” or subsections, where Khan Academy can put videos and materials that are related to a specific country’s curriculum. For example, you could create a first year math Bangladesh section and a UK secondary school biology section. Hopefully, as governments start to realize the potential of sites like Khan Academy, they will more actively help in providing resources and assistance to the company and similar non-profits, as to increase their efficiency with regards to improving education in their countries.
All in all, even though there are problems with internet based teaching platforms, there are many obvious advantages. By cutting costs and enabling teacher to spend more effective time with kids, whilst at the same time providing high quality rewindable lectures via Khan Academy, education should become more easily accessible and efficient for all. Problems with internet connectivity, hardware access and language, still stand in the way of successful worldwide implementation. Steps are however being made to address these issues, and looking at the progress that has already been made in those areas, I am sure that the future prospects of Khan Academy and global education are bright.
https://www.sri.com/sites/default/files/publications/khan-academy-implementation-report-2014-04-15.pdf (Research suggested that the more Khan Academy was used by students, the better were their test results, comparing different test schools and their use of Khan Academy in the Classroom)
https://www.edsurge.com/news/2017-03-22-building-education-technology-for-the-developing-world (One laptop per child)
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/education/educationnews/9568850/Khan-Academy-The-man-who-wants-to-teach-the-world.html Interview with Salman Khan
https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/6901436 (Use in Chilean classroom, positive math results)
https://www.quora.com/How-will-online-education-like-Khan-Academy-affect-education-in-Indonesia-or-other-developing-countries (Quotes on capabilities of Khan Academy)
