Humanizing Education Through Technology

Humanizing Education Through Technology

Two decades ago, the concept of delivering an educational lesson through a recorded video would have been considered a dehumanizing experience. How could students learn without the physical presence of a teacher instructing them in a classroom setting? Today, Khan Academy’s founder, Salman Khan, has flipped this notion and made an extremely strong case of humanizing teaching through a detailed set of recorded videos.

Before establishing a free global classroom for anyone with internet access, Khan was an analyst at a hedge fund. One day, he casually recorded an educational video for his cousins and uploaded it on YouTube for them to watch later on as a supplemental lesson. To his surprise, they told him “they preferred the automated version of their cousin to their cousin. At first it is very unintuitive but if you think about it from their perspective, it makes sense” (TED 2011). Khan realized that his cousins could pause, rewind and review his lecture as many times as they wanted without ‘disturbing’ the teacher. From this small instance, Khan dreamt big and decided to explore the potential of this platform; another one of many examples where change began by a small idea, and was incrementally built on to become a large vast-impact innovation.

With propagation of education in mind, Khan began playing around with the idea of generating impact through his recorded lectures. For me, the most interesting aspect of this phenomenon is the ability to create an intimate educational experience without physical presence. For centuries, people have thought of education to work with the physical presence of a teacher. No doubt, this method has genuine merits. However, when people criticize Khan academy of generating a mechanical educational experience, they are ignoring that it is still more animate than thirty students silently cramped in a class room not allowed to interact with each other. As Khan himself has stated, with no face or body in front of students, they tend to concentrate more on the content.

Moreover, the Khan academy does not claim to be the ultimate substitute to conventional educational methods. Instead, the focus is on supplementing education in any way possible. What does a street kid do who does not have the time and/or resources to go to school in the day? He can still try and learn something from Khan academy (if given access to internet). Similarly, there has been significant progress in schools who give Khan Academy lectures and problems to students for homework and then discuss the material in class. The following article discusses the viability of using Khan Academy in a school in Los Altos, California: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/shantanu-sinha/does-khan-academy-really-_b_946969.html. The success of the approach used in the Los Altos school definitely shows such a system has potential for improving education at low costs and in a sustainable manner. Obviously, this is not a one-method-fits-all-approach. The resources are there, it is up to the schools to contextualize them and use it the way them deem best.

Examples like these speak volumes about the future of education. The videos are there for eternity (assuming YouTube servers do not suffer from some astounding crash). Is this a building a block towards a global education curriculum? It might still seem a far-fetched and non-nuanced idea at this point. However, the success and sustainability of the Khan Academy videos do show that this is an area worth exploring in order to globalize quality education, particularly in places where the standards of education are below par.

Work Cited

"Salman Khan: Let's Use Video to Reinvent Education." YouTube. Ed. TED Talks. YouTube, 09 Mar. 2011. Web. 13 Sept. 2016.