Stock-trading and teaching might be different endeavors on the surface, but Kohlmeier says the work he does for Khan Academy is similar to the statistical modeling he did in finance. Before joining Khan Academy on a volunteer basis last year, he trained computers to predict price changes in the stock market and make trades based on those predictions. Like Khan, Kohlmeier is late of the finance industry. Jace Kohlmeier is one of those engineers. That, I think, is what we’re most excited about.” “Most of our resources, almost two-thirds of, are engineers working on the exercises and analytics platform. “I think too much conversation about Khan Academy is about cute little videos," Khan said in an interview last week. But in the process, it hopes to break new ground by changing how educators think about teaching, how psychologists think about learning, how employers think about credentialing, and how everybody thinks about the price of a good education. Khan Academy’s explicit goal is to teach people fundamental concepts. The real revolution at Khan Academy, they contend, is not being streamed on its vaunted website it is happening in the back end of the platform, where Khan’s engineers are learning as much about the site’s 1.4 million registered users as those users are learning about math and science. Khan’s charmingly unpolished home recordings form the public face of the organization and provide a peg for media narratives about online learning and the YouTube-ification of the textbook in an era where the rising prices and demand for higher education has collided with the Internet’s culture of free.īut Khan and his 20-person team - refugees from hedge funds, consulting firms, software companies, and tech start-ups - say the videos are hardly the most innovative work they are doing. Many have lauded Khan’s natural skill as a teacher. What began in 2006 as an attempt to tutor his young cousin from afar has evolved into a 2,700-video library with millions of monthly visitors. Here is what Khan does know: algebra, statistics, trigonometry, calculus, computer science, biology, chemistry, astronomy, physics, economics, and finance - well enough, at least, to demonstrate the concepts via brief video tutorials on Khan Academy, his free learning website. Until recently, he was an analyst for a hedge fund. He is capable of talking on the phone for a full hour without using the word “disruptive” once. He advocates for competency-based credentialing, but has never heard of Western Governors University. He cannot name any higher education accrediting agencies off the top of his head.
As a fledgling voice of reform in higher education, Salman Khan is an oddity.
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