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The Future of Education is Now |
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Written by Marius Pretorius
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Saturday, 02 April 2011 |
 Learners, teachers and parents who are interested in using technology to assist in their learning and teaching should take special note of the happenings in late 2010 and early 2011. I have been involved in technology and education for a number of years but I have never been as excited as I am now, over a real, viable, affordable, world class, current, technological solution for our education woes in South Africa. Read on …
Have you heard of Sal Khan, a senior hedge fund analyst who has become a teacher? Almost single handed he is revolutionising education in the USA through his approach to teaching. He has uploaded more than 2 200 videos onto YouTube, focusing mainly on Mathematics, but also on other subjects such as Physics, Chemistry, Biology and more. His channel is the most popular education channel on YouTube – more popular than MIT. Scores of people have testified what a difference he has made in their lives. After Sal Khan’s speech at TED in March 2011, Bill Gates said “Ladies and gentleman I think you’ve just seen a glimpse of the future of education.”
In 2010 Khan received R15 million from Google in recognition for the impact the Khan Academy has made on education in the world. He has used this money to implement his concept of teaching by combining it with state of the art programming to create a free online education platform. At any given time there is an average of 3 000 people active on his site, www.khanacademy.org. When you visit the site, you quickly find out why. The platform and the resources are improving and expanding on an almost daily basis.
Good news for us in South Africa, where bandwidth is expensive, slow and unavailable to many, is that (as from 2 March 2011) there is also an offline version available for download (approx. 50MB). This is an almost exact copy of the online platform and can be installed on single computers or network servers. The video playlists can also be downloaded to create a complete educational package. These resources may be copied and spread freely under a Creative Commons license.
Imagine what an impact this could have on education in South Africa. Download it, try it out and spread the word! The future of education is now.
Views: 1201
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, on 25-04-2012 13:42
I'm an educator myself and have been learning some things on Sal's website and am happy for the offline option because there really are places where an access to the internet is not available, so thanks and keep up the great work you are doing.
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Last Updated ( Wednesday, 07 March 2012 )
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