Continuing on the topic of online education, we look at the Khan Academy and how it leveraged a simple tutoring concept into an accepted way of modern learning.
Massive Open Online Courses (MOOC’s) and the Khan Academy learning models may very well be the future of medical education. The Khan Academy morphed from being originally a small project designed to help tutor several family members, to a vast portal offering better than 5,500 instructional videos and 100,000 study problems.
Looking back now, it is apparent that Sal Khan unknowingly created what is possibly the model for the future of education. MOOCs, are electronically delivered educational courses made available to “massive” audiences via the Internet.
How do Khan Students Learn?
In the case of the Khan Academy, videos are used to relay concepts on topic in a straightforward fashion using a digital blackboard. Here are three separate Khan Academy videos that show you how this format works:
The Khan Academy style was swiftly discovered to lend itself well to the concept of MOOCs, and an enormous gateway suddenly opened for those who found traditional school options out of reach.
What are MOOCs?
MOOCs are somewhat newer digital learning format in which an entire course may be utilized by a handful of people or a few hundred thousand people depending on popularity and necessity for a particular topic.
Many MOCC’s are open, which means available to anyone to participate in, as well as free. (If credit hours are offered, there may be an administrative charge for that.)
Khan Academy and MOOCs are already changing the way medical education is being conducted, if for no other reason than anyone who desires to learn has courses and instructional videos at their fingertips on demand, free of charge any time day or night. It has proved so successful that some medical schools are partnering with Khan Academy and MOOCs to provide fresh material to their curriculum.
Khan Academy has also partnered with Stanford’s School of Medicine, the Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC) and Robert Wood Johnson Foundation for online medical education purposes.
This learning model is cited as being the wave of the future. Merging information not only makes sense for everyone involved from a resource standpoint, it also provides students with the most opportunities to learn in a manner best suited to them individually.
To learn more about the Khan Academy, click here.