Blog 3.5

www.khanacademy.org

Khan Academy is an educational organization formed in 2006 by educator Salman Khan. It provides a free education online which is accessible to anyone from anywhere. It produces micro lecture in the form of videos, interactive applications, practice exercises and various other tools for educators as well for students. It also features progress tracking on each exercise and applications we use. Videos show step by step doodles and pictures on electronic background. It has a video library of more than 6500 videos on various topics and many automated exercises with continuous evaluation. It also has its resources translated into other languages. Its website is translated into 23 languages as on June’14. In the beginning, academy started with offering videos mostly about mathematics. Over the period of time, it garnered enough donations to support its operation. Consequently, it expanded its faculty and offered courses on finance, medicine, physics, chemistry, biology, history, healthcare, astronomy, cosmology, American civics, art, economics, computer science and music. Besides faculty, it also has network of content specialists. Its materials are also accessible through its mobile application which is free of charge and can be found in App store and Windows store.

Skills and resources one required to use Khan Academy

Ø  Basic knowledge of computer handling and surfing web sites

Ø  Basic knowledge of English reading and understanding is required as not every video or material is translated to other languages

Ø  Computer and internet connection

Ø  Understanding the interactive navigation to browse through the academy’s site and finds exactly what one wants to learn read and

Ø  Be able to read and understand printed text on site

Ø  One should understand the symbols used in interactive applications.

One could login into Khan Academy using Google or Facebook account. However, it also allows you to create a separate account for Khan Academy. It would also ask age of the user while creating the account. Children of elementary school might require some help and supervision from parents or mentors for navigation and guiding them to find application which is apt for their age. NGOs have distributed its resources which is offline version of videos rural areas in Africa, Latin America and Asia.

It also provides web based exercise that generates problems based on student’s skill level and performance. It assesses students weak areas of improvement based on test and grade assignment.  It provides a personalized learning experience which keeps track of what has been covered and also recommends for next assignment or exercises to be taken. Below picture is a sample account screenshot which shows accounts progress on early math sub subject.

It caters the educational need of all students from early childhood elementary school to higher school and beyond. It covers almost all subjects which are mostly taught in schools.

On the main home page, learning materials are classified into the following

Ø  Math

Ø  Science

Ø  Economics and finance

Ø  Art and Humanities

Ø  Computing

Ø  Partner content

Ø  Test Preparation              

Above list forms the broad classification, which is further classified into sub subjects. Most of the sub subjects would also show the percentage completion of sub subjects by the account holder.

On your account home page, you would get the following options as shown in the picture below, which would open new page for each option

 It also has community question where anyone can post their queries and read through the earlier discussion on the subject of interest.