CURMUDGUCATION: Khan Academy Expanding To Littles

CURMUDGUCATION: Khan Academy Expanding To Littles

Khan Academy Expanding To Littles

The pandemic has been very, very good to Sal Khan, and he's ready to grab the big sticky ball and run with it. He recently did an interview with Emily Tate for EdSurge, and it's all just as discouraging as you would expect.

Khan opens with a few thought about pandemic life in the Bay Area:

“Obviously, some aspects have been suboptimal for everybody,” he says, acknowledging that his family has been extremely fortunate. “Every now and then, it's been hard to do a call while the kids are screaming or something like that, but between meetings, to see them or have lunch with them or go on a walk with them, that part has been actually quite nice.”

Then, just a few paragraphs later, Tate asks "How did you adapt to meet the needs of students during the pandemic?" Spoiler alert: his answer does not have anything to do with having lunch in person or taking walks together. But it did introduce me to another data-tastic term.

In normal times, we see about 30 million learning minutes per day on Khan Academy. When the pandemic and the closures started, we saw that go up to 90 million learning minutes per day by the end of that week.

I'm going to assume that "learning minutes" is a clever rebranding of "screen hours." If not, I'm dying CONTINUE READING: CURMUDGUCATION: Khan Academy Expanding To Littles

CURMUDGUCATION: Khan Academy Makes Its Next Big Move

CURMUDGUCATION: Khan Academy Makes Its Next Big Move

Khan Academy Makes Its Next Big Move

The Khan Academy (aka that library of instructional videos that come in varying degrees of accuracy) is finally ready to take its next step and morph into an on-line-ish micro-credential competency-based school-ish thing. What does that even mean? Let me try to explain the vision behind this, the people behind this, and--well, then we can just reflect on how many kinds of bad ideas we're looking at here.

The Unbundled Micro-Credentialed Future

An idea beloved by one sector of the education privatizing world in micro-credentials. You've encountered this stuff if there's a newer-generation video game console in your home on which games offer a variety of badges to show your various accomplishments. In the ed world, they're called micro-credentials, and all the big guns are playing with them.

A few years ago I came across a fully realized portrait of the vision called The Ledger. It brings together Competency Based Education, data mining, personalized learning, the cradle to career pipeline, the gig economy, and the transformation into a master and servant class society. In this world, you wouldn't need "schools" or "teachers" (Knowledgeworks once made a whole big list of new jobs for them, all servile and dumb). You would get your education in bits and bites--a work experience here, a few sessions with a wise tutor there, each one earning you a  new micro-credential, which in turn qualifies you to act as somebody else's wise tutor. It would all be recorded in a blockchain-type digital identity (yes, there are already people working on those, too) along with all pertinent data about you. The unbundling of education also CONTINUE READING: CURMUDGUCATION: Khan Academy Makes Its Next Big Move