Online Learning, Personalized

Salman Khan, an Ivy League-trained math whiz and the son of an immigrant single mother, has become something of an online sensation with his Khan Academy math and science lessons on YouTube, which has attracted up to 3.5 million viewers a month. Now he wants to weave those digital lessons into the fabric of the school curriculum — a more ambitious and as yet untested proposition. This semester, at least 36 schools nationwide are trying out Khan’s experiment: splitting up the work of teaching between man and machine, and combining teacher-led lessons with computer-based lectures and exercises. As schools try to sort out confusing claims about the benefits of using technology in the classroom, and companies ponder the profits from big education contracts, Khan Academy may seem like just another product vying for attention. But what makes Khan’s venture stand out is that the lessons and software tools are entirely free — available to anyone with access to a reasonably fast Internet connection.