Khan Academy

khanWorld educational system gets closer and closer to revolution and innovation of information, but an essential factor of this process of developing is the internet – a big power of transferring knowledge from educational institutions to the whole mass of people eager to evolve and improve themselves.

Khan Academyhttps://www.khanacademy.org/ is one of the online education platforms that have produced an important impact over the education of young people and not only. This academy offers to the interested ones, a number of more than 3.000 videos concerning educational themes from different scientific and cultural domains.

Salman Khan, the initiator of this educational approach, did not intend to revolutionize the system, he just focused on fulfilling an ambitious mission of helping the ones that need to be trained. How did everything start? In the first place, he did online tutoring for his cousin, Nadia, after that, friends and relatives started to ask for his help. In such a situation, Khan decided that the best solution is to make videos containing these lessons and to upload them on YouTube so that he can give other people the possibility to use the information. His videos had a great success and this is what determined him to quit his job and to dedicate himself to this academic project.

His videos give people the chance to gain knowledge depending on one’s needs and possibilities and this is considered to be the biggest  advantage of them. Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and Google started to financially sustain the Academy, and this is how it became one of the most popular educational sites  from the entire world. There are over 3,7 million students that access this platform every year and this is what motivates Khan to invest in more translations of videos so that he can touch his main goal: a quality educational offer addressed for free to the desirous ones. Besides, the motto that represents the basis of his activity is: The one world schoolhouse.  – a quotation enlarged in the published book with the same name.

Salman Khan counts on the educational freedom that he considers to be absolutely necessary in the economic and social progress of the world. He militates in favor of introducing technology in the educational process, as an efficient strategy to hurdle the education impasse of education system.  The process of rethinking of education is closely linked to individual freedom of learning, according to his conception, because, as he explains, the purpose of the obligatory education was never prevailingly pedagogical, it was not to encourage individual thinking, but to create loyal and easy to manipulate citizens that learn to submit to the authority of parents, professors, Church and ultimately to the king.

Is really this the philosophy that represents the basis for the state education system? Is education through technology and personal involvement the solution?

Adelina-Mihaela Poenaru (translated by Elena Golăi)


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