While trying to find some interesting podcasts on education, Salman Khan’s TED Talk interested me a lot; he was bringing the educational process to a platform completely different from the conventional one; emphasizing the role of computers, videos, online tutorials and interactive educational web sites in an efficient process of education. I am the advocate of the latter and for two years was reaping the benefits of this approach.
Before coming to ATC I was studying in Yerevan State Agrarian University, which is one of the oldest Universities in Armenia. It still adheres to the traditional understanding of the education process, student-lecturer relationship and lecturing techniques, when the lecturer and the student interact only during the exam, and when the lecturer is the main speaker in the classroom and the “historical” notebook of the lecturer is the only “source of reference”. On the contrary, ATC is one of the few Universities in Armenia where open-mindedness, the aspiration to adopt the successful education methods and the interactive classes are the cornerstones of the studying process.
From monologue- To interactive
lecturer group-work
lecturer group-work
Though Khan was developing the topic in order to advertise or more precisely introduce its non-for-profit organization – KhanAcademy to the audience, however he was speaking about a phenomenon which is vital for everybody and in the end is of strategic importance for the whole economy. KhanAcademy is a portal for the provision of world-class online education to anyone anywhere. I went there and was really influenced with the large amount of mathematical and scientific information available. Many school districts are using it to share their knowledge and experience and always be in touch with each other. In ATC we as well have used interactive portals within the frameworks of different courses. In this curriculum we are using the Pearsonopenclass within the framework of our Analytical Writing course; it is a simple version compared with KhanAcademy. Therefore, all the benefits that Khan was listing were familiar to me. People are satisfied with the service they provide, which was obvious from the comments that Khan read and I could check under the wide range of videos/lessons that would not be delivered without a demand. The great advantage of having access to online tutorials, videos is that even if you have missed the lesson you can feel yourself as attending it by watching the video, pausing it, going back and ahead as many times as you wish until you get the message. You can make tests, fail, watch the material, test again and so forth; you don’t have to show mastery, it’s just a learning process. As one philosopher stated, failure is only a temporary change in direction to set you straight for your next success.
I really enjoyed watching this podcast. The moral was that we should be flexible to keep pace with the developments and opportunities of new technologies in order not to waste our time on writing lectures, but using that time for a little more communication, interaction and new experiences. It will be more interesting to sit at your home comfort and do a group work with people from different countries and different nationalities, won’t it?
Source: Salman Khan. (Educator). (2011, March). Let's use video to reinvent education (Video podcast). Retrieved from http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/en/salman_khan_let_s_use_video_to_reinvent_education.html
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