LRNT526 U1 a3 – Academic Reflection on Khan Academy and a Specific Issue Exploration
Our team, Khan Artists, selected the Khan Academy as the Open Education Resource (OER) to experience and work with on this course. Individually, I will explore the possible effects and consequences of adding a local complement to what a specific Khan Academy resource offers to the students from the standpoint of their regular curriculum.
Kami Thordarson thought Khan Academy’s to be a helpful resource to supplement her fifth grade instruction at an elementary school in California, US (Thompson, 2011, p. 2). Khan Academy is a non-profit organization that actually offers short lectures in the form of YouTube videos available to the public through the Internet (Kaplan, 2010).
The outcomes that Thordarson reports after a few months of introducing Khan Academy to her classroom are impressive. The results refer to students’ self-motivation on the one hand, and with increased individual performance on the other. These aspects are perfectly aligned with the self-determination theory (SDT) which, as stated by Deci and Ryan (as cited by Chen & Jang, 2010, p. 742) explains from the standpoint of a general theory of motivation the dynamics of the human needs, motivation, and well-being with regard to the social context surrounding the individual. SDT, as coined by Deci and Ryan (as cited by Chen & Jang, 2010, p. 742), implies the experience of choice as a core piece of human functioning.
Furthermore, SDT as a theoretical framework puts together elements of online learning such as autonomy, relatedness, and competency as determinants of motivation (Chen & Jang, 2010). And last but not least, three elements correspond to fundamental aspects of online learning: flexibility for learning; computer-mediated communication and social interaction; and the challenge of developing or acquiring technical skills along with the content being taught (Chen & Jang, 2010).
As part of our team warm-up activity, each member signed-up in Khan Academy and took the first two introductory courses on how to program a web page. The experience allowed us to confirm the simplicity and friendliness of how the content is presented, as well as the elements that keep the student hooked on using the resource.
The specific aspect that I chose to explore refers to the localization of a resource that would be complementary to the Khan Academy. Without pretending to compete with Khan, the addition of the local resource aims to increase the student’s sense of ownership due to familiar elements that would be incorporated with the local resource.
It will be interesting to learn the effects local elements would create on the students, and if those elements actually favor the learning in the audience. The setting would be as follows. After completing a Khan video the student would see the corresponding local video that will cover the same content, and this time several features of the local environment in which the student lives shall be included in the lesson as well as one of the local teachers conducting the session.
Thank you for taking the time to read my work. I will appreciate the feedback I receive from instructor and peers, since it will contribute to my further researching the topic and learning deeper with this assignment.
References
Chen, K. C., & Jang, S. J. (2010). Motivation in online learning: Testing a model of self-determination theory. Computers in Human Behavior 26. 741–752. Retrieved from https://s3.amazonaws.com/academia.edu.documents/32717732/Chen_Jang_CHB_%282010%29.pdf?AWSAccessKeyId=AKIAIWOWYYGZ2Y53UL3A&Expires=1524290148&Signature=5bvLt2pL2XXwe%2Fl6d8%2F2txOxTko%3D&response-content-disposition=inline%3B%20filename%3DChen_K._C._and_Jang_S._-J._2010_._Motiva.pdf
Kaplan, D. A., (2010, August). Innovation in education: Bill Gates’ favorite teacher. Fortune. Retrieved from https://web.archive.org/web/20101223035558/
http://money.cnn.com/2010/08/23/technology/sal_khan_academy.fortune/
Thompson, C., (2011, July). How Khan Academy is changing the rules of education. Wired Digital. Retrieved from https://s3.amazonaws.com/academia.edu.documents
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GZ2Y53UL3A&Expires=1524258037&Signature=6nHI8vA7MOFFH49qhUZMPjrdbpw%3D&response-content-disposition=inline%3B%20filename%3DKhan_Academy
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Localization of learning resources is a very interesting and current topic. Localization can take place in a number of ways, e.g.:
– enabling: open licencing with permissions and arrangements to permit the 5Rs of open educational resources OER – retain, reuse, revise, remix, redistribute (much of this enabled by open licensing, e.g. Creative Commons): http://opencontent.org/definition/ – and much video content isn’t licensed for this.
– as you indicate, having the teacher undertake additional framing and contextualization to leave the existing resource as is, but present from a new or even contradictory perspective.
Question – what would be your method for undertaking this research?
I would opt for the second alternative mainly because the school district is actually starting a major expansion and renovation project. The opportunity is such that each campus would have its own particularities, which might as well make each campus as a sub-project within the big project. For instance, while the school where I taught for five years was built in the mid 1950s so it will be demolished and rebuilt, another campus built in 2011 shall be expanded to increase 30% its capacity in addition to new facilities for labs and an auditorium.
My reasoning is as follows, since each campus where the localization of online learning resources is used the characteristics as so unique that there would be no need to restrict the opennes of the OER. Probably the only requirement would be, for each piece of localization to be produced, to obtain the approval of the school board to make sure no sensitive information is inappropriately exposed. Being the school district part of the public education system transparency should prevail but there is always a protocol to observe.
Thus for any given topic in Khan Academy, the localization for a given campus shall focus on specific aspects of the new facilities that offer good input for that same topic.