LRNT526 Blog Post Summary

My blog posts look at different aspects of Khan Academy, which is an online educational website that provides free online education.

The first blog post compared my expectations of Khan Academy to my first experience with it, while also looking a bit at the mastery learning philosophy that Khan Academy uses along with its extensive gamification. I found Khan Academy offered a lot more than just educational videos to learn the material, including online learning tools and exercises. Mastery learning requires students to reach a high level of proficiency in a topic or competency before learning subsequent content. Gamification is using game-design elements in non-game contexts, in this example to motivate learners to continue learning.

The second blog post considered what impact Khan Academy might have in the broader sense. Khan Academy’s role in promoting and supporting the flipped classroom concept was looked at. Flipped classroom is an instructional strategy where the instructional material is delivered to students outside of the classroom, likely when students are at home, and students work on what is usually considered homework in the class with instructor support if students have questions or need help. I showed evidence supporting the idea that Khan Academy contributed significantly to the current popularity of the flipped classroom, and also briefly looked at evidence suggesting benefit from the flipped classroom approach.

The third blog post was going to look at critiques of Khan Academy but did not find as much to discuss as expected, moved on to looking at alternatives to Khan Academy if one wanted free interactive exercises in the basics of computer programming but found no viable alternatives, and ended with a brief discussion of what it means for an organization to be an non-profit organization.