{"id":357,"date":"2020-04-19T21:36:00","date_gmt":"2020-04-20T01:36:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/malat-webspace.royalroads.ca\/rru0118\/?p=357"},"modified":"2020-04-19T21:36:00","modified_gmt":"2020-04-20T01:36:00","slug":"team-2-initial-summary-of-learning-event-and-delivery-technology","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/malat-webspace.royalroads.ca\/rru0118\/team-2-initial-summary-of-learning-event-and-delivery-technology\/","title":{"rendered":"Team 2: Initial Summary of Learning Event and Delivery Technology"},"content":{"rendered":"

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Photo by Elizaliv. Retrieved from https:\/\/www.dreamstime.com\/elizaliv_info<\/p>\n

Our team examined educational video and audio, choosing to focus our critical inquiry on the Khan Academy video learning platform. Khan Academy is a free US-based site that offers instructional content on an assortment of topics. The content is mainly delivered in video, using narration, animation, storytelling and interviewing formats to express information for a variety of age groups, from children to adults. The site also uses text-based content and in some instances, a mixture of both formats to best convey content.\u00a0 The mission of Khan Academy is \u201cto provide free, world<\/span>\u2011<\/span>class education for anyone, anywhere\u201d (Khan Academy, 2018a, para. 2). The Academy has structured their content around the core standards of K-12 schooling in the United States (Khan Academy, n.d.-b) so that the content can be effective in its integration in school classrooms across the country, as well as having considerations for content applicability more broadly in other global educational systems.<\/span><\/p>\n

Khan Academy represents an evolution of video learning content, hailed as revolutionary by some (Thompson, 2011), and criticized as insufficient by others (Bhaskar, 2015; Bates, 2012; Schwartz, 2013). Compared to other video platforms, it has an intuitive interface and a visually appealing style of presenting content. It has helped millions of students around the world to study and understand concepts through approachable video lessons<\/span> (<\/span>Khan Academy, 2018). If this free and widely available platform is helping students to learn, what is the controversy? (Technovation, 2012; Thomas, 2012). There are several points of criticism that educators have pinned on Khan Academy and platforms like it. One of the salient criticisms raised is that video lessons represent content\u2014albeit presented in a colourful package\u2014and that educators and researchers have been arguing for years that learning is more than just content (Schwartz, 2013). Thomas (2012) also argues that platforms that portray themselves as replacing the need for teachers and classroom education are disregarding valuable educational research and learning theories.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Through the process of critical inquiry, our team began to unravel the larger socio-cultural issues of video learning platforms such as Khan Academy. As we read blogs and researched this topic, we aimed to look beyond questions of effectiveness and focus instead on \u201cstate-of-the-actual\u201d questions (Selwyn, 2010, p. 70). This process led us to the following lines of inquiry, which we invite our cohort members to consider and respond with their perspectives:<\/span><\/p>\n