Created before the MOOC moment of 2012, Salmar Khan was inspired to create an educational website that would be accessible to anyone in the world. The result of his efforts was The Khan Academy. Founded in 2006, the academy is a 501(c)(3) not-for-profit organization offers classes in a variety of subjects and skill levels. The MOOC provider’s main medium is video, through which students can access the materials for the course of their choosing.
Class Formats:
If a Massive Open Online Course is defined as an online course through which individuals can learn about a subject and interact with a larger group of people, then The Khan Academy is not a MOOC provider. While Khan encourages successful students to help learners who may be struggling with a subject, this is not an essential aspect of The Khan Academy experience.
That being said, the MOOC provider’s course format has much in common with the typical MOOC. Specifically, the way in which The Khan Academy delivers its materials, through video presentations, is quite similar to how students encounter subject matters within a traditional MOOC. Furthermore, students are also assessed through computer-graded exercises.
According to The Khan Academy’s YouTube page, the course provider’s 34,598 videos have been viewed over 485 million times. In an effort to make the course materials easier to understand, Khan opted to have the video presenters explain their thinking out loud while completing a particular practice question. Students who take the courses can also track their progress on the website and complete practice exercises attached to each video.
The Khan Academy also offers students the chance to complete web-based exercises. The difficulty of the questions increase according to the student’s skill level.
Typical Class Offerings:
The most impressive area of The Khan Academy’s course offerings is mathematics. The website offers course materials for student through grades K-12. As a result, students who need help mastering skills ranging from basic counting to differential equations will be able to watch instructional videos and complete practice questions in an effort to master those skills.
The Khan Academy’s science offerings including biology, physics, and chemistry. The materials are roughly designed to cover a first-year high school or college course. Students can also study course materials on health and medicine, organic chemistry, and cosmology and astronomy.
Students interested in learning about economics and finance could also benefit from what The Khan Academy has to offer. The website offers courses in microeconomics, macroeconomics, entrepreneurship, and finance and capital markets. The entrepreneurship series offers learners access to a series of interviews with successful entrepreneurs like Mark Ecko of Ecko Unlimited and Elon Musk of Tesla Motors.
While The Khan Academy covers just three humanities subject matters (history, American civics, and music), the MOOC provider’s Art History offerings are quite extensive. Students can even study for the AP Art History through the materials offered on the site.
Learners who wish to improve their computer skills can take advantage of The Khan Academy’s computer programming and cryptology course offerings. The programming series focuses on JavaScript language and ProcessingJS library.
Finally, The Khan Academy also offers standardized test preparation courses. Students interested in taking the SAT, MCAT, or GMAT will be able to take full-length practice tests and complete practice test question sets. For the SAT in particular, the website offers questions taken directly from the test. The Khan Academy has also partnered with College Board, the organization behind the SAT, to create free practice materials for the new version of the standardized test set to be released in 2016.
Partner Resources:
Various institutions have also donated resources to The Khan Academy, including The British Museum, The J. Paul Getty Museum, the Asian Art Museum, The Museum of Modern Art, and NASA. The latter’s section addresses questions of how mathematics and science are used to understand the solar system, offering students an opportunity to apply the skills learned through The Khan Academy’s course materials.
The Khan Academy also features partner content from NBA superstar LeBron James. The section, “LeBron asks”, features James asking questions related to the game of basketball. For example, one of videos has the basketball player asking the questions “If Earth’s history were a basketball game, when did humans appear?” These videos offer students the opportunity to learn important materials with relation to a non-scholastic medium.
Languages:
The Khan Academy’s course materials are available in a variety of languages. In total, the website has been translated into 23 languages. However, the course videos of the website have been translated into 65 different languages.
Donating Parties:
The Khan Academy has received donations from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the Lemann Foundation, the Carlos Slim Foundation, and Google. Several of the donations have been aimed at helping to facilitate The Khan Academy’s translation of course materials into different languages.