Some six years ago, Salman Khan started tutoring cousins by placing video math lessons on line. Soon people who weren’t even related to Khan were watching the videos. So Salman Khan created a free online instructional service called the Khan Academy.
Traditional classroom teachers found the same videos online and starting turning the educational process upside down in what is now known as “flip” education.
In traditional education, the teacher gives the classroom instruction, students ask questions, and the teacher assigns homework to reinforce the lesson. The teacher checks the homework the next day completing the educational loop.
But in flip education, students watch the video instruction at home. The “homework” is actually done in the classroom where the teacher can help re-enforce the video lesson.
The video lessons have several advantages over traditional teacher presentations. The student can stop the video at any point to take notes or replay a section that the student may have difficulty understanding. The student can replay the video instruction twenty times (maybe more) to fully understand the instruction. The student can go back to previous lessons to refresh the content or place the new content in the context of previously learned material.
Not all students learn at the same rate. One student can get hung up on a particular idea or skill not being able to advance with his/her peers in the classroom. That student may fall farther and farther behind. But with flip education, there is no set pace. A student may be stuck at a particular point, finally have a breakthrough moment, and then race ahead, sometimes faster and farther ahead of the peers who once left that student so far behind.
For years educators understood that a good educational delivery system requires individualized instructions and pacing, but until the advent of the computers, educators had difficulty individualizing instruction. With online learning, teachers can spend more time working with students individually rather than preparing lessons or teaching to the middle.
However, flip education requires that a student have a computer and an internet connection at home. That is often not the case for students of lower socioeconomic status.
Schools can try to work around lack of access to the internet through the use of CDs or flash drives, but these solutions are cumbersome and are probably less cost effective than insuring that every student has internet access.
There is no right to a public education stated in the U.S. Constitution, but many state constitutions written in the nineteenth century and later did establish that right. Part of the right to a public education in this century may be the right to access to the internet. Even if we can’t legally establish such a right, state and local leaders should understand that such access makes economic sense, and may be one of the simplest ways to deliver education to the masses.
I sit on the MPS charter review committee that recommends possible charters to the MPS school board. I am astounded how many proposals believe that they are on the forefront of educational reform because they advocate small group work and project based learning. They believe that our public schools are still locked in the industrial factory educational delivery systems of the last century. I can assure you that fewer and fewer classrooms operate in such a manner.
The Khan Academy and similar flip educational systems may make, not just the traditional public school obsolete, but charter schools and school choice obsolete as well. Education is being transformed before our eyes.
