Consider your schooling for a minute.What if you had lectures for home work and exercises for class time? What if you could have spent more one on one time with your teacher to help you really grasp the details of concepts, and help you solve problems rather than sitting in a classroom trying to concentrate on the 5th lesson of the day? What if you could have rewound the teacher to listen again to the part that you didn’t quite understand?Would it have made a difference? Would you have learnt faster (or at least at your pace), been more engaged, been more interested?It’s underway.The Khan Academy, started by Salman Khan, is a fascinating project that is using videos and the web to turn education upside down and is a great example of opposite thinking. Starting off as a series of tutorials for his cousins, explaining algebra and other maths topics, Salman’s videos have now racked up 53 million views on Youtube and have expanded from maths to a huge array of topics (now there are over 2500 videos and growing). The Khan Academy is now being backed by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation amongst many others, and looking to roll out a full curriculum to schools around the world based on self paced learning, game theory, and everything that the web and technology now have to offer.There are a couple of things that I really love about this idea:

1. Salman did this initally to solve a problem for his cousins. The web has meant that his solution has been amplified, taken up and loved, by kids and parents all over the world.
2. It has the potential to take a traditional education approach of teacher in front of the class with minimum 1 on 1, to maximising teacher 1 on 1 time – a key ingredient to personalising education.

If you’re a believer that education is key to solving the world’s problems (like I am), then the execution of this great idea has enormous potential.Here is Salman explaining the concept in a TED presentation:[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nTFEUsudhfs&w=560&h=349]