Saturday, January 17, 2009

I'm going back to school!


Courtesy of Al Fin,we learn of a wonderful new online learning resource from Prof. Salman Khan. As Al Fin reports:


Khan Academy is a free online library of over 700 learning videos that make learning easy. This marvelous intutive-learning website is a labour of love from Salman Khan, investment professional and holder of multiple advanced degrees from Harvard and MIT.

Perfect for the homeschool student who is studying for the SAT, for the budding young engineer or scientist, or for anyone wanting to get better at math, physics, management, finance, banking, probability, pre-engineering etc. Example: have you been curious about Singapore Math? Khan Academy offers a series of videos to give you a good idea of what the program is all about.

Every homeschool parent should be aware of Khan Academy, as should anyone studying for the SAT or GMAT, or anyone who needs a better understanding of math, physics, probability or finance.


I think this is an absolutely brilliant idea, and a great service to the world. There are tens of thousands - no, scratch that, millions! - of kids in the Third World who can benefit from online access to this resource, if only they can get an Internet connection. Those are spreading rapidly, so one hopes they'll take advantage of it.

I'm planning to use Khan Academy myself. It's well over thirty years since I last tackled math or physics problems, and I know I've forgotten most of my high school learning in those areas. I see no reason why I can't tackle one or two short videos each week, and over a year or three, brush up my knowledge of those fields once more. It should be a lot of fun.

Thanks and congratulations to Prof. Khan for a very great service to education.

Peter

1 comment:

Easily Lost said...

I think I'm in love. (with a website)
Math was my favorite subject in high school, many many years ago. I took advanced math classes just for fun. To have a whole site dedicated to this subject is like ambrosia.
My thanks to you Peter, for posting this.