Khan Academy and Interactive Content in Digital Education - Visualign

During learning a student forms a mental model of the concepts. Understanding a concept means to have a model detailed enough to be able to answer questions, solve problems, predict a system’s behavior. The power of interactive graphics and models comes from the ability of the student to “ask questions” by modifying parameters and receive specific answers to help refine or correct the evolving mental model. Digital solutions are bringing innovations to many of these areas. One of the most innovative approaches is the Khan Academy. What started as an experiment just a few years ago by way of recording short, narrated video lessons and sharing them via YouTube with family and friends has grown into a broad-based approach to revolutionize learning. Over the years, founder Sal Khan has developed a large collection of more than 3000 such videos. Backed by prominent endorsers such as Bill Gates the not-for-profit Khan Academy has developed a web-based infrastructure which can handle a large number of users and collect and display valuable statistics for students and teachers. The Khan Academy has received lots of media attention as well, with coverage on CBS 60 minutes, a TED talk and more. The videos have by now been seen more than 130 million times!