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Let Them Eat Khan Academy
theodp writes "Connie Ballmer announced that Seattle's Lakeside School and nine other private schools have formed the Global Online Academy to enhance learning opportunities for students at the elite institutions, some of which charge upwards of $35,000 in tuition and count the likes of Bill Gates, President Obama, Steve Case, Mitt Romney, and Sean Lennon as alums. 'Independent schools have traditionally struggled with how to provide their education models and resources to a wider student population in order to serve a public purpose,' Ballmer explained. 'While the initial classes will be for students at member schools only there is potential to share them with a broader community and help narrow the disparity of educational opportunity.' In the meantime, there's always Khan Academy."
Color me cynical, but somehow I get the feeling that institutions whose clientele are exclusively the super-rich do not have a real stake in trying to minimize the disparity between their clients and the less fortunate. They may put up something "for everyone" for its PR value, but I wouldn't be surprised if at the same time they're emphasizing to their paying customers how much better is the education their kids are getting.
This is in contrast with private universities, which are also terribly expensive, but which have a tradition of valuing education for its social benefits. Even these universities may one day get to the point where they feel economically threatened by the free material they post (for example MIT's OpenCourseWare) --- for example, if a new demographic of students starts to appear which demand to pay less but only to be tested and certified for their degrees, because the free educational material available is good enough for them.
The reaction to Khan and his incredible resources is universal: People applaud and cheerfully encourage him to "keep going"
Now imagine if the reaction to Linus Torvalds had been the same in 1993. "Neato, Linus! More please! You're really awesome to have done all this yourself!"
Luckily for the world, that was not the reaction to the release of the Linux source code back then. People were like "Yeah, this is a great start, now let me add something to this so that we can build this into a fully functioning system." To be fair, Linus openly encouraged this and provided a framework for volunteer contributions. Khan doesn't do that, but does nothing to discourage it.
Yeah, his lessons are the work of one man, but already, they contain like 5% of a full curriculum of education. With 19 other Khans working in their spare time, we could finish the job and release "curriculum 1.0". Then, hopefully, many other Khans would work on augmenting and improving it. But it's almost shocking to me that something this important and easy is not being done. There might even be money in it for a company that releases free/openly licensed teaching material and then administers for-pay achievement tests or certification tests. If this were done right, it would be the obviously right path for gifted students, homeschoolers, and people who lack access to good traditional schools. They could go through the material at their own pace and take certification tests as quickly as they work through the material. Wise governments would even offer them a refund for the cost of tests they passed. It's much cheaper than the same government paying to "school" them.