For more than a century, we’ve viewed colleges and schools as the pathway to learning. Open educational video resources are changing that, and, in the process, more and more of our students are learning some valuable lessons about how “learning” really works. Today, individuals of all ages who have failed or struggled in school are realizing they’re not “stupid” afterall. And this could lead to some very interesting changes in the future course of education.

Cognitive Surplus: Consumers to Creators

Clay Shirky’s theory of Cognitive Surplus examines how 21st-century web technologies — like YouTube, Flickr, etc. — are now extending an opportunity to people around the world to exchange the free time they spent in the 20th century as “consumers” of content (think “couch potato”) into “creators” of content. Salman Khan is a perfect example of Shirky’s model. 

Sal Khan, the creator of the ever-popular Khan Academy began, got started by using digital technologies to create simple instructional math videos for his nephew, recording them in his closet, and sharing them online. He quickly began to receive support, praise, and requests for more from people he didn’t know. So he made more and shared more.  And, well, here we are.  Recently, the Khan Academy has received millions of dollars in funding from major corporations and foundations, including Google, Hewlett, and Bill and Melinda Gates.

However, it’s not the “content” that will change the world, it’s the effects of this content on people who, until now, have been sold the idea that they are failures, incapable of learning. This, I believe, is how open content will change the world and, in turn, foster change in our educational systems.

Empowering All Learning Rhythms

Last month, I subscribed to the Khan Academy’s Google Group. Since then, I have been a regular lurker. I asked myself one day, “Why are you doing this? You have so many other things you should be doing.”  But I realized that I do it because the stories I read are so darn inspirational. 

E-mails come in every day from teachers, students, and people who just want to learn. Some request new content, some offer suggestions for improving existing content, but many write simply to say “thank you.” And these letters, I believe, hold a powerful lesson for us all.

One message sent the the Khan Academy that stands out to me was written by a 49-year old male I will call “Kenneth.” He is a non-traditional learner who has stumbled with learning challenges his entire life. Here is an excerpt in which he compares his experiences learning from the Khan videos to his experiences in school and college:

My name is [Kenneth] and I am nearly 49. I am currently going to a reasonably well-recognized community college in … New York and I am taking Civil Engineering there. I have had an unusual relationship with the field of education because of the way that I learn. I knew that I had a learning problem when I was in high school and was given a bunch of tests … many [that] are still used today, and told that I had a learning disability. The more that I tried to find out the description of this [disability], the more … the psychologist[s] became vague…basically, they really didn’t understand what my learning problems were …

I have gone to psychologists all my life because … I have always felt like I am an underachiever due to the fact that when I … went to class, the STYLE of teaching was not interactive. I learn so much more, like most students do, when learning is … interactive. I find that the informal speech used in the videos on your web site [makes them feel] interactive … Instead, I have [had] to wade through all the possibilities of what [my] instructor “might”want because he is so unclear in presenting information.

Bottom-line, everybody operates at a different pace, and this economy will be most successful when most of us can operate at the pace that best suits us, as we all do things AT A DIFFERENT RHYTHM. WE LEARN AT A DIFFERENT RHYTHM AND THINK AT A DIFFERENT RHYTHM.

The Khan Academy videos have enlightened Kenneth. Their visually-based content and accessible, clear instruction has empowered him to understand that he can learn. And he now sees that his “problems” are merely an effect of an educational system crafted to support specific learning “rhythms.” There are hundreds of thousands of self-proclaimed “underachievers” just like Kennth who are learning from the Khan videos and, in turn, learning that they aren’t stupid. That’s a beautiful thing.

Learning Diversity

The human brain is a beautifully complex organ that, like the colors of our skin and the varieties in our fingerprints, varies from person to person. When I think about the way human brains learn, I picture a rainbow comprised of diverse, vibrant colors that blend into one another, forming variations and nuances. And when I picture the education system in the United States, I imagine taking a tiny slice of that rainbow — one or two colors –  preserving their brilliance them and removing the saturation from the rest. The “other” colors must be muted because they’re problematic and disruptive to a system constructured upon meeting the needs and abilities of the privileged colors and, in turn, get marginalized despite the fact that they’re just as integral to the spectrum as the rest (as Kenneth makes clear).

These “other” colors, of course, are representative of the students who are informed year and after, standardized test after standardized test, that they’re not good enough. Sometimes they are given special labels — “dyslexic,” “dysgraphic,” “ADHD,” slow reader, too chatty … I’m sure you can add to this list on your own. 

Whether the message is delivered through poor grades or a diagnosis, it’s received loud and clear. And by the time these students graduate high school (if they graduate high school), their sense of self-worth as a learner has crumbled. They really believe they can’t do it.  I have had these students in my classes and they are the reason I love to teach at community colleges — watching them become enlightened and empowered is truly magical. 

New Paths to Learning

Once upon a time, our path to learning was the sidewalk that led to school. Today there are more options. Our new culture of creating and sharing has opened the floodgates on the amount of content available at our fingertips. Videos are now easy to create and easy to share. Moving forward, the rich, visual experience of video coupled with the warmth of a human voice and the flexibility to pause, rewind, and replay from a computer or mobile device in support of each learner’s unique “rhythm” will do one of two things: be leveraged by educators to support and inspire our students’ learning or act as a subversive disruption to maintaining the status quo of traditional synchronous, lecture-based learning.

Clearly, not all the content out there is life changing, but when stellar content exists, our networked community naturally creates pathways to it, like a prehistoric migratory culture in search of food. And that’s what has happened with the Khan Academy.

In the future, how will these self-empowered learners, like Kenneth, fare in our formalized education system — now that the secret is out of the bag and they know, plain and simple, they aren’t the problem?