Talented educators (non-traditional and traditional) and technology are going to keep coming together in new and interesting ways. There will be lots of failures, but Khan Academy will not be the only success. The article doesn't mention things like MIT's effort in this field that predate Khan's efforts etc.
The article doesn't mention MIT, but it does mention other efforts such as Mathletics. What makes Khan Academy and Mathletics stand out from MIT is that they are MUCH more than just a collection of videos. Khan and Mathletics increasingly represent entire ecosystems with points systems, competitions, tracking of your performance, and so on. That is why Khan exemplifies the future of education vs simple collections of videos like MIT.
MIT's Open CourseWare project or OCW can hardly be described as a simple collection of videos. Each and every course at MIT has put up all their educational documents including slides, exercises, tests, audio, video, schedules etc for free. Many courses also include video and other multimedia artefacts.
The key differentiator is that these are aimed at under-grad and grad students and are simple conversion of what happens in a course, where the internet is only incidental.
Khan Academy videos are aimed primarily at school students and are much shorter, more focused and completely based on the internet. The tests are geared for online testing, the metrics collected are then displayed online etc.
> Each and every course at MIT has put up all their educational documents including slides, exercises, tests, audio, video, schedules etc for free. Many courses also include video and other multimedia artefacts.
Just to prevent readers from taking that statement literally, only a small minority of courses offer all these materials. (e.g., see [1]--you can see by the icons on the left which materials are available for which courses.) Most only offer lecture notes, and even those are generally very incomplete.
What MIT has done with OCW is outstanding, and I personally have learned a lot from many courses already, but they still have quite a ways to go to meet such a comprehensive claim. More funding and enthusiasm for the effort is still very much needed.
Just as an additional note, MIT came up with a set of OCWs for introductory courses back in January that are specifically intended for independent learners (IIRC, one of the MIT's original aims for the OCW project was to provide materials for educators rather than learners). These 'OCW Scholar' courses contain complete course material, and I'm guessing we'll have more of these as time progresses.
Talented educators (non-traditional and traditional) and technology are going to keep coming together in new and interesting ways. There will be lots of failures, but Khan Academy will not be the only success. The article doesn't mention things like MIT's effort in this field that predate Khan's efforts etc.