Khan’s taking on engineering school

Salman Khan is changing the world because he is upending an education paradigm that has been dominant for almost 200 years: classroom education in brick-and-mortar buildings. . . .

By the end of 2015, he was reaching 10 million students regularly with his free video lessons:

Khan Academy at Forbes Magazine

There’s no telling how this will change the world in 25 years. The US spends around $11,000 per elementary school student per year. Khan’s expenses may run $20 million, and at 10 million students that’s $2 per student.

Granted, there are factors that don’t translate 1 to 1, but we can see that there are orders of magnitudes of difference in costs.

Recently, I noticed something interesting on Khan’s website: he is expanding into engineering.

And, here’s the thing: it looks like electrical engineering is the first engineering field to get the Khan treatment. It still looks like it’s in development because it remains incomplete, but take a look:

https://www.khanacademy.org/science/electrical-engineering

What do you think? Could you learn electrical engineering using Khan’s methods as well as you did at college?

If so, what does that mean for the 900-year-old university model?

There are no videos yet, but I do know this: my professors would not have let me pause and rewind their lectures so that I could listen to their point again. The best professors were happy to repeat themselves a few times.

Now, with video, you can have them repeat themselves endlessly and they’ll never get annoyed.

Provocative stuff. The next 40 years will be interesting, indeed.

What do you think?