A Self-Appointed Teacher Runs a One-Man 'Academy' on YouTube - Technology - The Chronicle of Higher Education - 0 views
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George Mehaffy on 07 Jun 10"A Self-Appointed Teacher Runs a One-Man 'Academy' on YouTube Are his 10-minute lectures the future? Salman Khan, a former financial analyst, has created 1,400 educational videos and posted them to YouTube. "My single biggest goal is to try to deliver things the way I wish they were delivered to me," he says. By Jeffrey R. Young The most popular educator on YouTube does not have a Ph.D. He has never taught at a college or university. And he delivers all of his lectures from a bedroom closet. This upstart is Salman Khan, a 33-year-old who quit his job as a financial analyst to spend more time making homemade lecture videos in his home studio. His unusual teaching materials started as a way to tutor his faraway cousins, but his lectures have grown into an online phenomenon-and a kind of protest against what he sees as a flawed educational system. "My single biggest goal is to try to deliver things the way I wish they were delivered to me," he told me recently. The resulting videos don't look or feel like typical college lectures or any of the lecture videos that traditional colleges put on their Web sites or YouTube channels. For one thing, these lectures are short-about 10 minutes each. And they're low-tech: Viewers see only the scrawls of equations or bad drawings that Mr. Khan writes on his digital sketchpad software as he narrates."