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.