Do you wanna be splendid? Blend it!

For many years e-learning was a buzz-word linked to many promises but also to many failures. This year I visited some conferences and attended several workshops and lectures related to blended learning and e-learning. It was remarkable to discover how many of my fellow participants were either in an early stage of implementing e-learning in their organization or were unhappy about earlier attempts to implement computer aided learning and struggling to find better ways. Many of the solutions proposed were linked to embedding in the organization. I will try to cover them in a future post.
Now I want to dedicate this posting to a hugely successful example of implementation of simple e-learning tools and of blending it with other forms of learning.
Salman Khan was a young brilliant guy working for a hedge fund, who made some very simple video clips for his cousins to help them understand mathematics. According to Salman himself they preferred a video over seeing him in real life. Reasons mentioned: a video is always there when you need it and a video never gets bored explaining the same thing twice, or three times......
Strangely, Khan was not upset but rather felt encouraged to make many more videos. The videos became available via youtube and the rest is as they say, history. Within a few years Khans simple videos attracted a crowd of more than one million people. The Khan academy features now in 2012 over 3000 videos and the number is rapidly increasing.
This is the known story and a success on its own. However Salman Khan's ambition is now to really improve the quality of learning and realises that merely adding a few thousand videos to youtube and organising them in a catalogue will not do that job. His proposal is to "flip the class". Instead of using teachers time to explain basic rules and define tasks and projects as homework, he proposes to give the basic explanations and lectures as video and save teachers time for setting up projects. In addition he makes databases with quizzes and questions available to students and teachers. Teachers can easily monitor the progress of the students and dedicate time to the people who need it most. In my personal opinion it is this mix of simple videos, elaborate quizzing and monitoring techniques and good-old fashioned teachers attention which will prove blended learning to become splendid learning.
For more info on Khan and his academy follow this link On the top of the page there is a section referring to many inspiring speeches and interviews.