A big idea driving Khan Academy is a belief in “mastery learning”—that students should show proficiency in one set of materials before moving on to the next. The nonprofit’s latest push to make mastery learning mainstream involves partnering with school districts who adopt Khan Academy’s materials and platform.
There’s hundreds of thousands of teachers who are using Khan Academy. But when we went to districts they said, “We need support. We need training. We need integration with our rostering systems. Ideally, integration with our assessments. We want integration with district-level dashboards.” – Sal Kahn of Kahn Academy
Sometimes overlooked, logistics are a big part of what “schools” do, in the sense that students are part of a big machine and many variables need to be managed, organized, recorded, arranged, tracked. The article below talks about how one very successful online asynchronized learning tools/ videos company is trying to mesh with school district logistics, and something called rostering.
IOW, the new ways of learning which don’t require schools per se, need some MO that accomplishes integration into existing school “systems”. Thus the task for learning innovation isn’t just the quality new online tools themselves needing to be optimized and scaled up while still being well integrated into local cultures.
It’s also a seemingly much different challenge of figuring out integration with the “school systems currently extant”.
It’s one of the classic innovation conundrums: work with the system as it exists, or route around it with something obviously superior, as Buckminister Fuller advocated.
The educational bureaucracies have swallowed up a great deal of innovation over recent decades, without truly taking advantage of new approaches. Perhaps the current pandemic disruptions provide some additional ways forward in allowing education to innovate “the way it should/could”.
' Mainstream. Will Partnering With Schools Help? | EdSurge News