TGIF – Yes You Kahn!

As the week winds down, we wind down with some tidbits for your information, education, health, and enjoyment.

Quote of the Week:  “There is nothing so stupid as the educated man if you get him off the thing he was educated in.”  Will Rogers  (Editorial aside: This is especially true in an election year.)

Humor Break: “I was thrown out of college for cheating on the metaphysics exam: I looked into the soul of another boy.”  Woody Allen

Stat of the Week: Over 3,400 videos and counting.  Continuing with my September back-to-(Online)-school theme, my neighbor, Lutisha, reminded me that no back-to-school Online Education report would be complete without the Kahn Academy.  It is free.  It is worldwide.  It is for anyone.  It is for everyone.  It contains short videos, assessments, progress reports.  It is massive and excellent.  I am going to let them tell you about themselves:

“We’re a not-for-profit with the goal of changing education for the better by providing a free world-class education for anyone anywhere. All of the site’s resources are available to anyone. It doesn’t matter if you are a student, teacher, home-schooler, principal, adult returning to the classroom after 20 years, or a friendly alien just trying to get a leg up in earthly biology (editorial note: see today’s cartoon). The Khan Academy’s materials and resources are available to you completely free of charge.

“Our library of videos covers K-12 math, science topics such as biology, chemistry, and physics, and even reaches into the humanities with playlists on finance and history. Each video is a digestible chunk, approximately 10 minutes long, and especially purposed for viewing on the computer.

“A world of skills to practice, with help along the way.  Practice math at your own pace with our adaptive assessment environment. You can start at 1+1 and work your way into calculus or jump right into whatever topic needs some brushing up.

“Every time you work on a problem or watch a video, the Khan Academy remembers what you’ve learned and where you’re spending your time. We keep all of this data private but expose powerful statistics to each user and their coaches. You get at-a-glance information about everything you’ve been learning and whether or not you’ve been hitting your goals.”

So far they have delivered 193,000,000+, including a whole bunch of new computer tutorials.  Must be doing something right!

Action Tip: Check out Kahn videos on business and personal finance.  Tons of stuff.

The Self-Development Corner: All this month I have been writing about Coursera, the new(ish) Online Universal University (free for all but noncredit).  My hope is that some of you will try it.  So today I will give some description of the process.  I will use the course I am taking, The History of the World since 1300 as a typical example.  What I have learned in my first two weeks is that the course is much like its subtitle World’s Together, Worlds Apart.  The classroom course and the online course are similar (together) in two ways.  One, they are university level classes and two, there is an assigned curriculum.

They are different (apart) in several ways.  The most significant difference to you, the user, is the online course offers you several flexible levels of study, leaving it up to you how much you want from the course.  If you do the minimum, you would put in about 2+ hours a week.  The maximum could be as much as 10-12 hours a week.  You choose.

(1) You can sign up for the course and simply watch 2 hours of lecture material each week (broken up into 10 -20 minute segments).  Each video segment has a one question “quiz”.  You can even skip the quiz.  I prefer to take the quiz, but I confess my heart rate increases just before I submit my answer.

(2) You can add reading to your study.  This course recommends one book.  (I rented it from Amazon for $33).  Some of the book can be found on the Internet for free.  There is one assigned chapter each week.  Each chapter is between 40 and 50 pages.  I find the reading slow going, so I invest about 2-3 hours reading the chapter.  (3) The next level of depth is writing essays.  In this class there are 6 essays assigned throughout the 12 weeks of the course.  Each essay is expected to be about 750 words and will be reviewed and “graded” by five peers.  (In this respect it is similar to 360-degree feedback, the data is yours and yours alone.)  Each essay will require several hours of work.

If you still want more, there are (4) nine weekly Global Dialogue videos added beginning in week 3.  These feature other (Princeton) professors and on campus students discussing issues from the course and questions submitted by the virtual students; (5) the Professor’s Forum where the professor and a Ph.D. student discuss the lectures; and (6) student initiated forum on topics of interest.  One particularly interesting student forum is called “Ideas and Faiths”.  This link has had 1,000s of hits and 100s of posts as people around the world try to grasp the full implications of faith in the world we live in.  I have found this link to be totally fascinating.  (7) There are also student initiated study groups in some of the major cities of the world.  In my town I am the only student enrolled, so that’s out.  Otherwise I am all in!

Bill Bradley

Bill Bradley (mostly) retired after 35 years in organizational consulting, training and management development. During those years he worked internally with seven organizations and trained and consulted externally with more than 90 large and small businesses, government agencies, hospitals and schools.