Study on Khan Academy - non of the teachers used flipped classroom...

Khan Academy is a really intriguing platform. I remember the first time when hearing of it, it was in 2009, Khan himself presented it in the BigIdeasFest in California. He had just received a big grand from Bill Gates to develop it further. I had a hard time imagining what was so cool about it. After all, it was a very classical way of "frontal teaching" where a teacher walks you through a problem. Well, this was in 2009, life before the hype on MOOCs, flipped classroom hype, etc... :)

So after lots of talk about Khan Academy, today, I was glad to find this piece of research on teachers' use of Khan Academy: How Are Teachers and Students Using Khan Academy? (comment: Funnily enough, the starting point of Khan Academy was not to be used as part of formal educational context, but rather as a "catch up tool" when the teacher wasn't really doing his/her job as ought to.)

An interesting finding:

While Khan Academy videos are often associated with the flipped classroom model in which teachers assign instructional videos to be watched at home, none of the teachers in this study used that model. And though some educators have used Khan Academy videos as a launching point for project-based learning models, none of the teachers in this study reported using that model.

So instead of an innovative new way of using the resources, teachers often resorted back to their usual classroom organisation, namely to using Khan Academy resources as part of a rotational model (some use it, while others use pen&paper and a third group receives face2face lesson), for remediation purposes or as part of self-paced studies.