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You can now take every Khan Academy course via the iPad
Your iPad just became an even more powerful learning tool than it already was, and you can thank Khan Academy for that. The non-profit education hub just brought its entire catalog of over 150,000 courses to Apple's tablet, meaning you can spend the rest of your life learning things you never realized you needed to know. Khan Academy has had an iOS app for a while, but the experience it offered was somewhat watered down compared to its desktop counterpart. By expanding the app to include the full compliment of lessons, it's definitely going to appeal to a lot more would-be students. A new handwriting recognition feature has also been added which will let you scribble down notes and have them checked for accuracy by the app. Just don't expect your iPhone version of the app to be this awesome, as the current update is iPad-exclusive for the time being. [via The Verge]
MMO Family: How Khan Academy redefines learning
In past editions of MMO Family, I've looked how games have attempted to teach and entertain -- and how challenging it is to do both. This week, I'd like to flip things around a bit and look at an educational site that, while not an MMO, does incorporate some gaming characteristics. It's a site called Khan Academy, and it offers free instructional videos on a variety of topics for students of all ages. This week, we're replacing our virtual swords with keyboards and substituting our colorful avatars for colorfully drawn instructional videos. We're taking a week off from cute pets and monster-slaying to look at how Khan Academy is turning the current system of public education on its head.
Khan Academy releases iPad app
MIT alum Salman Khan has an ambitious plan. He wants to provide anyone, anywhere with a quality education. To that end, he's created a website with over 2,700 K-12 lectures spanning math, history, science and more. Now he's bringing all this online learning to the iPad with his new Khan academy app. In keeping with Khan's philosophy of learning, the Khan Academy app and all its resources are available for free. The app lets you login to your Khan Academy account and track your progress as you work through the courses. You can also download videos and playlists for learning on the go and follow along with subtitles that'll help you navigate through each lecture. You can grab the Khan Academy app for free from the iOS App Store.
Khan Academy iPad app screenshots show progress
The Khan Academy is an online non-profit organization whose goal is to provide a "free world-class education to anyone anywhere." Think of it as TED for everyone, except Khan's videos, resources, and lesson plans can actually help you be one of the TED speakers one day. Currently the Khan Academy is only accessible through a browser, but, John Resig, Dean of Open Source and head of JavaScript development at the non-profit, has shown off a few alpha screenshots of the upcoming Khan Academy iPad app, and it looks awesome. Initially the 1.0 version of the iPad app will allow video navigation and viewing, interactive transcripts, and offline support. However, future versions of the iPad app will allow for in-app exercises. No word yet on a release date for the app, but combining the Khan Academy with the iPad could prove to be a truly disruptive combination of technologies for traditional education. And especially with kids coming out of US colleges with upwards of $150,000 in student debt, perhaps our more traditional education models need to be disrupted.
