Kahn Academy – DIY OER to Educate the World

Last Friday was an interesting day. I was tipped off by a colleague, Paul Leman, about the Kahn Academy when he sent me a link to Glen Moody’s blog post. At first sight the Kahn Academy looked like a fantastic resource, with 1000+ videos on various topic for students of all ages. But being one who never takes things on face value, I wanted to check things out and see what others were saying about this resource. That’s when I found David Wiley’s post which explained how there was no Creative Commons license attached to the content. I had a look and he seemed to be right. David had written to Sal Kahn the creator of the Kahn Academy previously, but he decided to drop him a further email. Then, as is evident from the comments David received on his post, everyone was immensely pleased to see that by the end of that day Sal had acted on David’s call and prominently displayed the CC license on the Kahn Academy homepage making it an OER for reuse, remixing, sharing, etc. I immediately embedded this video in my Daily Interests blog under the title Education for the World until I had time to write in more detail.

Now I have to take my hat off to Sal Kahn for a truly immense resource. What he has achieved with the Kahn Academy is nothing short of incredible. Single handedly generating instructional videos covering subjects including:

• Economics
• Finance
• Chemistry
• Arithmetic
• Pre-algebra
• Algebra
• Geometry
• Biology
• Trigonometry
• Precalculus
• Statistics
• Probability
• Calculus
• Differential Equations
• History
• Linear Algebra
• Physics

What a wealth of information. This has to be place in the category alongside Academic Earth and Udemy.

This story excites me on a number of levels. Perhaps one of the most significant is the difference anyone can make by openly publishing knowledge online to freely educate others. It’s an approach I’m trying to take myself to make a difference, however small; it is something that I passionately believe in. More power to anyone and everyone doing the same.

Subject Professor – Social Sciences and Arts

I first happened upon the Economics version of the “Professor” series of these Social Sciences and Arts sites, each of which has the subject preceding Professor. They include:

• EconomyProfessor.com
• PoliticsProfessor.com
• SociologyProfessor.com
• PhilosophyProfessor.com
• TheologyProfessor.com
• ArtProfessor.com

Each of the different sites is of the same format, generally with terms categorized into theories and theorists, or their equivalent for the particular subject. Each of the terms is then defined, in a similar way to that in a dictionary or glossary of terms. The definitions are trawled from primary or secondary sources, and you can suggest amendments or additions.

There also tends to be a couple of useful links out from each site, be that to a discussion forum or online journals, etc.

These appear to be useful sites to students of the subjects, however, these aren’t my particular subject areas, so, as always, you’d need to assess them against other sources to validate accuracy.