A few weeks ago when I reviewed OpenLearn’s Succeed With Maths MOOCs, I said that there was a much better option out there.
Course Title: Various, depending on what you want to learn
Provider: Khan Academy
Price: Free
Level: Introductory, Intermediate, Advanced
Effort: Self-paced
Prerequisites: None
Completion awards: In-site badges
About the course:
Khan Academy says they’re not a MOOC. They’re Massive in intake, Open in philosophy, Online by nature … So that just leaves Courses. They say they’re not a MOOC since they don’t have structured, led courses with beginnings and ends. But they do have courses. In fact, they have several different flavours of courses. They have subjects, missions, skills, and … well, some kind of skill grouping that isn’t explicitly defined. It’s in the vein of a cMOOC, rather than an xMOOC.
You just drop in, and drop out, and study what you need to study. I’m not sure if the instruction is really as fantastic as I think it is, or if it’s just presented in a way that my unique brain makeup interprets and absorbs well, but it’s fantastic for me.
In junior high school, I had a teacher who held me back from the next year’s advanced maths class, because while I’d performed well in exams, I didn’t do any of the coursework. Then in high school another teacher noticed that the rest of the class asked me to re-teach what he’d finished lecturing about every day. His response was to force be back up into advanced maths the following year. The result was that I skipped trigonometry entirely.
I’ve struggled through with trigonometric functions, having taught myself a few of the rules, and then using the basic blocks I knew to struggle through more advanced issues, by combining those blocks with each other or with basic algebra. But I’ve always felt like there was a huge gap in my learning because of this, and I’ve been a little ashamed of my skills in mathematics because of that gap. I had tried multiple books over the years to fill that gap, but didn’t really feel like it got me anywhere.
Khan Academy filled that gap within 12 days. In fact, what it did is show me in elegant, logical steps that were effortless to take in, that I’d gotten it right all along. But now I don’t have to re-work and re-invent trigonometry each time I tackle it; they’ve made the knowledge much more accessible to me.
My five-year-old son was very excited to watch my progress, and see the badges I was getting, and how my avatar was growing. He asked me to set him up an account, too. I did, thinking he’d just log on, have a look, and log off. Joke’s on me.
He goes on for about an hour a day, just to play. By play, I mean take quizzes, work through practice questions, watch videos on new maths concepts … An hour a day. And what has he learned?
He started out doing addition within the 1-20 range, and subtracting numbers in the 1-10 range. He has now mastered two-digit addition and subtraction, is working on three-digit, can read an analog clock with or without numbers, can read information from bar graphs and solve story problems using two bar graphs, is better at understanding the operand required from story problems than I am, and is starting on geometric principles meant for 7 to 9 year olds. In eight days.
He advanced so much, that his school literally started sending home worksheets for the next year’s maths. Which is something that they said at the beginning of the year that they would not do under any circumstances. (We had called for a meeting with his teacher and the head of English Learning for his school to discuss advanced reading for him, and it was stated then that their maths curriculum was designed in such a way that they would never allow students to use maths resources from advanced years. Which upset us, but didn’t think would become an actual issue.)
In addition to maths, you can study programming, history, music, economics … A lot of things. It is an amazing self-education tool and well worth any time invested in it.