TED Talk – Let’s Use Video to Reinvent Education by Salman Khan

Logan Altizer, Pharm.D.

PGY-1 Managed Care Pharmacy Resident

Kaiser Permanente

Over the past decade, along with the rise of technology and social media, there has been a great push to utilize these two sectors more and more and to incorporate them further into the realm of education. We know that for students to best learn, there are a multitude of things to consider and two of the areas that the traditional classroom teaching method often fails are accessibility and feedback.

In the TED Talk, “Let’s Use Video to Reinvent Education” by Salman Khan, he goes into great detail as to how and why he created his amazing Khan Academy, a very structured series of educational videos posted online that is accessibly to anyone at any time, and talks about how as educators, we should spend less time lecturing in the classroom, and instead utilize that time to do homework with the instructor there available to help.1

The first component of accessibility is where the Khan Academy really demonstrates the power of an instructional video. The Khan Academy has over 4,000 videos covering a huge range of topics including math, science, finance, and history.2 These videos are very structured in their design and delivery so that the method of teaching is the same despite the content changing. This allows students to spend less time adapting to different educational styles, and instead can focus on the actual content being taught. These videos enable students to watch and listen to the lectures at their own speed, allowing them to pause to take notes and re-watch if they feel they need to hear the content again, and can be accessed on their own schedule. These videos allow for a variety of learning styles to thrive as it provides narrated audio over a visually clear and detailed video, all under the guise of a teaching lecture model. This allows students to take these modules at home where they can learn independently and try to develop their own understanding of the content which is then assessed with interactive exercises built into the content that provides evaluation of learning and provides explanations for correct answers.

Feedback is incredibly important for learning as it provides an objective measure of evaluation and allows for more directed learning as follow up to close any educational gaps and understanding of content. Salman Khan makes the argument that the classroom should instead of being a place to be lectured, it should be a place to do homework and receive help and individualized learning and feedback. His philosophy is that the students can watch these instructional videos at home, try to learn the content independently and then are able to complete assignments with the teacher available to help and provide additional teaching as required.

I think this concept of receiving the lecture materials at home and first participating in independent learning and having interactive assessments for understanding and feedback really facilitates a more thorough understanding once in the classroom where more advanced content can be discussed. This is often utilized, although arguably not enough, in pharmacy school when professors require you to read chapters or complete cases in advance of the lecture so that you have some foundational understanding of the topic prior to receiving the in-person lecture so that you can spend less time listening to the professor teach, and can spend more time interacting and participating in more advanced cases or discussion of content to better solidify the information.

I feel as though this idea of getting to independently watch video lectures and learn under less pressured, time unrestrictive settings and developing foundational understanding of the material would allow for a much better learning experience in person where the professor could spend more time teaching the application of the material and students would be completing interactive assignments that would focus on facilitating deeper understanding. Hopefully as educational design and theory continues to develop with technology, as educators we can move away from traditional delivery into a system like this.

1. Khan, S. Let’s Use Video to Reinvent Education. https://ed.ted.com/lessons/let-s-use-video-to-reinvent-education-salman-khan#digdeeper

2. Khan Academy. https://www.khanacademy.org/about