Khan Academy

Since you live at 520 Park, you must be incredibly smart, right? Yet, even with all of your obvious intelligence, have you ever wished you had learned more in your school days or perhaps, just retained more of those lessons you did learn? While we may yearn for a greater understanding of the world around us or even just what we've forgotten from our youth, the notion of going back to school can be far too daunting to consider. However, what if you could take your pick of academic topics and have access to award-winning tutorials that move only at your own pace? And, what if these vast resources were free? That is where the Khan Academy comes in. This non-profit educational organization was created in 2006 by educator Salman Khan to provide "a free, world-class education for anyone, anywhere." Khan's own academic credentials include three degrees from MIT followed by an MBA from Harvard Business School. The Khan Academy's website features thousands of educational resources, including a personalized learning dashboard, over 100,000 practice problems, and over 6,000 micro lectures via video tutorials stored on YouTube. The subjects (so far) include mathematics, history, healthcare, medicine, finance, physics, chemistry, biology, astronomy, cosmology, American civics, art history, economics, music, and computer science. All resources are available for free to anyone around the world and by 2013, were used by about 10 million students per month and its micro lectures have been watched over 468 million times! The educational approach differs greatly from the typical classroom environment. Broadly termed "flipping the classroom," the idea is that students will watch lectures and work through problem sets on their own time, at their own pace. Once mastery of a concept is demonstrated, adaptive software can suggest new ones, much like Amazon recommends new books. This enables you, as the prospective student, to choose what you'd like to learn about and to absorb the material based on your schedule and ability, completely unencumbered by grades, availability, or cost - just a pure learning experience providing its own rewards. So now that you know it's out there, what will you learn about first? Khan Academy Website