Khan Academy founder announces "common sense" mastery learning features
According to a Gallup poll, only 48 percent of American parents are "completely" or "somewhat satisfied" with the quality of K-12 education their children are receiving. Educator and entrepreneur Sal Khan is working to change that with his non-profit organization, Khan Academy. Now the online platform that offers free educational content is announcing new mastery learning features.
"It's an old idea. It's arguably the first way that people learn, that, hey, if you need to learn something, if you're having trouble with it, keep working on it until you master it and then you go to a more advanced concept. But in the education systems that all of us grew up in, we all learned at a fixed pace," founder Sal Khan told "CBS This Morning."
Mastery learning, he explained, allows students to learn at the right level and pace.
"It's just until now, it was hard to do logistically. How does one teacher with 30 students meet the need of every student? That's where we try to come in," Khan said.
Khan Academy's instructional videos on topics like math, biology, and grammar provide teachers with tools and help students develop their skills. The academy has 64 million registered users in 190 countries, and it benefited some 140,000 teachers worldwide last year alone.
Khan called mastery learning "common sense."
"Because these kids were being… moved ahead while having gaps in some more fundamental things. A lot of times when kids have problems with algebra or trigonometry, it has nothing to do with the subject matter, has nothing to do with their innate intelligence. It's just they that they had some gaps in elementary school that they never got to fill in," he said.