You’re trying to study at Stauffer the night before your exam. You’ve prepared yourself for the long night ahead—your pencils have been sharpened, your laptop has been charged, and your coffee has been brewed. Despite being as prepared as you can be, you look down at the material and nothing makes sense. How often have you been in this situation?
Whenever this feeling of helplessness and concern hits, my first instinct is to read over my notes. This is usually a dead end. My second reaction is to check to see if there’s material online that will help me understand the material quickly. More often than not, my search starts and ends with Khan Academy, an education resource used by more than 100 million students every year. Created in 2007 by Sal Khan, Khan Academy is a non-profit education organization with the mission of making education more accessible to students worldwide. Although the organization started by creating tutorials focused on math and science principles, its popularity and success has let it expand to host a variety of subjects including humanities, standardized test prep, and even personal financing.
Now, Khan Academy is not the only tool employed by students. In fact, there are now countless others that supplement our learning in classrooms. Although Khan Academy and other educational tools help us learn and test better, they also display the unfortunate truth regarding the lack of effective learning actually done in classrooms. Whether it’s the outdated methods of teaching employed by professors or our desire to learn through online means, our reliance on online tools displays an issue with our current educational system.
Although online educational tools act as great resources that facilitate our learning and help us succeed in examinations, our reliance on tools such as Khan Academy shines light on the more fundamental problem of the shortcomings of our current educational system. These educational tools should be used to supplement our learning in classrooms, instead of being a crutch when classroom learning fails. This reliance on online education tools should be noted by professors and school administrators as a shift away from the conventional classroom learning style and should be acted upon for the betterment of students.