Wednesday, June 08, 2011

DMS Help: Media Services Serves Up Math Help. O rly??

Ok, so math tutorials are not really DMS Help, but this particular website certainly is worth knowing about for a couple of reasons.

For those who don't know, Salman Khan is the MIT-educated creator of the not-for-profit educational website Khan Academy.

Salman, or "Sal" as he likes to be called, began developing video tutorials to help his nephew with math. His site now houses more than 2,100 tutorials on a wide variety of subjects both in and out of the mathematical realm: basic algebra, calculus, differential equations, biology, chemistry, astronomy and physics to name a few.

While Khan Academy is certainly a great place to get help with your homework and study for exams (there are a huge number of practice problems on the site as well), there's something relevant here for media-makers as well.

One of the things one notices right off is that these are LOW-tech videos. He's using a simple screen-capture software and hand-writing all of the work he does. And despite this, his website has amassed over 58 million video views. Some schools are even using Khan's videos as supplements to their instruction. With that in mind it's worth considering the notion that a simple and solid concept is often much more effective than a sparkling execution.

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