One of my new obsessions is the Khan Academy. I love just about everything open source, and I have always admired MIT for starting its open coursware project, but in order to really benefit from it, a student really needs to have some understanding of the fundamentals. The Khan Academy is filling in this gap brilliantly, with over 2400 video lectures on a variety of topics and a progressive set of exercises in mathematics which start with basic addition and goes all the way to basic calculus. And this is just the beginning.
In fact, when I registered for the Khan Academy last month, there were 144 exercises; now there are 159. So they are avidly creating more material all the time.
The thing that amazes my the most about this website/organization isn’t the volume of material, or the success they had so for, or where they plan to go: its how addictive they have made the site! They have managed to create a site that triggers those same dopamine releases I get when I play video games. The Mathematics exercises are even structured in a knowledge tree which looks like a tech tree in one of Sid Meier’s Civilization games, or a skill tree in a role playing/adventure game.
So here I am spending several hours a week learning biology, finance, economics and working my way through the math exercises on the site and I’m not in school, I have no kids in school, and I have no plan to take any standardized test in the near future. I must be one of the biggest nerds on the planet! And yet I wonder, if there is anyone else out there in my situation, done school but still wanting to learn new subjects or brush up on topics once mastered but now forgotten due to lack of use?