Khan Academy

Right now methods in teaching and learning are changing hugely. And high quality open availability (free) courses are a major part of what's new and exciting.

MOOCs, which stands for Massive Open Online Courses, are one of the new phenomena in education arising from the Digital Revolution. These are being offered by conventional schools like MIT, Harvard and CalTech. The MOOCs are accessed online and often include videos, real-time lectures and online means for student/teacher interaction. The "open" part means that the course is available free to anyone who wants to take it - although for some this is now in question (reference #1) .

The Khan Academy is something a bit different. Less than 10 years ago Salmon Khan started making videos in which he taught various things.  Initially these were to help his cousin with algebra. His videos became a hit and soon he had a following of thousands. Since then he has expanded his teaching videos and has founded the Khan Acadamy. Salmon continues to make his videos and is now joined by others who do the same through his free academy. Today millions watch his academy's videos.

Here's some of what Wikipedia has to say about Sal and his academy (for the full Wiki article go here):

The Khan Academy is a non-profit^[2] educational website created in 2006 by educator Salman Khan, a graduate of MIT and Harvard Business School. The stated mission is "providing a high quality education for anyone, anywhere".

The website supplies a free online collection of more than 4,000 micro lectures^[3] via video tutorials stored on YouTube teaching mathematics, history,healthcare, medicine, finance, physics, chemistry, biology, astronomy, economics, cosmology, organic chemistry, American civics, art history,macroeconomics, microeconomics, and computer science.^[4] Khan Academy has delivered over 240 million lessons.^[5]

A sampling of Khan's video's:

• Polynomial approximation of functions (part 1)
• Introduction to Cellular Respiration
• Introduction to Magnetism
• Introduction to Economics
• Introduction to Waves
• Korean War Overview

Great stuff,  isn't it?   And there are more than 4000 others like these!