Khan makes an excellent point about a problem with synchronous classroom teaching: everyone has to move at the same pace, and if you're a bit slower to understand the concept being taught, the class moves on without you. If students were allowed to learn at their own pace, slower students would get a chance to master the material without slowing down the faster students, and everyone would learn more. There might be other benefits to teaching and learning asynchronously. There's the obvious convenience factor: our leisure, work, and social lives are increasingly fragmented, unscheduled, and asynchronous. Each of us has a different schedule. This difference essentially requires every activity, including teaching/learning, to become asynchronous. Khan also makes the point that a teacher waiting for you to give them the right answer, even in a one-on-one tutoring session, creates pressure that can inhibit thinking.
Having had the experience of a class move on before I mastered the material (quite recently, as a matter of fact), I instantly saw the value in Khan's customizable approach. But as much as I am capable of seeing the downside to a classroom that moves at one pace, I wonder if the synchronous approach motivates students who would otherwise not be motivated to learn the material. Customizability sounds good, and from the (straw-man) economists point of view, it is logical to assume that students who know that they must pass the class in order to get a job they like that pays well will try hard to learn the material. The students are accountable for their performance, and they know that they slack off at their own peril. If customizable, asynchronous learning experiences are a better tool for that (which, I would agree with Khan, they are), then it would follow that students would benefit from their use.
Being in a synchronous learning environment does put pressure on some students: the pressure to keep up. When we take that pressure away, how does this affect student motivation? My intuition, after having spent the past couple of years absorbing research on immediate/delayed gratification and self-control, is that even when some students know they should (or even need to) pay attention and try hard when completing coursework, they will be unable to do so without the pressure to keep up. Its not a question of accountability as much as it is a question of motivation.
I'm reminded of students who form study groups. Some criticize the practice as counter-productive: students spend more time distracting one another than holding one another accountable or helping each other learn the material. But I'd wager that for a certain type of student, such groups (which are kind of a self-imposed synchronous learning environment) are far better than trying to study alone. Traditionally, students have been left to find out whether studying on their own or in groups works best for them, but as someone who will likely be teaching an online course in the near future, I'd like to consider ways of identifying the characteristics of students that would benefit from synchronous learning environments and keep things synchronous for those students while having the others learn at their own pace. It would be a hybrid course in terms of synchronicity/asynchronicity.
I have only begun reading Khan's book, so maybe he addresses this issue of motivation in the new asynchronous learning environment later on. The grand MOOC experiment has already begun, and I'd love to get a look at who drops out of the courses and why. Another point on which I agree with Khan: online learning gives us more data on how people learn than we had before, and this could be a great help to those designing better learning environments online and offline.
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