The way we teach our kids is…well, stupid. Our overcrowded classrooms with one-size-fits-all solutions teach good students that success and knowledge is the ability to complete tests with little or no relevance in the real world, and leave students who struggle in a spiral of failure that can dictate the limits of their future. It is a system that is good for no one—not teachers, not parents, not students, and definitely not an economy receiving more bored drones than engaged minds.

A few years ago, a New York City hedge fund analyst Salman Khan was tutoring his cousins. They lived halfway across the country however, and in order to make it easier to coordinate their schedules, he started making short video versions of his tutorials. And then a funny thing happened. His cousins reported that they liked learning from his videos better than from him.

At first Khan was surprised. Why wouldn’t they want the ability to actually interact with him? But then he thought about it from their standpoint and it began to make more sense. Having a video made it so they could repeat and replay anything that they didn’t understand as many times as necessary. They could refer back to weeks-old lessons without having to feel embarrassed about it. They could learn without another person standing over their shoulder asking, “do you understand yet?”

OER, prevalent in discussions about radicalising Higher Education, now begin to make waves in schools.