Khan Academy

Khan Academy is a non profit educational organization created in 2006 by Salman Khan, a triple graduate from Massachusetts Institute of Technology (a BS in mathematics, a BS in electrical engineering and computer science, and an MS in electrical engineering and computer science), he pursued an MBA from Harvard Business School. The plight which Salman Khan choose was rather unusual and a daring one.

Salman Khan

 After graduating from Harvard Businees School, he began his career as a hedge fund analyst at Boston. He was requested to help his cousin Nadia on mathematics who was staying in New Orleans. He began to give her lessons remotely using Yahoo's Doodle Notepad. But later because of the difficulty in finding a free time for both of them, he uploaded YouTube videos of lectures.What happened was his cousin actually preferred YouTube Videos over live sessions. He also noticed a large number of people are viewing his videos in YouTube. Hits increased tremendously and he started to get encouraging mails and comments.

He thought of what can be reason for so large popularity for his videos. In the case of YouTube videos, viewer can actually pause the video, repeat the video and even view it at later time to refresh. The speciality of the videos was that, it avoided the standard format of person solving on a blackboard. Instead videos were like a person solving a problem on a piece of paper thinking loudly. As days passed, the popularity of his videos increased. He began to put Youtube lectures on a large number of topics mathematics, history, healthcare and medicine, finance, physics, chemistry, biology, astronomy, economics, cosmology, organic chemistry, American civics, art history, macroeconomics and microeconomics, and computer science. Now there are more than 3200 videos available on his YouTube channel on various Topics.

He tried to analyze the reason for the popularity of the videos. Different students have different pace of learning. Some may be quick to understand a concept while they may take a longer time to understand a similar concept. This varies from student to student also. Therefore one of the major draw back of class room education is that all the students are taught at the same pace. Some may understand what is taught while some others may not. There is also a limitation on the time a teacher can spent on teaching one particular kid. So those kids, who didn't understand the concept are left behind. This fundamental issue can be solved using video lectures. Students can pause the lecture to understand a topic, repeat the same again and again, can do the studies at a time he finds suitable at any place which he finds comfortable.  There no one is actually left behind. If some one needs more time on a particular topic, he can spent as much as time he require. The student is also saved from the embarrassment of asking publicly his doubt. 

It is this understanding which made Salman Khan to set up Khan Academy. He quit his job as a hedge fund analyst in 2009 and devoted all this time for Khan Academy. The mission of Khan Academy is

"Providing a high quality education to anyone, anywhere"

  

 After the introduction revolutionary YouTube lectures, he thought of taking Khan Academy to the next level. Khan Academy is current offering different interactive sessions for students through the website www.khanacademy.org. The were given self assessment tests where the difficulty of the test varies according to the proficiency of students in the subject. The main philosophy behind course formulation is increase the interaction between students and teachers & between students. To achieve this, Khan Academy actually wants students to do the learning at their home at their convenience and the problems or exercises will be done in class rooms where teachers will be actually able to spent quality time with students. It also encourages those doing well to help struggling class mates. This Khan Academy method of teaching is implemented in a few schools and is proved to be extremely good; improving overall performance of the class and there is no below average students after implementation of this program. This can be considered as an extra ordinary achievement. There are provisions in the website to track how much time does a student has spent in understanding a particular concept, how many problems has he completed etc and all this data can be accessed by the students teacher. This also lets a teacher to know the problematic area for a particular kid, there by giving more personnel attention. 

Khan academy works with a vision is to create "the world's first free, world-class virtual school where anyone can learn anything."

After quitting his job he found it difficult to fund for the entire program. Due to the popularity of his videos, he got some donations in the range of $1000 to $10000 from various places. Khan Academy website also earned $2000 dollars per month from advertisements in its website till 2010, when it stopped taking advertisements. Khan academy has significant backing from Bill Gates Foundation. It also has received a $2million from Google to create videos on more topics and to translate the core library into worlds most widely spoken languages.

Working with such a small capital and its a non profit institution, Mr. Khan thought it would be difficult to attract good talents for addition of lectures on topics and development & maintenance of website. To his astonishment there were a few talented people, who are ready to join his institution. They are ready to work for an average upper middle class salary. What they seek from this is the satisfaction they are deriving from working for a social cause like this. He found all the people in his team are self motivated and they need little further motivation (Theory Y). Working with a small team on a very small capital, Khan is set to change the world educational scenario.