The Khan Academy

Khan Academy:


"A free world-class education for anyone anywhere."


The Khan Academy is a not-for-profit organization created in 2006 by Salman Khan. Khan holds 3 degrees from the MIT: a BS in mathematics, in electrical engineering and computer science as well MS in electrical engineering and computer science. He holds an MBA from Harvard Business School. He worked as a "Hedge fund analyst" before quitting in late 2009. It started with Khan tutoring his cousin Nadia. He taught her mathematics over internet using notepad. He continued with this method for almost 2 years. He switched to youtube after his friend suggested him to do so. Shifting to youtube was the first step towards "Khan Academy". The videos got popular and suddenly there was a huge demand for his videos. He started his own site, http://www.khanacademy.org/. All of the site's resources are available to anyone. It doesn't matter if you are a student, teacher, home-schooler, principal, adult returning to the classroom after 20 years, or a friendly alien just trying to get a leg up in earthly biology. The Khan Academy's materials and resources are available to you completely free of charge.






Vision & Mission : 
"It is our mission to accelerate learning for students of all ages"
Sal Khan and Khan Academy have a great vision of providing resources to all.  The goal of the Khan Academy is to use technology to provide a free, world-class education to anyone, anywhere. Khan Academy does not charge nor do they plan to charge for their services.


The Ability to Learn Content Based on One’s Own Time and Need :
A strength of content-based videos, not just from Khan Academy, is that people can view them during their own time frame, reviewing parts that are of particular interest or to develop greater understanding. He described how students in our traditional education system are provided with an instructional unit and then tested. Then the next unit is taught.  


But what happens to those students who tested lower on a unit?  They are asked to move on even though they have not achieved proficiency. This often results in the student failing to fully understand the concepts, often giving up and feeling like a failure. Sal Khan stresses that learning content should be based on the students’ timing.  It is based on knowledge acquisition and gaining proficiency.


Conceptual, Human and Technical skills:
Salman Khan's TED interview:

In this video, Sal Khan tells us that he is only responsible for the educational content(videos). He leaves other technical things(in this case he talks about merit badges) for his technical team. Here we can see that Khan has all the qualities of a Manager. He uses his conceptual skills for videos and leaves technical aspects to his technicians. 


Creative Problem Solving:
Khan chose to avoid the standard format of a person standing by a whiteboard, deciding instead to present the learning concepts as if 
popping out of a darkened universe and into one's mind with a voice out of nowhere.


Khan developed a dashboard for students and teachers to track their progress through the website’s Knowledge Map. Teachers and coaches can access all of their students’ data. Teachers can get a summary of class performance as a whole or dive into a particular student’s profile to figure out exactly which topics are problematic (http://www.khanacademy.org/about).


Business Model:
Khan academy is FREE. It highlights itself as a not-for-profit organization. It got huge backing from the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation in October 2010. Additionally, it also earned $2,000 a month from ads on the Web site in 2010, until Khan Academy ceased to accept advertising. In 2010, Google announced it would give the Khan Academy $2 million for creating more courses and for 
translating the core library into the world’s most widely spoken languages. Khan has managed his funds very well despite being a non-profit organization.


As the chinese proverb says, Tell me and I’ll forget; show me and I may remember; involve me and I’ll understand, I think Sal Khan is not only tutoring the students through his videos he is involving us in it. I will like to conclude with a video which shows Khan's success.