Khan Academy - updated

Innovation is everywhere. You see an apple I-pad and will always tell "wow!". But when you come across an innovation having a social purpose there is a double "wow". Thats what i felt when I came across Khanacademy.com website. It is a website that offers free instructional videos on everything from basic arithmetic to multi-variable calculus. Its founder, Salman Khan, originally started the site to help tutor his cousins in math. Today, millions of students across  world have used it for homework help and test preparation. Some even wonder whether it will eventually replace teachers altogether.

There is a high demand for quality education in the world and considering the world literacy rate there is much that can be done in this sector. Khan academy identified this gap and made its stand.

It is an educational video repository which supplies a free online collection of more than 3,000 micro lectures via video tutorials stored on YouTube teaching mathematics, history, healthcare and medicine, finance, physics, chemistry, biology, astronomy, economics, cosmology, organic chemistry, American civics, art history, macroeconomics, microeconomics, and computer science.

How did The Khan Academy actually come up ?

 

a) Students vary in their learning capability and how they perceive a given problem. Their pace of learning are different. Some learn at a faster pace than others and this difference affects both the fast as well as the slow learners.
b) Students varying nature - some are extrovert and some are introvert. The extrovert gang asks their problems within the class and the introvert are not able to put up their problems.

In late 2004, Khan began tutoring his cousin Nadia in mathematics using Yahoo's Doodle notepad. When other relatives and friends sought similar help, he decided it would be more practical to distribute the tutorials on YouTube. The popularity of the YouTube videos and the positive feedbacks of appreciative students prompted Khan to quit his job in finance as a hedge fund analyst at Connective Capital Management in 2009, and focus on the tutorials full-time.

Mission & Vision 

The mission is to provide a high quality education to anyone, anywhere. All of the site's resources are available to anyone. It doesn't matter if one is a student, teacher or an adult returning to the classroom after 20 years. The Khan Academy's materials and resources are available to anyone completely free of charge. They raise money and resources for the site's functionality through donations. Khan’s vision is of turning the academy into a charter school.  

The Innovation

Salman Khan has made excellent use of technology to let more and more p people learn things. He has started a revolution. With such a spark and vigor in him, he has collected a team of people who works full time at the venture in order to fulfill the mission of providing high quality education to anyone signifying the importance of a great hard-working team being the backbone of any organisation. Not only it offers an excellent service it also delights the customers by giving statistical reports of the user. One gets the information about everything one has been learning. One can get a summary of class performance as a whole or look into a particular student's profile to figure out exactly which are the topics in which the students are facing problems. Apart from that, children start earning badges and points for learning. This excites the students and makes learning fun. A non-profit organization making its market share more and more with more and more viewers. Its YouTube channel has over 150 million total views, compared to MIT's 38 million. It also has twice as many subscribers, at more than 320,000.

 Creative Problem Solving

The whole concept of this academy is very creative. The source of this idea is a by-product of the limitations of classroom teaching:

a) Students vary in their learning capability and how they perceive a given problem. Their pace of learning are different. Some learn at a faster pace than others and this difference affects both the fast as well as the slow learners.

b) Students varying nature - some are extrovert and some are introvert. The extrovert gang asks their problems within the class and the introvert are not able to put up their problems.

c) Teachers also find it hard to give 100% attention to each student.

Future

The most important thing to be learnt here is the humility that Salman Khan maintains about it. Despite having millions of people logged in to the system daily, he goes about doing new things repeatedly for many students across the world. His work has deeply touched many people, people from different strata and walks of life. Donations keep pouring in all the time, encouraging him to do even better for the little kids for this planet. What's more, Bill Gates was so impressed with the product that he didn't hesitate to endorse the product as a learning resource for his kids and working for its cause through the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. 

Armed with simple though powerful vision statement, he is bringing in major changes to the way a human gets educated. The site now features online assignments and homework. With near term goal of designing more interactive features he ultimately aims to educate any student in any corner of the world.