Sal Khan — The Man Who Is Lighting Up The World By Reinventing Education
‘A free, world-class education for anyone, anywhere’ — this simple, yet revolutionary idea took roots in the head of Sal Khan in 2006, when he was a senior-analyst at a hedge fund. 9 years later, this idea has transformed into a worldwide phenomenon — Khan Academy. Khan Academy is a non-profit educational organization that provides free instructional video tutorials, interactive exercises and a personalized learning dashboard that empower learners across the world to study at their own pace in and outside of the classroom. With fewer than 100 employees, Khan Academy reaches more than 15 million people each month with over 100,000 videos and exercises related to mathematics, science, computer programming, history, economics, and more. The Khan Academy channel on YouTube has about 2,349,000 subscribers and the Khan Academy videos have been viewed more than 696 million times.
“ My sense is that in Einstein’s generation, there were probably a hundred potential Einsteins that were just completely squandered. Now we can go into a reality where that could be nurtured and identified in a more scalable way. And this is the beauty of the internet. The internet now allows that genius to get that exposure and hopefully other geniuses around the world will recognize that genius for what it is ” — Sal Khan
How It All Started
Sal Khan, was born in New Orleans, Louisiana, United States to immigrant parents from Bangladesh, and India. After earning three degrees from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (a BS in mathematics, a BS in electrical engineering and computer science, and an MEng in electrical engineering and computer science), he pursued an MBA from Harvard Business School. Khan was working as a hedge-fund financial analyst in 2004 when he started remotely tutoring his cousin, Nadia, in Louisiana, who was struggling with maths. “ Then the rest of the family heard there was free tutoring,” he says, and more relatives started taking part. The demand got too much — until a friend suggested he could film the tutorials, post them on YouTube and let the family members view them whenever they chose. This was the inception of Khan Academy in 2006.
How Khan Academy Is Reinventing Education
Since 2009, Khan has devoted himself full-time to Khan Academy. The idea of using internet to widen the access to education is not revolutionary in itself. But the Khan Academy is different. Although it also carries tutorials in arts, computing and science, its core remains secondary school maths, in which it couples hand-holding video instruction with online exercises, from basic addition and multiplication to the farther reaches of algebra and calculus. There are no accredited qualifications, just a self-paced course combined with sophisticated software that charts progress and highlights weaknesses. The easy interface makes it simple for parents to help their children with homework, even without knowing the finer points of algebra.
How Khan Academy Works: Watch a video in which Sal Khan explains the subject being learned, and then take the online tests that follow. The software times answers as well as noting missteps, offers encouragement for doing well or even just persevering. Then, when satisfied you have mastered the topic, it invites you to move on to a related topic.
The World’s Best Known Teacher
Khan’s work has won him praise and accolades from the Downing Street to Washington DC, from Bill Gates to LeBron James. In 2012, Time Magazine named Sal Khan in its annual list of the 100 most influential people in the world. Khan Academy now has the backing of The Gates Foundation, Carlos Slim Foundation (Mexico) and Google. Recently, Khan Academy partnered with the equally iconic Tata Trusts to create specialised, freely available online content tailor-made for India, including rolling out content in regional languages.
“ Sal is the world’s first superstar teacher ” — Yuri Milner, a physicist turned venture capitalist from Russia.
“ I’ve used Khan Academy with my kids, and I’m amazed at the breadth of Sal’s subject expertise and his ability to make complicated topics understandable “ — Bill Gates
Give it up to the genius Sal Khan! Let’s hope that Khan Academy reaches, inspires and sheds the light of knowledge on a billion students across the world.
