Sal Khan: The Man that Enables Free and Easy Access to Quality Education
Having born and raised mostly in Sumatera (a few provinces), when I was in High School I realized how diverse it is the quality of education between schools here and there on many big cities in Java. Having said that I was already quite lucky to have an easy and accessible means of education here in the capital city of Lampung. I can’t imagine how different it is in eastern part of Indonesia. Many people can’t have a good education due to many factors such as a lack of human resource, quality teachers or the teaching materials, etc. From there, I always been interested in the concept of free, easy, and accessible quality education.
Meet Salman Amin Khan, or commonly known as Sal Khan, is an American educator and the founder of Khan Academy, a free online non-profit educational platform. As of February 2022, the Khan Academy channel on YouTube has 7.11 million subscribers and Khan Academy videos have been viewed more than 1.94 billion times, and that’s not counting the videos viewed on their platform directly.
Sal built Khan Academy is to provide a free, world-class education to anyone, anywhere. Since 2009, Khan has devoted himself full-time building Khan Academy, with pithy videos, the majority narrated by Khan himself.
Khan Academy has helped many students around the world by providing free and easy to access quality education from their platform ranging from basic math to niche skill like programming. I, myself too was benefited from Khan Academy. The way it teaches you about the concept rather than most school teaches (to remember the formula) really helped me during my preparation time for SBMPTN back then.
I believe education is the gate for improving quality of life, but the problem sometimes people with low quality of life can’t afford or have access to good education. What Sal envision as Khan Academy is one way to close that gap by providing access to good quality of education anywhere in the world, either you live in a big or small cities, as long as you have Internet access. What Sal has made is, in my opinion, something that has a big impact to the world. By providing a good quality of education, some people in a corner in the world who maybe doesn’t have access to good education can learn. And who knows what those people can be in the future because of Khan Academy, because I can testify to that Khan Academy helped me to this state.
I hope more people copy what Sal Khan envisioned, to provide free and accessible good quality of education. And always good luck to Khan Academy!
