THE KHAN ACADEMY

                                                          Pedagogy of excellence

Khan Academy is a non-profit organization which was established by educator Mr. Salman Khan in 1996 with a motive of helping students in learning. The founder is a graduate of MIT and Harward Business School.

This organization is working via a website www.khanacademy.com which supplies online collection of more than 3200 lectures which has been stored onwww.youtube.com . These tutorials teach mathematics, history, finance, physics, chemistry, biology, economics etc.  

Mission

The mission of this organization is “providing a high quality education to anyone, anywhere”.

Below are few numbers which are mind boggling. Have a look! 

 ·         

• Around 5 million unique students have watched videos over KA last month.
•  Every month there are around 80 million lectures delivered
•  Till date, there have been around 260 million exercises completed

On a different note, Sal (as he is more often known as to the Silicon Valley) says that KA has taught more students than what HBS has taught till date from the time of its inception. Which is like WOW!! 

                                      Khan Academy Vs Traditional education system

Teamwork

Where he once was an army of one, the staff has been ramped up to 32, including the recent high-profile addition of Google's first hired employee, programming ace Craig Silverstein. The staff's immediate mission is to further broaden the site's content and improve assessment and feedback features so the Khan Academy experience becomes more interactive.

Innovation

Innovate or die. Look at Apple. Look at Google. Every top company will have a story or two to talk about innovation. Khan’s academy is a perfect example of how we can innovate in even the smallest of things. What started as a collection of youtube videos is now a complete teaching platform. Practice exercises. Self-paced learning. Concept of badges etc are amazing pieces of innovation which must have played a big role in the success of this venture. Khan Academy as a whole is an amazing innovation in itself

Future 

Love it or hate it, Khan Academy is part of a looming tech-education iceberg. To go from making videos for your cousins to promoting a new model for education in a few short years is amazing. But it's also the best thing that can happen to this space. It needs more smart people who care. The future prospects are very bright for Khan Academy.

Key Learnings

• As the saying goes "education gives the best returns". The concept of E learning has revolutionised the society in such a way that various universities are adopting the same.

          http://hbsp.harvard.edu/list/elearning
          http://ocw.mit.edu/index.htm

• One should always have a bigger picture in mind when you come up with a venture. There should be long term thinking. Here, he wanted to impart free and world class education to students all around the globe, irrespective of the profits to be earned. 
• One has to back his/her instincts and shouldn't just give up.