Khan Academy

                                       Khan  Academy

 Introduction:

Khan Academy is the brainchild of Salman Khan,  a Harvard and MIT scholar, who was working as a hedge fund analyst at the time of its inception . The Khan Academy is a non-profit educational organization.  The website supplies a free online collection of more than 3,200 micro lectures via video tutorials stored on YouTube teaching  a wide range of subjects that include mathematics, history, healthcare and medicine, finance,physics, chemistry, biology, astronomy, economics, cosmology, organic chemistry, American civics, art history, macroeconomics and microeconomics, and computer science.

                                         
Khan Academy has eclipsed MIT's Open Course Ware (OCW) in terms of videos viewed.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.

Mission :

The mission of Khan Academy is to provide a high quality education to anyone, anywhere in the world.

Innovation  :

The majority of students across the world are unable to bear the fruits of  education primarily because of any of the two factors - either they are too poor to afford this education or they are too slow to pick up with the teacher's pace in the class. Khan Academy tries to address this issue.In India these two problems are prevalent in large numbers. Some of the families especially in rural India are too poor to send their children to school. The teacher-student ratio in schools of this country is not adequate. Individual attention does not happen in schools most of the time.

To address this problem which is prevalent in the society Khan Academy came out with an innovative solution. They invoked the concept of virtual one-to-one teaching. To conceptualise the virtual teaching method, Khan made full use of the available technology. He created a website which now supplies a free online collection of more than 3,200 micro lectures via video tutorials stored on YouTube teaching a wide range of subjects.

Unique Technique.......


With high-quality lectures and an interactive format, Khan Academy empowers kids to set goals and learn at a comfortable pace. The most impressive part is the way Khan teaches those lessons. He never assumes beforehand that the student has some prior knowledge about the topic. He starts from scratch and teaches in a systematic yet simple way. It helps the students to grasp the core concepts that are dealt in the topic.

How my family benefited from Khan's videos ...........
 My cousin who was lacking behind his classmates in arithmetic in his 3^rd standard  developed a fear for maths. He took help from Khan’s videos and the video-teaching not only helped him to improve his arithmetic skills but also the fear of maths disappeared.

Interactive Features


The website has the interactive workpad feature combined with a dashboard application. The dashboard application tracks students’ individual statistics, showing them and their instructors how many videos they had watched, how many questions they had answered, and also shows them which questions they got right or which of them they got wrong. Khan uses technology and creativity in these applications.

At the heart of all this lies innovation. Khan was the first to visualise the large scale utility of virtual teaching. Without innovation and creativity on Khan’s part this would not have happened.

Globalization :

Anyone and everyone in the world can watch and learn from Khan’s videos. A student staying  in Mexico and a student staying in Russia will use the same video to learn the concept. Both of them can share their views on the topic in the Comments section. Many more students from different parts of the world can also join. The whole world is transforming into one large classroom.

The concept of globalisation is deeply ingrained in the functioning of Khan Academy. Khan Academy  embraces globalization indeed.