He is known as the man with the coloured fonts to many of his students.
Most of them do not even know what he looks like, he is just a voice behind a lesson they are learning.
He lives in California, in the US, near San Francisco. H
is students belong to varied nationalities. He turned a simple online platform into one of the most powerful learning tools ever. His academy has delivered over 139,900,606 lessons in topics ranging from algebra, arithmetic, art history, banking, biology, calculus, economics, healthcare to even the IIT JEE! Salman Khan, founder and executive director of the Khan Foundation started with the belief ‘A free worldclass education for anyone anywhere.’Little did he know that he was going to become a teaching sensation! Since Khan gave up a lucrative job as a manager of a hedge fund to educate for free, one must ask, where does his passion come from? ‘It was never about money. Its about wanting to do something really badly, and trying by all means to achieve it,’says Khan. So this is someone who is interested in everything and has a passion to tell others. ‘From my point of view, I started off with the maths and the physics and the science, basically stuff that I knew from my own background. But now I have turned into this person who gets to learn about almost anything, and distil it down, and teach it!’No wonder, Khan Academy offers over 3100 videos to students, and these videos have been viewed over 50 million times, besides being translated into seven different languages. Being founder and faculty means Khan stays busy setting the vision for the Khan Academy and expanding our library of educational videos.
According to their website, ‘The Khan Academy is an organisation on a mission.
Wealt39re a not- for- profit with the goal of changing education for the better by providing a free world- class education to anyone anywhere. All of the sites resources are available to anyone.
It doesnalt39t matter if you are a student, teacher, home- schooler, principal, adult returning to the classroom after 20 years, or a friendly alien just trying to get a leg up in earthly biology. The Khan Academys materials and resources are available to you completely free of charge.’To add to it, each tutorial is only about 10 minutes long, to it is quite digestible.
So how did it all begin? ‘My cousin and I were killing time at a family event, and I was throwing her brain teasers, the kinds which are offered at software position interviews. Most people just disengage, but this 12- year- old was all for it. So when I came to know she had been placed in a slower math class, I was in disbelief, she was clearly much brighter than that. So I promised to help her get over her hurdles notwithstanding the geographic distance between us. So every evening after office, I and worked with her over speaker phone. That led on to tutoring her siblings and my other cousins, and fast forward 18 months, the idea of online tutorials was born in a casual conversation with a friend,’informs Khan. The secret of the his success Khan feels is, ‘I teach the way that I wish I was taught. The lectures are coming from me, an actual human being who is fascinated by the world around him.’Well, there has been no looking back after that. This man with three degrees from MIT and an MBA from Harvard, had found his passion. On the website, students can make use of the video library, interactive challenges, and assessments from any computer with access to the web.
Going ahead, Khan thinks there is a potential for turning into an institutions and can be talked about at par with some institutions that have been around for years. With his material becoming part of the curriculum in many schools, and making a sizeable difference not only to studentsalt39grades, but also their lives, this now seems an achievable dream.
Knowledge catches up with young educationist Salman Khan, founder and executive director of Khan Academy, who in his own small way has revolutionised the way students approa
