How to get a FREE education - The Kahn Academy

Salman Khan: The Messiah of Math
Can an ex-hedge fund guy and his nonprofit Khan Academy make American schoolkids competitive again?

In August 2004, Salman Khan agreed to help his niece, Nadia, with her math homework. Nadia was headed into seventh grade in New Orleans, where Khan had grown up, but she hadn't been placed in her private school's advanced math track, which to a motivated parent these days is a little bit like hearing your child has just been diagnosed with Lou Gehrig's disease. In particular, Nadia was having trouble with unit conversion, turning gallons into liters and ounces into grams.

Being a bit of a geek, Khan put Yahoo!'s (YHOO) Messenger to work to help Nadia, using the Doodle function to let him illustrate concepts for his niece as they spoke on the phone. Then he wrote some code that generated problems she could do on a website. With Khan's help, Nadia made it into the fast track, and her younger brothers Arman and Ali signed on for Khan's tutoring as well. Then they brought in some of their friends. Khan built his site out a little more, grouping the concepts into "modules" and creating a database that would keep track of how many problems the kids had tried and how they had fared, so he'd know how each of his charges was progressing.

Less than five years later, Khan's sideline has turned into more than just his profession. He's now a quasi-religious figure in a country desperate for a math Moses. His free website, dubbed the Khan Academy, may well be the most popular educational site in the world. Last month about 2 million students visited. MIT's OpenCourseWare site, by comparison, has been around since 2001 and averages 1 million visits each month. He has posted more than 2,300 videos, beginning with simple addition and going all the way to subjects such as Green's theorem, normally found in a college calculus syllabus. He's adding videos on accounting, the credit crisis, the French Revolution, and the SAT and GMAT, among other things. He masters the subjects himself and then teaches them. As of the end of April, he claims to have served up more than 54 million individual lessons.

http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/11_22/b4230072816925.htm

Los Altos district pilots technology-based math program, Khan Academy

The Los Altos School District is piloting the program in fifth-grade classrooms at Covington and Santa Rita elementary schools and in two seventh grade classrooms at Egan. On Friday, students in Cadwell's class eagerly typed in answers on white MacBooks, as a graph projected overhead tracked the number of energy points the class was earning per minute.
"I love Khan Academy," said seventh-grader Devon Nemelka, 12. "Things that I'm having trouble with, it helps me set a goal to be proficient at it and get energy points and stuff."

Instead of lecturing, Cadwell moved around the classroom and helped students who were stuck on a problem. From her own computer, Cadwell can track each student's progress down to a problem-by-problem level, and help an individual student with a particular topic while allowing the rest of the class to move ahead. "It's helped me target my instruction," Cadwell said. "I just feel like I'm making a better use of my time and my kids' time."

Cadwell said she hadn't felt any pushback from parents on the new teaching approach since she began using it in December, though the program is a "paradigm shift" for some teachers accustomed to a more traditional classroom. The district is discussing how to expand the program next year, she said.

http://www.mercurynews.com/breaking-news/ci_17705589?nclick_check=1

Salman Khan talks about how and why he created the remarkable Khan Academy, a carefully structured series of educational videos offering complete curricula in math and, now, other subjects. He shows the power of interactive exercises, and calls for teachers to consider flipping the traditional classroom script -- give students video lectures to watch at home, and do "homework" in the classroom with the teacher available to help.

Salman Kahn's presentation on TED Talks… http://goo.gl/owewh

Sal received his MBA from Harvard Business School where he was president of the student body. He also holds a Masters in electrical engineering and computer science, a BS in electrical engineering and computer science, and a BS in mathematics from MIT where he was president of the the Class of 1998. While at MIT, Sal was the recipient of the Eloranta Fellowship which he used to develop web-based math software for children with ADHD. He was also an MCAT instructor for the Princeton Review and volunteered teaching gifted 4th and 7th graders at the Devotion School in Brookline, MA.

Specialties
Financial Analysis, Economics, Education, Technology
http://www.linkedin.com/in/khanacademy?goback=.nppvan_%2Fcarrollalice

How are you funding/making money off of this?

I quit my day job as of September 2009 to work on this full-time and was digging into my savings until recently. In May 2010, some generous individuals gave large enough gifts for me to take a salary.

Since then, Khan Academy has received donations from The Gates Foundation and won Google's Project 10 to the 100 of ideas to change the world.

Khan Academy is an IRS-recognized 501c3 not-for-profit organization. My goal is to make it self-sustaining in the next five years.

Are you interested in turning this into a business? Maybe with some VC funding?

I've been approached several times, but it just didn't feel right. When I'm 80, I want to feel that I helped give access to a world-class education to billions of students around the world. Sounds a lot better than starting a business that educates some subset of the developed world that can pay $19.95/month and eventually selling it to some text book company or something. I already have a beautiful wife, a hilarious son, two hondas and a decent house. What else does a man need?

With that said, if you are a social venture capitalist and are looking to deploy capital with the highest possible social return per dollar invested, we should talk. I think you'll find that there is no more measurable, scalable and high impact way to educate the world.

http://www.khanacademy.org/about/faq