The other Salman Khan Education for all

The Khan Academy has pioneered a whole new concept in learning through technology that could signify learning for all

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BY RITAM MITRA

Skipping lectures is by far the most tempting guilty pleasure all university students have had the misfortune to enjoy at one stage. At least, it has traditionally been a guilty one. With the amount of technology that educational institutions embrace today however, the need for students and teachers to be physically together in a classroom has been greatly diminished. Salman Khan, the Bangladeshi-IndianAmerican creator of the nonprofit educational organisation Khan Academy, has translated this concept into a massive phenomenon – and it will be the future of education.

A cursory glance out the window on a rainy morning once used to lead to thoughts of the long commute to university, wet socks, broken umbrellas or delayed trains. To the majority of this generation of students, though, it is simply an opportunity to sleep in and watch the lecture online. Whether or not the student watches the lecture is another matter altogether.

The multi-million dollar concept for Khan Academy could not have had humbler beginnings. Khan, whose mother is from Kolkata and whose father is from Barisal in Bangladesh, is a graduate of MIT and Harvard Business School. He began tutoring his younger cousins in New Orleans remotely through Yahoo’s ‘Doodle’ notepad in 2004, and soon began supplementing their lessons with short YouTube clips, as a simple “refresher” to their learning experiences.

At the time, Khan was working as a hedge fund analyst. The videos gained a massive following and by 2009, having seen the rapid rise in demand and the popularity of his videos, Khan quit his position at Connective Capital Management to focus strictly on his tutorials. His vision for education is based on a simple, fundamental philosophy described typically succinctly on the Khan Academy YouTube page: “It is our mission to provide a world-class education to anyone, anywhere.

And Khan Academy is indeed reaching the world. With videos dubbed in 16 languages and subtitled in many more, Khan’s ideas have transformed his organisation into more than just a depository of tutorials.

A quick visit to the Khan Academy website and two things struck me immediately – there are no advertisements and the database is ridiculously large! There are no advertisements because Khan started turning down advertising revenue in 2010, even though the project was earning $2000/month simply through its own website – which would be a far greater figure now that YouTube videos can be monetised. Khan’s videos are not, but he has received large grants from Google, Bill Gates (who calls Khan his favourite teacher) and the O’Sullivan Foundation, among a huge number of other good-wishers.

It took me less than fifteen seconds to sign in with my Facebook account (it also offers users the option to log in with their Google accounts, or create their own Khan Academy account), and within a minute I was revisiting the fundamental skills of addition, subtraction and telling time, in the website’s ‘Practice’ function – a mindmap of mathematics topics and problems, from which I can select and complete exercises at will.

Even now as an adult, I was still excited and nervous as my streak of ‘correct problems’ grew, and when I stumbled across longforgotten mathematics problems which I had absolutely no hope of ever completing again, I simply clicked the ‘Show Hint’ button, and for anything from complex numbers to vectors, I was given a step-by-step solution to each problem.

The website features a staggering 3200 videos. Lessons are wide-ranging, and cover any number of subjects. The most recently uploaded video is titled, “Why Europe is worried about Greece”, and features Khan (albeit, like every other video, just his voice and his tablet-drawings) speaking in layman’s terms about the Eurozone debt crisis.

A quick look down the page reveals other surprises. After I scrolled past the 500+ algebra videos, I saw a collection of hundreds of videos on Art History, ranging from Ancient to Baroque to Post-Colonial. A click on any of them takes me to a virtual analysis and history of an unimaginably large number of paintings and sculptures. Going further down, I even happened upon some tutorials on investment valuation and venture capital, a pleasant surprise in the context of my upcoming finance exams.

Although the organisation relies entirely on donations, the site features only a very subtle, nondescript, small-font ‘Donate’ button in the top right hand corner. The big, bold buttons that most sites would use to encourage donations instead say, ‘Watch a Video’ and ‘Take a Challenge’.

Khan hopes that schools all over the world will embrace the site, in what he sees as a path to a virtual reversal in learning –students will learn the syllabus at home and go to school to resolve any problems they are facing with it. Teachers will have access to a wide range of statistics outlining which students are having difficulties with exactly which types of problems – if a student has made 9 attempts at factorising a particular expression, the teacher will know exactly which one it was, and at which step they were asking for hints.

Khan’s tutorials have been a huge success largely because of their simplicity. Khan never appears in the videos themselves, and mainly uses fluorescent coloured ‘pens’ on a black background. Although he is certainly a technological pioneer, it is the complete absence of ‘hightech’ in his tutorials that makes them so appealing. It is, simply, pure education.

Skipping lectures has been common practice for a long time now, but it’s only the current generation that has had the luxury of recorded lectures and supplementary materials to catch up to the pack. Now, Khan Academy has once again revolutionised the way education is perceived. The benefits to remote and disadvantaged communities are already immense. On an even larger global train of thought, though – what a wonderful thing it would be if every single person had the opportunity of an education.

Teachers will have access to a wide range of statistics outlining which students are having difficulties with exactly which types of problems – if a student has made 9 attempts at factorising a particular expression, the teacher will know exactly which one it was, and at which step they were asking for hints.

With videos dubbed in 16 languages and subtitled in many more, Khan’s ideas have transformed his organisation into more than just a depository of tutorials.