You’ve probably heard of Salman Khan, the popular hero of Hindi films (If not, head over to my Movie Review Blog). Now here is another – Salman Khan of Khan Academy – the completely free virtual school. The first time I surfed to this website after hearing about it from a friend I was astounded that Khan and his team were offering all this for free. Khan Academy features hundreds of videos and practice exercises in Maths, Science, Humanities (History and Finance) and Test Prep (SAT, IIT JEE etc.).
The videos, all 2400 of them are made and narrated by Khan (who refers to himself as Sal) . With these videos, Khan Academy opens up a whole new way of learning. I cannot imagine the immense help these videos, when translated, would be of in educating impoverished children in countries like India where small villages lack basic facilities and teachers. This puts the power of learning in the hands of the user or motivated individual.
All this started when Khan started teaching his younger cousin. Upon requests from friends and family, he uploaded these to Youtube. With the response he got from Youtube, Khan Academy was born, and Sal quit his full-time job to devote himself to the site. Now he has received grants from Google and Bill Gates and other donations.
Note that this is not an ordinary “education” website. The videos are high quality and clearly narrated and explain concepts as well as worked out problems. A student, a class of students, a parent or an educator can track performance and concept understanding. There are also badges a user can collect – from Meteorite to Black Hole badges rewarding students for perseverance in listening and grasping concepts to being able to successfully solve a set of problems. My kids use Khan Academy for routine school Math and Science, but I noticed that in the Finance section there are also some videos explaining the Geithner plan, if you are so interested.
All videos are in English but volunteers are translating them to other languages, and there are several Youtube channels where these translated videos are available. Khan, who holds 4 degrees, seems filled with altruistic vision. CNN did a feature on this amazing organisation :
