KHAN Academy : Global One-World Classroom

It teaches over 4 millions of students a month. It might change the conventional education system of the world. It is trying our best to improve the way the world learns. Too many people around the globe don’t have access to high quality educational materials, or are forced to learn through a system that doesn't allow them to learn at their own pace. 

Who is it?

It is KHAN Academy. KHAN Academy is not-for-profit organization with the mission of providing a free world class education for anyone, anywhere. Created in 2006 by by Bangladeshi American  educator Salman Khan, a graduate of MIT and Harvard Business School. The website supplies a free online collection of more than 3,200 micro lectures via video tutorials stored on YouTube teaching all the subjects.

Let us absorb how he has built on simple idea to make one of the breakthrough non-profit educational organization.

Inception of idea

Salman Khan has the habit of teaching his cousins and relatives children. Khan used to tutor his cousin Nadia in mathematics using yahoo doodle notepad. When other relative children asked him taught same thing, he decided to make a tutorial video  and uploaded it in youtube.

His cousins like the video as they could rewind and revisit anytime and anywhere. Accidently few unintended surfer also visited his video and put some encouraging comment. This  prompted Khan to quit his job in finance as a hedge fund and began working out of his closet in a non-profit endeavour to "provide a free, world class education for anyone, anywhere."

Vision

To build a global one-world classroom

Mission

Provide a free, world class education for anyone, anywhere

Conceptual model

1. -         To create video library on various subject from basic topic areas to advanced topics.
2. -       Flip the classroom.  In traditional way of learning, students are taught basic concept in class and were given homework to find out the his understanding on the topic. Now with videos on various topics are available on the site, student can watch the video at home and do homework at school.
3.       Online assessment on various topics
4. -       To provide data and analytics to teachers so that they can track the progress of student. It should also highlight in which questions or topics student is struggling to understand.

Scalability

As Khan Academy is not for profit organization, scalability has been the issue for propagation of the breakthrough idea. He has following expansion initiatives :

1.      Expanding the teaching faculty

2.      Working on data analytics for teacher to track the student progress.

3.      Extending content through crowd-sourced contributions following a Wikipedia-style model.

On noticing highest possible social return on value many philanthropists has donated handsome  amount of money. Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates discovered Khan's videos for his own kids; he invited Khan up to his foundation to discuss Khan Academy. Soon, millions of dollars were donated to his efforts, much of it from Google and the Gates Foundation.

Participative Management Style – Theory Y:

(Assuming student as the employee)

-       Student (Employee) learn as naturally as they play because they don’t have to feel the pressure of teacher being monitoring him. Also, they don’t have to feel shy if they don’t understand certain part as they can any rewind it or restart it. There is no strict time-table to follow. They can follow their on pace.

-  Student (Employee) will apply self-control and self-direction in the pursuit of learnings (organisational objectives), without external control or the threat of punishment (Appraisal)

-        Student (Employee) usually accept and often seek responsibility. It has been absorb that students were studying even during vacations and at 3 a.m.

Constant restructuring of Organisation:

They keep on taking constant feedbacks of teachers regarding the progress of the student as well as on the software for data analysis. Depending upon the requirement of teacher (customer) they on changing the software as well as curriculum and teaching style.

Future Prospects and Globalization:

Topics to be covered in open ended, from basic physics to metaphysics, algebra to calculus. There are unlimited topics to covered. Moreover, there won’t be any competition as everything available is for free.

Internet is source of global expansion. One can access it sitting silicon valley as well as one sitting in rural India. Also, with collaboration with google for language translation, more and more will be able to understand it. Currently all the videos are translated into 10 foreign language.