Sal Khan is a math, science, and history teacher to millions of students, yet none have ever seen his face. Khan is the voice and brains behind Khan Academy, a free online tutoring site that may have gotten your kid out of an algebra bind with its educational how-to videos. Now Khan Academy is going global. Backed by Google, Gates, and other Internet powerhouses, Sal Khan wants to change education worldwide, and his approach is already being tested in some American schools. Sanjay Gupta reports.
Vision & Mission
With its digital lessons and simple exercises, he's determined to transform how we learn at every level. One of his most famous pupils, Bill Gates, says Khan -- this "teacher to the world," is giving us all a glimpse of the future of education. Mission is to have every precocious 13-year-old in the world have access to every bit of information they could ever want.
Problem and inspiration
Among student there is lots of frustration with how information is conveyed in textbooks and lectures. As per Khan there would be connections in the subject matter that standard curricula would ignore despite the fact that they make the content easier to understand, enjoy, and RETAIN. Fascinating and INTUITIVE concepts are almost intentionally being butchered into pages and pages of sleep-inducing text and monotonic, scripted lectures. Intelligent peers memorizing steps and formulas for the next exam without any sense of the intuition or big picture, only to forget everything within a matter of weeks. The videos posted are his expression of how the concepts should have been expressed in the first place, all while not compromising rigor or comprehensiveness.
Innovative solution
In the process, Khan has fueled the debate over tech's growing influence on education while garnering the support of powerful friends.
"At 3,000 lessons online, Sal's personal ability as a teacher is remarkable," says Bill Gates, whose mention of Khan Academy put the website on the map. "Bringing this kind of creativity and new assessment tools for teachers could make a profoundly positive difference in education."
Where he once was an army of one, the staff has been ramped up to 32, including the recent high-profile addition of Google's first hired employee, programming ace Craig Silverstein. The staff's immediate mission is to further broaden the site's content and improve assessment and feedback features so the Khan Academy experience becomes more interactive.
Strategy and future goals
Khan's plans are no less ambitious on the ground. This summer, he'll launch the first Khan Academy Discovery Lab in Palo Alto, Calif., a small, project-based summer camp "that's like a lab for us, so we can learn more about how kids learn," he says. If it's a hit, the labs will expand nationwide next year.
And after, perhaps a bricks-and-mortar Khan Academy. "I wouldn't want to be the headmaster of such a place per se, because I want to work on stuff that scales," he says. "But it's a cool idea. A place where teachers make what an engineer would make, where the ideas we have can be on display."
Those ideas have caused friction in the education community. Though critiques vary, most hinge on the inference that classroom-based teachers aren't as important as we thought.
Khan's timing is perfect, because students and parents are living in the age of YouTube, where video watching is routine. Certainly schools need to evaluate what's best for their kids and curriculum. That said, technology is here, and doing the same old thing just won't work.
"We have 6 million visitors a month, so we think that students helping each other is the future," Khan says. "That community can become as popular as the videos themselves. It'll be like having free private tutors in the cloud."
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