The headquarters of what has rapidly become the largest school in the world, at 10 million students strong, is stuffed into a few large communal rooms in a decaying 1960s office building hard by the commuter rail tracks in Mountain View, California. Despite the cramped, dowdy circumstances, youthful optimism at the Khan Academy abounds. At the weekly organisation-wide meeting, discussion about translating their offerings into dozens of languages is sandwiched between a video of staffers doing weird dances with their hands and plans for upcoming camping and ski trips.
Pivoting, Salman Khan, the 36-year-old founder, cracks a sports joke appropriate for someone who holds multiple degrees from MIT and Harvard. It involves LeBron James (a Khan Academy fan), three-point shots and sophisticated algorithms called Monte Carlo simulations. The company’s 37 employees, mostly software developers with stints at places like Google and Facebook, are the types who know when to laugh. And they do.
Even in internet terms, that’s impressive for an organisation that 24 months ago consisted of one man working alone in a walk-in closet and 12 months prior to that was the oddball hobby of an intellectually hyperactive hedge fund analyst. But Salman Khan’s ambitions go much further. “Now that there are these tools, where students can learn at their own pace and master the concepts before moving on, can we rethink this educational model that has been standard practice for hundreds of years?”
The Prussian model had a number of advantages. It guaranteed all Americans a free, relatively good education and guaranteed employers a time-disciplined workforce with a set of common skills. It played no small part in lifting millions into the middle classes. And given the state of technology at the time, it was arguably the most cost-effective way of doing so. But it also had significant drawbacks, most notably its factory-like pacing.
“It is the naysayers that say nothing new,” sighs Udacity’s Thrun. “Almost any recent success you see in society was quote-unquote ‘nothing new’. There were lots of people who said the internet was nothing new. After all, we have books already and can send them by mail. If there was nothing new, Salman Khan wouldn’t have hundreds of millions of views.”
(This story appears in the 21 December, 2012 issue of Forbes India. To visit our Archives, click here.)
I have read a number of "revolutions" that were always touted as the next big thing in education, but i must say this is really new fresh and very very effective. Hadnt heard of Khan academy before this, and made a visit to the webpage.Staggeringly effective! Needs to be pushed more in India, a country which churns out millions of so-called engineers and we have the most archaic and rigid education system.
on Jan 4, 2013