Khan Academy - Future of Education

For Salman Khan and the students on the planet earth, last 5 years were great. These years transformed him from a hedge fund manager to the most influential teacher in the world while gave a 1 man academy available from everywhere in the world. As Bill Gates stated correctly "we've moved about 160 IQ points from the hedge fund category to the teaching-many-people-in-a-leveraged-way category. It was a good day his wife let him quit his job."

Khan Academy on the Gates Notes

In the summer of 2004, Salman Khan learned that his seventh-grader cousin, Nadia was having trouble in math class converting kilograms. He wanted to tutor her but there was a problem. Salman was living in Boston while Nadia was in New Orleans. However, this did not prevent them. Using Yahoo Doodle software as a shared notepad, and a telephone, Salman Khan started to tutor Nadiaand then her brothers. Word spread to other relatives and friends. But it was proved to be difficult for all to sit at the same time for tutor and Khan solved this problem by creating videos and uploading them to Youtube. These videos and their growing popularity created what is now known as Khan Academy. In 2010 at the Aspen Ideas Festival, Bill Gates calling it "unbelievable" and revealed that he has been using Khan Academy with my kids.

Eventually, Salman Khan left his full time job and started to devote all of his time to the academy with the vision to create a virtual school composed of tens of thousands of videos about every teaching topic under the sun.  He is also well supported with the world community. According to wikipedia:

Several people have made $10,000 contributions; Ann and John Doerr gave $100,000; total revenue is about $150,000 in donations, and $2,000 a month from ads on the Web site. As of September 2010, Google announced they would be providing the Khan Academy with $2 million to support the creation of more courses and to enable the Khan Academy to translate their core library into the world’s most widely spoken languages, as part of their Project 10^100.[8] Salman is aiming at making nothing less than "tens of thousands" of tutorials offering the "first free, world-class virtual school where anyone can learn anything."

Khan Academy recently released KhanApp, a smart phone application to access the video pool of Khan Academy. Broad band internet is providing the students a chance to directly learn from a genius from anywhere with internet connection. Khan academy also has plans to overcome to obstacles: Language barrier and no internet connectivity. They plan to translate this works to the languages of the world and prepare CD's for rural areas.

KhanApp - Khan Academy on Smartphones

If you have not discovered him yet, do yourself or your kids or other kids a favour and spread this work! It is really amazing and one of the best things that happend in world wide web!