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Khan Academy

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Khan Academy
File:KhanAcademyLogo.png
Type of site
educational video repository
Available inAmerican English
OwnerSalman Khan
Created bySalman Khan, founder and Executive Director
RevenueN/A
URLwww.khanacademy.org
CommercialNo
Registrationrequired for some services

The Khan Academy is a non-profit[2] educational organization, created in 2006 by American[3] educator Salman Khan, a graduate of MIT. With the stated mission of "providing a high quality education to anyone, anywhere", the website supplies a free online collection of more than 3,000 micro lectures via video tutorials stored on YouTube teaching mathematics, history, healthcare and medicine, finance, physics, chemistry, biology, astronomy, economics, cosmology, organic chemistry, American civics, art history, microeconomics and computer science.[4]

History

The founder of the organization, Salman Khan, was born and raised in New Orleans, Louisiana, United States.[5] After earning three degrees from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (a BS in mathematics, a BS in electrical engineering and computer science, and an MS in electrical engineering and computer science), he pursued an MBA from Harvard Business School. In late 2004, Khan began tutoring his cousin Nadia in mathematics using Yahoo!'s Doodle notepad. When other relatives and friends sought similar help, he decided it would be more practical to distribute the tutorials on YouTube.[5][6] Their popularity there and the testimonials of appreciative students prompted Khan to quit his job in finance as a hedge fund analyst at Connective Capital Management in 2009, and focus on the tutorials (then released under the moniker "Khan Academy") full-time.[6] Bill Gates once said that "I'd say 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."[7]

The project is funded by donations. Khan Academy is a 501(c)(3) not-for-profit organization,[2] now with significant backing from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and Google. Several people have made US$10,000 contributions; Ann and John Doerr gave $100,000; total revenue is about $150,000 in donations. Additionally, it also earned $2,000 a month from ads on the Web site in 2010, until Khan Academy ceased to accept advertising.[8] In 2010, Google announced it would give the Khan Academy $2 million for creating more courses and for translating the core library into the world’s most widely spoken languages, as part of their Project 10100.[9]

Technical format

File:Khan Academy heart disease.ogv
A Khan Academy video explaining heart disease

The Khan Academy started with Khan remotely tutoring one of his cousins interactively using Yahoo Doodle images. Based on feedback from his cousin, additional cousins began to take advantage of the interactive, remote tutoring. In order to make better use of his and their time, Khan transitioned to making YouTube video tutorials.[10] Drawings are now made with a Wacom tablet and the free natural drawing application SmoothDraw 3, and recorded with screen capture software from Camtasia Studio. Khan's audio narratives are recorded with a Samson C03U USB Multi-Pattern Condenser Microphone with a miniature desk tripod.

While all videos continue to be hosted on Khan Academy's YouTube channel, they also are available through Khan Academy's own website, which also contains many other features such as progress tracking, practice exercises, and a variety of tools for teachers in public schools. Logging into the site requires a Google or a Facebook account.

Khan eschewed a format that would involve a person standing by a whiteboard, desiring instead to present the learning concepts as if "popping out of a darkened universe and into one's mind with a voice out of nowhere" in a way akin to sitting next to someone and working out a problem on a sheet of paper: "If you're watching a guy do a problem [while] thinking out loud, I think people find that more valuable and not as daunting."[11] Offline versions of the videos have been distributed by not-for-profit groups to rural areas in Asia, Latin America, and Africa.[5][12] While the current content is mainly concerned with pre-college mathematics and physics, Khan's long-term goal is to provide "tens of thousands of videos in pretty much every subject" and to create "the world's first free, world-class virtual school where anyone can learn anything."[5]

The Khan Academy also provides a web-based exercise system that generates problems for students based on skill level and performance. This software is available as open source under the New BSD license. [13][14] Khan believes his academy points an opportunity to overhaul the traditional classroom by using software to create tests, grade assignments, highlight the challenges of certain students, and encourage those doing well to help struggling classmates.[6] The tutorials are touted as helpful because, among other factors, they can be paused by students, while a classroom lecture cannot be.[15]

The success of his low-tech, conversational tutorials—Khan's face never appears, and viewers see only his unadorned step-by-step doodles and diagrams on an electronic blackboard—suggests an educational transformation that de-emphasizes classrooms, campus and administrative infrastructure, and even brand-name instructors.[16]

Services and vision

The major components of Khan Academy include:[17]

  • a video library with over 3000 videos in various topic areas and over 131 million lessons delivered.[18][19] These videos are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 License.[20]
  • automated exercises with continuous assessment; there are 315 practice exercises, mainly in math, including four challenges and 311 individual modules.
  • peer-to-peer tutoring based on objective data collected by the system, a process that will be projected in the future.

Not-for-profit partner organizations are making the content available outside YouTube. The Lewis Center for Educational Research, which is affiliated with NASA, is bringing the content into community colleges and charter schools around the United States. World Possible is creating offline snapshots of the content to distribute in rural, developing regions with limited or no access to the Internet.[5][21]

Khan has stated a vision of turning the academy into a charter school:

This could be the DNA for a physical school where students spend 20 percent of their day watching videos and doing self-paced exercises and the rest of the day building robots or painting pictures or composing music or whatever.[8]

A November 2011 grant of $5 million from Ireland-based The O'Sullivan Foundation, founded by Avego MD and cloud computing pioneer Sean O'Sullivan, will be directed to three initiatives:

  1. Expanding the teaching faculty
  2. Extending content through crowd-sourced contributions following a Wikipedia-style model
  3. Developing curricula to help users blend the content with physical teaching through STEM learning

Recent teaching appointees as a result of the grant include Dr. Steven Zucker, formerly of Pratt Institute and Dr. Beth Harris, from the Museum of Modern Art in New York, to produce art and history content. YouTube video creators Vi Hart and Brit Cruise have also joined the teaching faculty.[22]

A series of summer school camps are planned to start in Northern California from June 2012 to test curricula for real-world schools. [23]

Recognition

Salman Khan at TED 2011

References

  1. ^ "khanacademy.org Site Info". Alexa Internet. Retrieved 2012-02-02.
  2. ^ a b Contribute | Khan Academy
  3. ^ "Frequently Asked Questions". Khan Academy. Retrieved 2011-11-03.
  4. ^ a b Michels, Spencer (2010-02-22). "Khan Academy: How to Calculate the Unemployment Rate". PBS NewsHour. PBS. Retrieved 2011-01-05.
  5. ^ a b c d e "About Us: Frequently Asked Questions". Khan Academy. 2010. Retrieved 2011-01-05.
  6. ^ a b c d Temple, James (2009-12-14). "Salman Khan, math master of the Internet". sfgate.com. Retrieved 2009-12-23.
  7. ^ a b David A. Kaplan (2010-08-24). "Bill Gates' favorite teacher". CNN. Fortune. Retrieved 2011-01-05.
  8. ^ a b Young, Jeffrey R. (2010-06-06). "College 2.0: A Self-Appointed Teacher Runs a One-Man 'Academy' on YouTube". The Chronicle of Higher Education. Retrieved 2011-01-05.
  9. ^ "$10 million for Project 10^100 winners". The Official Google Blog. 2010-09-24. Retrieved 2010-09-24.
  10. ^ Khan, Salman. "Khan Academy FAQ; How Did You Get Started?".
  11. ^ "Need a tutor? YouTube videos await". USA Today. AP. 2008-12-12. Retrieved 2011-01-05.
  12. ^ a b "2009 Education Award Laureate: Salman Khan". Techawards.org. Retrieved 2009-12-14.[dead link][verification needed]
  13. ^ "khanacademy on Google Code".
  14. ^ "Khan Academy source code on Kiln".
  15. ^ Rasicot, Julie, "Education Review: Web site offering free math lessons catches on ‘like wildfire’", Washington Post, 5 August 2011.
  16. ^ a b "Innovation in Education: Bill Gates' favorite teacher". CNN Money. August 24, 2010. {{cite news}}: Italic or bold markup not allowed in: |publisher= (help)
  17. ^ "Khan Academy Vision and Social Return". YouTube. 2010-04-13. Retrieved 2011-01-05.
  18. ^ Khan Academy
  19. ^ "Khan Academy". YouTube. Retrieved 2011-05-01.
  20. ^ "Khan Academy". Khan Academy. Retrieved 2010-10-25.
  21. ^ "Partners". Worldpossible.org. Retrieved 2010-07-06.
  22. ^ Frequency Stability - YouTube
  23. ^ "Khan Academy Receives $5 Million to Accelerate the Reinvention of Education". MarketWatch. Retrieved 2011-12-03.
  24. ^ "Salman Khan on CNN". YouTube. 2010-03-11. Retrieved 2011-01-05.
  25. ^ "Sal's Amazing Global Academy". The Gates Notes. 2010-10-07. Retrieved 2011-01-05.
  26. ^ "Project 10100 Winners". Project 10100. Google. 2010. Retrieved 2011-01-05.
  27. ^ [1] Spoke on Mar 2, 2011; video at http://www.ted.com/talks/salman_khan_let_s_use_video_to_reinvent_education.html
  28. ^ "Salman Khan of Khanacademy.org". Charlie Rose. May 4, 2011. Retrieved 2011-05-09.
  29. ^ Thompson, Clive (July 15, 2011). "How Khan Academy Is Changing the Rules of Education". Wired. Retrieved 4 August 2011.
  30. ^ "Salman Khan on Liberating the Classroom for Creativity". Edutopia. September 30, 2011.
  31. ^ "The O'Sullivan Foundation Grants $5M To Online Learning Platform Khan Academy". Techcrunch. November 4, 2011.
  32. ^ "Khan Academy: The Future of Education?". March, 2012. {{cite web}}: Check date values in: |date= (help)
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