My name is Khan too

Mala Ashok is all praise for this free virtual school that has children as well as adults flocking to it.

This is not the story of Sharukh Khan’s wonderful portrayal of a special needs person.  It is in fact the story of Salman Khan — no not the Bollywood hero with the six-pack abs.

This Khan too is a hero; but his fame spans a world far beyond Bollywood or Hollywood. He is famous all over the world.

Salman Khan, a graduate of MIT worked as an investment analyst, and a very successful one, in Boston till the year 2006.  He had some young cousins in New Orleans who needed some help with their school work and Salman offered to teach them remotely from Boston.

Khan did this by making simple digital videos.  In these videos, he narrated and explained lessons on an animated digital chalkboard.  His drawings dealt with equations, chemical reactions and so on.  The lessons dealt with basic subjects covered in school. 

Khan posted these ‘tutorials’ on YouTube so that they were available to all kids with Internet connectivity.

Automated self wins

After a few months Khan found that his cousins preferred the YouTube version lessons to any lessons he taught in person!  Khan describes this as “they preferred an automated version of their cousin to their cousin.” Yes, he had almost made himself redundant!
This is not all that surprising when you think about it.  The student cousins could ‘pause’ and repeat the teacher cousin’s lesson whenever they needed without feeling embarrassed or stupid.  If they needed to re-learn something that they had already learned they just watched the videos again.  By the same token, if the lessons were too slow and they got bored they could skip some portions and advance.  Thus essentially they were getting a self-paced, individual learning tool delivered to them in a medium they enjoyed and trusted — a medium that spoke their language and a medium they were comfortable with.

These tutorials, which were in the public domain, went viral.  The Khan Academy, as it is now known, evolved from his lessons to his cousins and soon their friends became an Internet sensation.  Within three years, over 50,000 people were watching the videos each month.  In four years this number was 200,000 and by the year 2011 the Khan Academy was drawing over 2 million visitors to its site.  The viewership had grown exponentially without any advertising — just word of mouth.

With the increase in the number of viewers, the range of subjects covered, has also increased.  The Academy’s Video Library now has over 3,000 videos in a diverse range of topics from American History to Quadratic Equations.  You can ‘click’ on to the Khan Academy site at www.khanacademy.org.  I did and reached a screen called, “The Beauty of Algebra.”  And, yes it was fascinating.

For parents too

This made me realise that the site is useful not only for students who like learning by themselves but also for parents whose skills are rusty and want to help their children with their homework.

So how fast is the library growing?  Roughly three lessons a day are being added i.e. about 1,000 a year.  With all this growth and the phenomenal success, The Khan Academy’s mission is simple — “To accelerate learning for students of all ages.” 

Shantanu Sinha is the President of Khan Academy.  He explains, “Our vision is a free virtual school.  We want to get enough content up that anyone in the world can start at one plus one equals two and go all the way to quantum mechanics!  We also want to translate the site into the ten most common languages.”  Some day the site will attract billions of visitors a month the visionaries hope.

This is indeed a far cry from the vedic paathshaalas and gurukulas which initiated learning in our country but indeed just as successful in facilitating learning.