Stories
Stories
Giving millions of students a new path to learning
Sal Khan (MBA 2003) is the founder and CEO of Khan Academy. In this video, he talks about his path from hedge fund analyst to education innovator and the explosive growth of his online learning platform.
“I’m the founder and executive director of the Khan Academy, which is a not-for-profit with a mission of providing a free, world-class education for anyone anywhere.
“What that is today, it’s a website and software and several thousand videos on anything from basic arithmetic all the way up to college-level calculus and physics and art history and history. It’s being accessed by about 10 million students every month. It’s been translated into the world’s languages. It’s been used formally in about 300,000 classrooms in some way, shape, or form.
“There are two goals here: one is to provide not just videos but also interactive software and feedback and knowledge to as many people as possible, whether they’re in a classroom or not, but also to empower teachers so that the focal point of the classroom is no longer information delivery and instead it can be used for higher-order things—for conversations, for case discussions.
“This whole project started in 2004 while I was working in Boston as an analyst at a hedge fund and I was tutoring a cousin remotely in New Orleans. At that point, I became what I call a ‘tiger cousin.’ That remote tutoring over the phone worked out well for her, so then I started tutoring her brothers. Then word got around in the family that free tutoring was going on, so I found myself working with 10 or 15 cousins every day after work, and I started writing some simple software for them so I could give them practice problems.
“A friend said, ‘Well, you know how to help yourself scale up, so why don’t you make some of your lessons as videos and put them on YouTube?’ And I said, ‘No, YouTube is for cats playing piano. It is not for serious mathematics.’ Slowly the traffic picked up and you fast forward to 2008, 2009 and several tens of thousands of people were using the site every month.
“In 2009, I quit my job to focus on this to see if I could turn this into a real organization, and you fast forward to today and it’s about 10 million [users].
“At minimum, what Khan Academy gives a student is an outlook. It gives them a second opinion. Now they have another place to go, a place that they can trust, a place that one of their friends have told them about. And not only can they go there to learn what they are supposed to be learning in their formal classroom, they can now go at their own pace. So if someone is self-directed, they can go as far as they want to.
“This is what I would want from my own children. If you can give students ownership over their own learning, and if they can pull information instead of having information pushed on them, they’re going to be OK in life.”
(Published June 2014)
Support the next generation of leaders Make a gift nowPost a Comment
Related Stories
-
- 20 Dec 2023
- Making A Difference
New School
Re: Rob Waldron (MBA 1992) -
- 01 Dec 2023
- HBS Alumni Bulletin
Turning Point: Where Credit Is Due
Re: Nagi Otgonshar (MBA 2015) -
- 22 Jun 2023
- Making A Difference
Book Smart
Re: David Risher (MBA 1991) -
- 19 Oct 2022
- Skydeck
If I Were You
Stories Featuring Sal Khan
-
- 10 May 2022
- HBS Alumni Bulletin
Alumni Achievement Awards 2022
Re: Tosh Barron (MBA 1972); Sal Khan (MBA 2003); Naina Kidwai (MBA 1982); Bob Ryan (MBA 1970); Bob Wilson (MBA 1961) -
- 05 May 2022
- Skydeck
Lesson Plans
Re: Sal Khan (MBA 2003) -
- 01 Mar 2022
- HBS Alumni News
2022 Alumni Achievement Awards Announced
Re: Tosh Barron (MBA 1972); Sal Khan (MBA 2003); Naina Kidwai (MBA 1982); Bob Ryan (MBA 1970); Bob Wilson (MBA 1961)