Khan Academy : Evolution of Teaching

Salman Khan, who founded the Khan academy, is harnessing the power of the internet to teach 100,000 pupils a month from the comfort of their own home.

Pupils watch the lessons on their computers and then get together in the classroom to work through exercises and receive tutoring from their teacher.

Beginnings :

Khan Academy began in 2006 as a tidy collection of math and science tutorial videos from its founder Salman Khan, a hedge-fund analyst who had posted the material to help friends and relatives. Its popularity snowballed, and in recent years Khan has beefed up the software that sits behind and around the video lessons, delivering interactive practice exercises and enabling conversation and remote teaching.

Organisation Structure :

 From just two programmers at the beginning of 2011 and five programmers a year ago, Khan is up to 20 coders now, not counting 15 summer interns. It could use more engineers, but has deliberately slowed its hiring to preserve its laid-back workplace culture, which includes group outings for bowling, movies, and board games.

In many ways, Khan Academy resembles a software startup more than a traditional nonprofit. Workers say the pace of software development can be intense – “I am working as hard as I was at Facebook, if not harder,” says Juan – and the salary is calibrated to match that intensity.

“We compensate extremely well, especially for this area,” says Ben Kamens, who quit Fog Creek, a well-regarded New York software boutique, to join Khan as lead developer, bringing a programmer coworker along with him. “Life here is pretty good and we wouldn’t be able to hire the team we’ve hired if that wasn’t the case.”

Khan is constantly peppered with unsolicited overtures from people interested in helping to improve the academy’s code base, Kamens says, a wide spectrum of developers including the very seasoned and very young. That’s partly because Khan invites contributions to its source code, freely available on GitHub, but also because the organization is at the center of the hot, fast-emerging online education movement.

The Khan Advantage :

There are no textbooks and no teacher lecturing. The students watch the Khan video for homework the night before to learn a concept. Then, they come to class and do problem sets called modules and they can get one-on-one help. There is less lecturing and more interaction. What you think of as homework, you do at home, and what you would normally do in the classroom, you do at home (they call it “flipping the classroom”). You are able to rewind or pause the video if you miss something or aren’t understanding something. Computer lab at the school is open until 10 PM.

In addition, the teacher can help with the student’s progress. The teacher doesn’t have to assume that everyone understands everything. She can see who needs help and how long each student took on each problem with this software. The teacher then can have mini workshops with those few students that need help in a certain area of math. They are gathering data from these classrooms and those who are watching the videos online. There have been 41 million visits in the past 18 months from people in the United States alone. 

It’s really neat to see how the future of education is changing for the better because of technology, specifically through Khan Academy. I think that I would’ve done much better in math with this type of learning. It sounds like the software really helps the teacher see what students need help and in what areas. That way the students who are excelling can continue learning new material and the students who need help can get one-on-one help from the teacher.