LE02: Management lessons from Khan Academy

Introduction

The Khan Academy is a non-profit educational organization, created in 2006 by Bangladeshi American educator Salman Khan, a graduate of MIT and Harvard Business School.  Khan quit his job in finance as a hedge fund analyst at Connective Capital Management in 2009 to work on his mission of "providing a high quality education to anyone, anywhere". This led to the birth of www.khanacademy.org

What it is all about? Its Mission and Vision

Vision: Khan’s vision 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."

Mission: To provide a high quality education to anyone, anywhere.

The website provides a free online collection of more than 3200 micro lectures via video tutorial on mathematics, history, healthcare and medicine, finance, physics, chemistry, biology, astronomy, economics, cosmology, organic chemistry, microeconomics, microeconomics and computer science.

How is it changing the rules of Education?

1      Low Teacher Student Ratio: The biggest problem in primary education sector in India is very low teacher to student ratio 30:1. With increase in internet penetration across geographical boundaries of India Khanacademy.org can provide free informative lectures at home. The short-term goal is to help the average student become proficient in subjects with which he or she has trouble.

2    Rote Learning:  Also some students are not able to all learn at the same rate, thus either holding back the faster ones or leaving behind those that need more help. But now kids can learn online at school  replacing teachers’ rote lectures

3    Challenge for classroom teachers:  This is a new challenge for classroom teachers. They need to develop students as thinkers.  Now, the site’s video tutorials are sequenced, so students can move through increasing levels of competency on the path to mastery. This is how video games work, but until now, it’s not how schools traditionally have operated.

 Business Revenue Model

The project is funded by donations. Khan Academy is a not-for-profit organization 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. 

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.

Khan Academy has eclipsed MIT's Open Courseware (OCW) in terms of videos viewed—its YouTube channel has over 150 million total views, compared to MIT's 38 million. It also has twice as many subscribers, at more than 320,000.

Theory Y

Khanacademy believes in theory Y. If a student is provided with ample learning opportunities then sky is the limit for him/her.