Khan Academy Changing the Way We Learn


Salman Khan started out creating videos aimed at assisting his niece, Nadia, with her math homework.

That was in 2004.

Fast forward to today and the Khan Academy, Khan’s free educational website, has over 2,300 videos aimed at helping students all over the world with various problems ranging from simple addition to college calculus and everything in between. Math, however, isn’t the only subject that Khan covers in his lessons, which usually last anywhere from 10-18 minutes.

Just check out his website and you will see that he is constantly adding videos on accounting, the French Revolution, and the SAT and GMAT, among other things. Sal first masters the subjects himself and then teaches them via his videos. By of the end of April 2011 the Khan Academy had served up more than 54 million individual lessons and that number continues to grow at a rapid pace.

Just to put things in perspective as to how big his education site is becoming chew on this. MIT’s OpenCourseWare site has been around since 2001 and averages 1 million hits a month. Last month alone, Sal’s website, which posted it’s first video in November of 2006, had over 2 million visits.

Teachers aren’t the only ones, however, getting excited about Kahn’s project. Microsoft mastermind Bill Gates, a online learning devotee, is one of Sal’s biggest fans.

“What Sal Khan has done is amazing,” Gates says in a video on his personal website. “He’s taken all this material and broken it down into little 12-minute lectures. I use it myself to remind myself of things. I see Sal Khan as a pioneer in an overall movement to use technology to let more and more people learn things,” says Gates. “It’s the start of a revolution.”

Check out the video below to hear Gates talk about the Khan Academy and how it can change the world of learning as we know it.

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