Khan Academy

Inception of the Khan Academy

Over the past year, it’s become difficult to have a conversation about education and education reform without mentioning the words “Khan Academy.” For those who aren’t familiar, Khan Academy is a website that offers free instructional videos on everything from basic arithmetic to multi-variable calculus. Its founder, Salman Khan, originally started the site to help tutor his cousins in math. Today, millions of students across the world have used it for homework help and test prep, while major school districts have begun to incorporate Khan Academy into their curriculum. Some even wonder whether it will eventually replace teachers altogether.

From the Washington Post to 60 Minutes, Salman Khan has been hailed a pioneer, while everyone from gleeful journalists to investors have anointed Khan Academy a “revolution in education.”

It’s not.

Instead, Khan Academy may be one of the most dangerous phenomena in education today. Not because of the site itself, but because of what it — or more appropriately, our obsession with it — says about how we as a nation view education, and what we’ve come to expect.

On the most recent Program for International Student Assessment, American high school students finished 25th in math among OECD countries. Meanwhile, a recent Raytheon report found that 61 percent of middle school students would rather take out the garbage than do their math homework.

When you ask students why they dislike math so much, they typically say, “I don’t know what it means or when I’ll ever use it.” This is understandable. As so many of us know from our own school days, math is too often presented as a bunch of random steps for students to memorize and then regurgitate on a test.

Salman Khan , a hedge fund analyst in US, stumbled upon by chance on an idea that paid rich dividends. He gave up his lucrative career for that. So the story becomes all the more fascinating. May be there is a lesson in there for all of us  - the future managers. What does an Enterprise mean? By Enterprise we mean a business that involves risk and pays dividends. Such a business requires boldness and effort. Salman Khan, now an entrepreneur showed just that. He started with teaching his cousins online via videos that could be downloaded elsewhere in the world. The best part according to him was that his cousins were not only able to receive the knowledge but refer to it as and when they wanted later. That's how, i feel, education becomes effective. So he took the idea ahead and built an organisation on it called Khan Academy.

What is Khan Academy?

The Khan Academy, a not for profit organisation provides online educational content to millions of web users.These videos are micro lectures on subject such as  mathematics, history, healthcare  and medicine, finance, physics, chemistry, biology, astronomy, economics,cosmology, organic chemistry, American Civics, art history, macroeconomics  and  microeconomics,  and  computer science. The videos are available to be viewed for free on video sharing sites such as YouTube.

Vision of the Entrepreneur Mr Salman Khan

 Mr. Khan has stated a vision of turning the academy into a charter school:

This could be the DNA for a physical school where students spend 20 percent of their day watching videos and doing self-paced exercises and the rest of the day building robots or painting pictures or composing music or whatever

Khan Academy as a business model

The organization runs on donations from individuals. Some years ago it had started accepted advertising through its videos which it later discontinued. It has found a sponsor in Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Google also helped it in a big way by contributing $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 10. Khan Academy has been viewed more times than MIT's OpenCourseWare (OCW). 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. Thus in short one can say that the business model adopted by Khan Academy is a sustainable one as it adds value to users and industry alike.

The videos on Khan Academy 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nTFEUsudhfs

Here is a TED video

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W-vj6BhQa5w

Management Lessons that you can derive 

Goal Setting

We had discussed earlier that the goals we set need to be S.M.A.R.T.E.R.

S - Specific

M - Measurable

A - Attainable

R - Realistic

T - Timely

E - Evaluate

R - Re-evaluate

Here we observe that Mr. Khan has done exactly that by targeting the school going students who are in general dissatisfied with traditional means of education. His goals are specific to catering a particular audience and realistic, in the sense that he knew what he was good at and used that to his advantage without much experimenting. for example initially he did the videos himself so he set real targets.

Theory X and Theory Y Managers

In principle, Theory X managers are negative in the mindset. So they look at every opportunity as a task that they are being forced to do. Whereas Theory Y managers are just the opposite. They are the ones who believe that things that are tough to achieve are waiting for someone who is tough enough mentally to do them. In essence, Theory Y managers have a positive outlook of life and that reflects in their work too. Here Mr. Khan could not have taken up this initiative without feeling positive about the tasks and the barriers. Thus, he stands out as a Theory Y manager.

Conceptual, Human and Technical Skills

In theory it has been said that people possess three kinds of skills namely - Conceptual, Human and Technical. 

When we talk of conceptual skills we mean the learning of the trade that you are in. For a manager it may be understanding the business of the company or module he is a part of. By human skills we mean the skills needed to interact in an environment. Managers need to treat the people around them with respect and understand their potential at all times. Lastly, technical skills are also the part of a human being as they stand for the theoretical know-how of how things work. As a person moves up from one level to the other the combination of skills that his job requires changes as given in the figure below.

We observe in the real life example of Mr. Khan that initially he does the video creation himself. So, it can be safely said that he possesses technical skills and requires less of human skills when he is working alone, all by himself. But as he gradually builds the business around the tutorials he needs more conceptual and human skills. Whereas the technical proficiency is taken care of by his team which further develop the tabs and cluster of topics on the web.

USP of Khan Academy

the need for tutoring arrived to Salman Khan as an opportunity when he was making his niece study through web. It was a good example of creative problem solving where in a need was made viral through the use of web based services.

The videos are of 10 mins length and not more than that using the scientific principles of retention such that the effectiveness of study is maintained. It has over 3200 video hours of lecture and more watched than MIT Sloan Open Course Ware(OCW).

Its interactive unlike the chalk and teacher videos and children can ask their question to the software, form the youtube videos it has now turned into an interactive software, this is an example of progressive evolution of an organisation.


Khan Academy - The Truth


When Bill Gates and others generously donated millions of dollars to Khan’s organization, he immediately turned around and used this money to hire an all-star team of…computer scientists. Of the twenty people who work at Khan Academy, none has ever taught in a K12 classroom in the the United States. Zero. For Khan Academy, fixing education isn’t a question of better teaching. It’s a question of better engineering, and here’s how it works:

Students watch a video on a particular skill (e.g. calculate the equation of a line between two points), and attempt a series of questions. As soon as they get ten in a row, the system deems them proficient and advances them to the next skill. To stay motivated, students earn badges along the way, such as the Ridiculous Listener badge for listening to four hours of video, and the Millionaire badge for earning a million “energy points.”

Instead, the real issue with Khan Academy is its underlying pedagogy (or lack thereof). Quite simply, it doesn’t work. Not only do we know this anecdotally — how many adults still say “I don’t do math?” — but we also know it experimentally. In fact, we’ve known it for decades!
    Because a large segment of the material in IPI is presented in programmed form, the questions often require filling in blanks or selecting a correct answer. Therefore, this mode of instruction places and emphasis on answers rather than on the mathematical processes involved.
In other words, students who used IPI may have identified that 1 + 1 = 2 on a multiple choice test, even without understanding the concept of addition. As we might expect, Erlwanger concluded that IPI did not help students learn math in any meaningful way, but instead through using IPI, learning mathematics has become a “wild good chase” in which [the student] is chasing particular answers.


The big question - WHAT LIES AHEAD ?


EDUCATION FOR ALL ??