The Khan Academy is a not-for-profit organization with the mission of providing a high quality education to anyone, anywhere.
The Khan Academy also provides a web-based exercise system that generates problems for students based on skill level and performance. Khan believes his academy points to an opportunity to overhaul the traditional classroom by using software to create tests, grade assignments, highlight the challenges of certain students, and encourage those doing well to help struggling classmates.
As of December 2009, Khan's YouTube-hosted tutorials receive a total of more than 35,000 views per day. Each video runs for approximately ten minutes, and is produced using video capture on SmoothDraw. Khan eschewed a format that would involve a person standing by a whiteboard, desiring instead to present the content in a way "akin to sitting next to someone and working out a problem on a sheet of paper": "If you're watching a guy do a problem thinking out loud, I think people find that more valuable and not as daunting".
Offline versions of the videos have been distributed by not-for-profit groups to rural areas in Asia, Latin America, and Africa. While the Khan Academy's current content is mainly concerned with pre-college mathematics and physics, Khan states that his long-term goal 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".
Major components:
* Video library (already over 1400 videos and counting in various topic areas)* Automated exercises with continious assessment (already over 70 modules mainly in math)
* Peer-to-peer tutoring based on objective data collected by the system (future projected)
* Khan Academy videos are licensed under a Creative Commons 3.0 License.
Salman Khan (Sal)
Salman Khan (Sal) founded the Khan Academy with the hope of using technology to foster new learning models. He is currently the portfolio manager of a fund based in Menlo Park, CA. Prior to this, Sal was one of the initial employees at MVC Venture Capital. He has also worked as a Technical Architect at Scient Corporation and as a Senior Product Manager at Oracle Corporation.
Sal received his MBA from Harvard Business School where he was president of the student body. He also holds a Masters in electrical engineering and computer science, a BS in electrical engineering and computer science, and a BS in mathematics from MIT where he was president of the the Class of 1998. While at MIT, Sal was the recipient of the Eloranta Fellowship which he used to develop web-based math software for children with ADHD. He was also an MCAT instructor for the Princeton Review and volunteered teaching gifted 4th and 7th graders at the Devotion School in Brookline, MA.
http://www.khanacademy.org/
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