Future of Education - Khan Academy

In a world where number of students is more and number of education institutes considerably less, there is a case of under developed potential in students. Education is a basic right and it should be available for one and all, not to select individuals. Khan Academy is one great example of this principle.

 About Khan Academy :

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. With the stated mission of "providing a high quality education to anyone, anywhere", the website supplies a free online collection of more than 3,200 micro lectures via video tutorials stored on YouTube teaching 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 project is funded by donations. Khan Academy is a  not-for-profit organization, now 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 OpenCourseWare (OCW) in terms of videos viewed.

Now, what connection does this educational organization with management principles? Look closely and you will observe it does apply lot of managament principles.

Mission and values -

Its mission is "to accelerate learning for students of all ages."For the vision he sees for the future, he states "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"

Creative problem solving - 

Khan Academy has provided a solution for the wide gap between demand and supply in education by leveraging internet as means of mass communication. The teaching style provided by Khan Academy is revolutionary as compared to other formats. It uses the internet to provide lectures which can be viewed anytime anywhere.

Innovation - 

Drawings are made with a Wacom tablet and the free natural drawing application SmoothDraw 3, and recorded with screen capture software from Camtasia Studio. Khan's audio narratives are recorded with a Samson C03U USB Multi-Pattern Condenser Microphone with a miniature desk tripod. This is an innovation pioneered by Khan Academy.

Funding - 

Khan Academy is a not-for-profit organization. Thus it generates funds required for its working by seeking contributions from philanthropists and organizations. Donations have come from Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation ,Google,Ann and John Doerr.

Quality - 

The education sessions provided by Salman Khan are of same quality as that of any session provided by MIT,covering all the essential elemets.