Khan Academy

World is full of innovations. Khanacademy.com is one of the best example for it. It contains 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.

Now that's an extensive database of knowledge being delivered without having to spend any penny. What makes it more attractive is the fact that all these lessons have been recorded by an MIT & Harvard graduate in a closet at home with the help of a cheap headset. His name is Salman Khan (not the Dabangg one!) who was recently listed among the Time 100 Most Influential People for 2012. So innovation doesn't always require large amount of resources to create something. Sometimes it can just happen with the help of things that are easily available to us. And obviously along with the main ingredient is very important i.e. Passion. Yes, only the passion to do something for others combined with intellect can help create such an impact as Khanacademy did. The mission of this non-profit organization may not sound very unique but serves a very strong purpose.

"It is our mission to accelerate learning for students of all ages."

So how did this website plan to accelerate learning? The strategy was to invert the normal rhythms of school, so that lectures are viewed on the kids’ own time and homework is done at school. Though it may sound very weird actually, it actually makes a whole lot of sense when we realize that students need someone around to help them with homework rather than when they are learning. This simple but innovative concept is now actually helping millions of kids around the world improve their grades and also enhance their learning potential.

Salman's words about the vision clearly points to the fact that this academy can actually be converted to school in future:

"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"

The whole concept of virtual teaching and practice seems to be based on a very old method of one-to-one tutoring. This method had been proved to very effective but was always considered expensive until now. The most impressive part is the way Khan teaches those lessons. He always assumes that he is teaching a seven-year old and therefore he never skips any step (which generally teachers do) while solving anything. He has an uncanny ability to inhabit the mind of someone who doesn’t already understand something.

Innovative Features:

Apart from the vast number of lessons, another eye-catching feature of the website is the interactive workpad feature combined with a dashboard application available:The application also has scratchpad which can be used to do rough calculations.

The dashboard application would track students’ individual statistics, showing them and their instructors how many videos they’d watched, how many questions they’d answered, and which ones they’d gotten wrong or right. Day to day, it’s hard to know what a student is and isn’t learning. A dashboard, Khan says, can change all that.

Khanacademy being a non-profit organization has significant backing from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and Google. Also, from time to time, it has received several donations.