Khan Academy

About

Khan Academy is a non-profit organisation and mainly depends on venture capitalist and NGOs for fundings.The not-for-profit partner organizations are making the content available outside YouTube. The Lewis Center for Educational Research, which is affiliated with NASA, is bringing the content into community colleges and charter schools around the United States. World Possible is creating offline snapshots of the content to distribute in rural, developing regions with limited or no access to the Internet. 

 

Vision

Khan has stated a vision of turning the academy into a charter school. Khan academy feels that too many people around the globe don’t have access to good education materials, or they are forced to learn through a system that doesn't properly cater to their individual needs. They believe that the technology exists today to fundamentally change this, and they are trying to build the tools and resources every student deserves.
 

Mission

With the stated mission of "providing a high quality education to anyone, anywhere", and a vision to have a one single global classroom, Khan Academy is incredible.

A mission statement which looks very simple but what Salman has done is unbelievable. A simple concept of online tutoring has been innovated incredibly to provide this high quality.

  

 Concept

Khan Academy started when Salman Khan wated to teach mathematics to his cousins online.
After sending them the videos, he put them up on You Tube so anyone else could view it if they wanted to. But he could never have imagined that this would snowball into a major phenomenon that is currently under way, but we'll touch that later. The feedback he received from his cousins was unthinkable. They actually preferred his videos to him. The videos granted them the ability to listen to him at their own pace. It was much easier now to ask him to repeat what they couldn't understand. They could revisit his lectures as and when they needed to. This ability that has been placed at the disposal of students has profound implications. This happening snowballed into teachers actually leaving comments relating to how it was changing their classrooms. While all videos continue to be hosted on Khan Academy's YouTube channel, they also are available through Khan Academy's own website, which also contains many other features such as progress tracking, practice exercises, and a variety of tools for teachers in public schools. Logging into the site can be done via a Google or a Facebook account for those who don't want to create a separate Khan Academy account.

Theory X and Theory Y Learning

What KhanAcademy has done is the best example of theory Y manager concept. Whether Employees are lazy or not and managers assume that their employees are not lazy. No matter how slow you are in learning, KhanAcademy gives you the freedom to go on you pace. Sal Khan believes majority of students are good, given a chance everyone can excel.

Creative Problem Solving

The Khan academy focuses on bridging the gaps in the concepts of students. The Khan engineers are also working to tweak the exercise platform so it does not confuse genuine mastery with “pattern matching” -- a method of problem-solving wherein a student mechanically rehashes the steps necessary to solve that type of problem without necessarily grasping, conceptually, what those steps represent. Therefore at a time when students are always within arm's reach of a computer and a wireless signal, “mechanic practice schedulers” can spring questions on students at intervals to gauge how well they remember how to do certain types of problems. This would allow Khan's team to collect data on how well students retain their command of different concepts, which in turn would enable them to look back at their original interactions with the concepts and try to spot variables that correlate with long-term retention.