Khan Academy - A Revolution

 

Introduction

The 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.

Salman Khan's education project is a milestone in the democratization of the internet. When the distribution and acquisition of knowledge finally bursts free from the financial shackles it's struggled with for centuries, all will finally truly be equal. I'm elated that Mr. Khan's efforts are not only being recognized finally, but supported by those who realize the potential this method of education offers.

This is truly a significant step toward the next major evolution of humanity, knowledge free from the carcinogenic influence of religion, government, politics, culture, money, shame and fear.

Vision:

Sal Khan and Khan Academy have a great vision of providing resources to all. The goal of the Khan Academy is to use technology to provide a free, world-class education to anyone, anywhere. Khan Academy does not charge nor do they plan to charge for their services.

Mission: 

Khan Academy becoming the world's first free, world-class virtual school where anyone can learn anything--for free. The videos are just part of the vision. They are building out the adaptive software to cover all the topics that the videos cover. They also intend to develop simulation games to give more nuanced and applied understanding of concepts. 

Goal of Khan Academy

Khan Academy’s explicit goal is to teach people fundamental concepts. But in the process, it hopes to break new ground by changing how educators think about teaching, how psychologists think about learning, how employers think about credentialing, and how everybody thinks about the price of a good education.

Business Models in Online Education

At the moment, there are basically three business models in online education. Ad-supported, freemium and premium. But there are also two large scale operations that have no business model at all, Khan Academy and Wikipedia. Let’s go to the three most popular for-profit ones before we focus on the noncommercial examples. 

Ad-supported education are in most cases smaller projects of individual educators who upload videos to YouTube and display Google ads against them. 

This model, however, is not suitable for bigger operations. 

Freemium is a very popular model amongst education startups. Users have access to a big chunk of the product for free, though this part is usually also supported by display ads. If learners then want to have access to extra content, usually grammar charts, worksheets or videos, they will have to pay. 

Premium, as the name suggests, is content that is only available to paying customers. Language learning platform Babbel famously switched the popular freemium model to premium only back in November 2009 and soon afterwards announced that the startup was profitable. Another reason was the problem the team saw in displaying ads. 

Khan Academy’s Business Model

Ads are far from being an ideal revenue stream in an educational context. You cannot really control what is displayed next or even inside of the video lesson. Ads can be a distraction, especially when they are animated or feature sound effects and they have the draw-back that they are seen critically in a public school context and I think this is also part of Khan Academy’s success amongst educators. Khan Academy has always been ad-free although nowadays Khan could make some significant income based on either Google Ads or by selling sponsorships based on his reach. 3.5 million unique visitors a month are worth a ton of money yet Khan Academy stays a noncommercial platform.

The same is of course true for Wikipedia. Jimmy Wales is also fighting the idea of displaying advertisements or sponsored links on the site though it could earn Wikipedia a lot of money based on the page views. Yet he chooses to go in the trenches, raising money to keep Wikipedia up and running. Though Wales has no big success in getting the basic user to donate he usually meets his goal through big donations like the lastest $500k grant by Google founder Sergey Brin and his wife whereas Khan always had a steady flow of small donations to keep the Academy alive.

So both, Khan and Wales, are proving that there is “a better way” to deliver true free education on the Internet. And I think this is the really radical part. If you take a look at what the Khan Academy is going to offer for free to educators one could ask why anyone would pay for similar products? Khan has no commercial interest something that resonates with the ideals of most educators. Khan is independent from big brands and publishers in education that take more and more influence in promising education startups lately by either investing and / or partnering with them. 

Conclusion

Free, quality education has been a dream of many educators and of course students for a long time now and Khan might be on the road to establish that mindset in the generation of users he and his faculty are teaching every day.

Lecture 02

In the second lecture, Dr. Prasad talked about Theory X and Theory Y managers the class shared personal experiences about these two types of managers in the real world.

Theory X

In this theory, management assumes employees are inherently lazy and will avoid work if they can and that they inherently dislike work. As a result of this, management believes that workers need to be closely supervised.

Scenario 1: In this scenario, Employees are lazy and Manager thinks employees are lazy

Scenario 2: In this scenario, Employees are good and Manager thinks employees are lazy

An example of Theory X manager is the time clock. You have to clock in partly because the management thinks you'll arrive late and leave early if you don't.

Theory Y

In this theory, management assumes employees may be ambitious and self-motivated and exercise self-control.  A Theory Y manager believes that, given the right conditions, most people will want to do well at work.

Scenario 1: In this scenario, Employees are lazy and Manager thinks employees are good

Scenario 2: In this scenario, Employees are good and Manager thinks employees are good

An example of Theory Y is an artist on contract to produce art. You tell the artist what you want done but you leave it to him/her when and how to do it as long as they produce what you want within your timeline. She can paint at 2AM for all you care - as long as you get art by the deadline.

Lecture 01

On a Thursday morning, woken up from deep slumber for a 9 AM lecture, I geared myself for the first class of the subject ‘Principles of Organization and Management’.  Expecting four hours of a sleepy lecture, I went half heartedly to Syndicate 1. To our surprise, entered Prof T. Prasad, full of life and beaming with energy carrying a variety of toys which left us all perplexed.

Then started an amazing four hour ride into the world of Management and Leadership – not by boring theoretical concepts, but practical examples and activities.

Dr. Prasad (fondly known as Dr. Mandi for conceptualizing the idea of the event Mandi wherein students sell various educational toys in the market and the funds generated are used to support an NGO)  insisted on the ideology that ‘if you are smart enough to spend then you are smart enough to earn’. He helped us to introspect and realize the importance of earning while learning and I was greatly motivated to start a venture while at NITIE.

The catch line phrases and slogans that Sir used stirred a motivational spree in almost everyone and we chanted along:

Soacho.. Becho !  Becho.. Seekho ! !   Seekho .. Soacho ! ! !

Behatar Padhai ke Liye... Kamai !

Earning by Learning . & .Earning for Learning  !

Aaj Ki roti...Aaj hee,  kamyaenghae  ! 

TOWER BUILDING EXERCISE


In the second half of the session, Sir asked us to bid for playing a tower building game. The person to bid the highest was selected and we were asked to guess the number of cubes that could be placed one over the other.  The entire class was asked to write their estimates on a piece of paper. Finally, a tower of 17 cubes was built.

Then we were asked to consider a hypothetical situation in which the student would be blindfolded while making the tower and we were asked to estimate the height of the tower in that case. There were three groups of people which came to light after this exercise.

The first group consisted of people who decreased the estimate in the second case. A majority of people fell into this category. This group was an example of managers who do not believe in their team and get bogged down by difficulties.

The second group consisted of people who did not change their estimate in the second case. These people are examples of static managers.

The third group consisted of people who increased the estimate in the second case. They are the reflection of the progressive managers. They believe in their team’s capabilities even if hurdles come their way.