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.