Khan academy and its implications on the way we learn in future

The innovation

After Jimmy wales, Larry Sanger(The founders of Wikipedia), Mark ZuckerBerg(Founder of you know what...!!), it's the name of Khan Academy that became the buzz word in collaborative social platforms now...  When I came to know about the Khan Academy, it was one of those moments of awe when your mind becomes blank and cherishes the inherent simplicity and magnanimity of such an idea.

In short, the idea and the vision is to record a series of video lectures that are rich in content and commentary, and post it on a social platform where it is accessible to the entire world enabling people all over the world to learn from the video at their own pace irrespective of their age and intellectual capabilities. As Mr. Salman Khan, the founder of Khan Academy puts it, this eliminates the need for another human being yelling at you if you understood the concept? Pretty intelligent...!!

Please take a look at following lecture video of Khan Academy:

The strategy and implementation

Now what is so unique and innovative about Khan Academy that makes us look up and think for a while? Online digital libraries that contain video lectures are a norm in many prestigious universities and one can find a plethora of video tutorials on various subjects on the internet. However, what Khan Academy has done is to streamline this entire process by creating a series of lectures, organizing them in a logical structure, creating a curriculum mapping, making them content, commentary and graphic rich and most important of them all, making them available over the internet for free to this global village called 'world', to watch and learn.

There is no more a need for a human presence as the tutorial can be played, paused, forwarded and re-winded as per one's own pace. This is something that is not done earlier. It's not that touch phones never existed before iPhone, but what Apple had done was to redefine the entire touch experience starting from the roots and came up with an entire ecosystem for their devices. A similar phenomenon is happening at Khan Academy. And this strategy is already paying dividends.

The repercussions

For the growing number of schools that are adopting iPads, the most impactful potential for the app is for Khan Academy's "flipped classroom," in which lectures are watched at home by students, and then assignments are completed collaboratively in class, where a teacher is present. Thus the teacher is free to do a lot more of the human interaction.

This phenomenon will revolutionize the entire concept of classroom teaching wherein the students are trained to reach a certain intellectual level and then promoted to higher standards. The gaps in their learning is never compensated for, until one day they realize that they are missing something. With the entry of such a tool, even elders can resort to online learning in the comfort of their home.

Khan Academy, an educational non-profit, is becoming one of the sexiest workplaces for programmers in Silicon Valley, where stock options, IPOs, and big-money acquisitions have long been considered key to luring talent. It is attracting star coders from companies like Google and Microsoft and, as it grows, has its pick of some of the tech sector’s top engineers.

Khan’s recruiting success underlines something often forgotten as investment dollars pour in to the Valley: Money isn’t everything. At Khan, none of the staff can hope for a fast fortune. What they can realistically hope for is to shape a nascent industry and to markedly improve the lives of millions of students. It turns out that means a lot.

Salman Khan - The New york Hedge Fund analyst turned Khan Academy Founder

Conclusion

Only time can tell what heights Khan Academy can reach, but looking at the pace at which they are growing and delivering, it will be very soon when they become the future of online education and teaching unless off course another innovation comes in its way. For more information, just google for Khan Academy... (And on a curious note, my phrase 'google it' instead of 'search for it on internet', itself deserves another blog on brand development ). Or you can refer the same here...