LEARNINGS FROM 'The Khan Academy' for PRINCIPLES OF ORGANISATIONAL MANAGEMENT :

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.

Here is a Khan Academy video, explaining heart disease :

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Khan_Academy_heart_disease.ogv

The Khan Academy started with Khan remotely tutoring one of his cousins interactively using Yahoo Doodle images. Based on feedback from his cousin, additional cousins began to take advantage of the interactive, remote tutoring. In order to make better use of his and their time, Khan transitioned to making YouTube video tutorials. Drawings are now made with a Wacom tablet and the free natural drawing application SmoothDraw 3, and recorded with screen capture software from Camtasia Studio. Khan's audio narratives are recorded with a Samson C03U USB Multi-Pattern Condenser Microphone with a miniature desk tripod.

Salman Khan, in a lecture session :

A screenshot of the website :

A screenshot of the mobile app :

The tablet app :

Khan chose to avoid the standard format of a person standing by a whiteboard, deciding instead to present the learning concepts as if "popping out of a darkened universe and into one's mind with a voice out of nowhere" in a way akin to sitting next to someone and working out a problem on a sheet of paper: "If you're watching a guy do a problem  thinking out loud, I think people find that more valuable and not as daunting." Offline versions of the videos have been distributed by not-for-profit groups to rural areas in Asia, Latin America, and Africa. While the current content is mainly concerned with pre-college mathematics and physics, Khan's long-term goal is to provide "tens of thousands of videos in pretty much every subject" and to create "the world's first free, world-class virtual school where anyone can learn anything."

Some screenshots of Khan's sessions :

An illustration of an organic living cell :

A graphic illustration of fractions in mathematics :

An illustration of simplified thermodynamics :

The major components of Khan Academy include:

• a video library with over 3200 videos in various topic areas and over 165 million lessons delivered. These videos are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 License.
• automated exercises with continuous assessment; there are 320 practice exercises, mainly in math.
• peer-to-peer tutoring based on objective data collected by the system, a process that will be projected in the future.

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.

Khan has stated a vision of turning the academy into a charter school:

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.

A few examples of Khan teaching simplified management concepts :

Statistics :

Economics/Finance :

A November 2011 grant of $5 million from Ireland-based The O'Sullivan Foundation, founded by Avego MD and cloud computing pioneer Sean O'Sullivan, will be directed to three initiatives:

1. Expanding the teaching faculty
2. Extending content through crowd-sourced contributions following a Wikipedia-style model
3. Developing curricula to help users blend the content with physical teaching through STEM learning

Recent teaching appointees as a result of the grant include Dr. Steven Zucker, formerly of Pratt Institute and Dr. Beth Harris, from the Museum of Modern Art in New York, to produce art and history content. YouTube video creators Vi Hart and Brit Cruise have also joined the teaching faculty.

A series of summer school camps are planned to start in Northern California from June 2012 to test curricula for real-world schools.