Khan Academy

Salman Khan, a Harvard University graduate, sits in a converted cupboard at home in Boston. He's studying for a lecture he's going to give, but it won't be a typical hour-long lecture in a lecture theatre for forty or fifty students. Salman's lecture will take place on YouTube, it won't last for more than ten minutes, and it will reach a potential audience of millions. He records up to eight lectures like this every day.
This all grew from a young girl's desire to do better at school. In 2006 Salman's 13-year-old cousin Nadia was having trouble with Maths, so she asked him if he could tutor her. Then when other relatives and family friends asked him when he could tutor them, too, he didn't want to keep explaining the same things over and over again, so he suggested creating videos and putting them on YouTube. To Salman's surprise, his cousin admitted that she preferred the virtual Salman to the real thing! She explained that on YouTube she could watch the clip whenever she wanted and anything she didn't understand. She was learning sucessfully and Khan realised it was because she could go over and over something at her own pace without feeling embarrassed.
Salman's homemade video lectures soon attracted people's attention on the Net. As he recorded more and more videos, he eventually decided to quit his job as a financial analyst to create Academy. Before long, tens of thousands of people Qvery y kemisty and Fconomics to History and Biology. The clips are far from repeat free educational website, the "Khan watching his lectures In each video, he explains a principle of a subject ranging from were Maths, Chemistry high tech. Khan never appears in his videos. Instead, with just his voice and his scribbles on a an aonears in h igital sketchpad, he makes a complicated topic entertaining and easy to understand through his informal, chatty style. "My biggest goal is to try to deliver things the way I wish they were delivered to me," he says.
When Salman doesn't know anything about the subject he wants to teach, he gives himself a crash course in it first. He researches it until he feels he can explain it in his own words, step by step so that a motivated 7-year-old would understand it. Khan admits that he makes occasional errors with this learn-as-you-go approach, but he believes that students see the process better when they watch him stumble through a problem himself.
Bill Gates, chairman of Microsoft, claims that Khan is his favourite teacher and uses the videos, which now have about 2 million users, with his children. Some teachers are also using the videos as a teaching resource. They have told their students to use Khan's videos at home and have seen fantastic results. As for the future of the academy, Salman is planning to translate ris videos into ten languages and he is even thinking of opening his own privale school. He is full of new ideas such as not dividing classes by age, usng board games to teach negotiation skills and even teaching history backwards. It seems he's committed to challenging and changing the way people lean In the meantime, though, it's back to his cupboard to record more videos!