I’m quite sure that most of the netizens would have heard about Khan Academy at least once. It’s a website with a huge library of educational videos founded by Salman Khan who is respected as a visionary in educational field now.
A little background about why I am talking about Khan Academy now. My daughter is in her summer vacation and super bored at home. She’s five and hyper active and can’t sit idle. So it was getting difficult for us to keep her entertained/occupied. When I was browsing youtube videos casually I stumbled upon the interview between Sal Khan and Elon Musk. The video reminded me of Khan Academy and I decided to check out if they have any educational videos for pre-schoolers.
Voila! I was in for a surprise. Khan Academy has changed a lot. It has come a long way from being a repository of educational videos to an academy in true sense. Some pointers:
- You can login as a parent or a teacher
- A parent can create accounts for his/her child and monitor the progress that the child is making.
- A parent or teacher login has a ‘Coach’ tab which allows to manage and monitor the progress of multiple students (kid/students)
- It has a point based system – completion of each video, each test gives points.
- Accumulate these points and get badges.
- The educational videos span a wide range of academics – Maths, science, statistics, history, art, entrepreneurship and what not.
I created login for my daughter and checked if there are any videos for pre-schoolers. There were. We took the basic counting and numbers videos. Though my daughter didn’t show much interest in the actual video, she enjoyed the tests. She was excited about tests which included counting, ordering numbers, missing numbers, and subtraction/addition by one etc. What I liked was the way questions were framed. We look forward to use it more in the coming days.
Revolutionizing the education is a noble deed and Sal Khan has done a good job taking free education online to masses. No wonder, Bill Gates supports him. I strongly feel that Khan Academy would be quite handy in CSR activities where corporates adopt a school and teach the children during free time. Vision and scope are great. I sincerely wish it picks up in all the nations.
Cheers!
Pointless & Prosaic 
I just wish he paid attention to quality. I just looked at some videos on area and perimeter — and he’s got teh “practice exercises” in front of the video in one place, and his picture of two plots to compare area have the one that’s supposed to be bigger — and the numbers would calculate to be that — is actually smaller, which had students confused in the comments… with the millions of dollars, I just wish there were some recognition that quality matters, too. It’s nice, but *noble* would be caring enough for the confused students to get the details right.
thanks for your comment. I have just gone through very few videos. So probably I was too early to comment. But I agree that there should not be any compromises on the quality. More so, because it is educating somebody.