Spotlight

last updated 8 January 2015

Salman Khan is changing the way kids learn, said Somini Sengupta in The New York Times. Six years ago, the Silicon Valley hedge-fund manager began posting short video lessons on YouTube to help his cousin with her math homework. Since then, this “Ivy League–trained math whiz” has become an online sensation. KhanAcademy.org, which boasts 2,700 instructional videos on everything from civics to long division, attracts as many as 3.5 million viewers a month. The lessons, most under 10 minutes, aren’t particularly high-tech: Khan uses a digital blackboard to guide viewers through concepts. But what’s remarkable about the 35-year-old’s effort is that the videos are “entirely free.” At least 36 schools across the country are integrating Khan’s videos into their curriculums and using free software he developed to track students’ progress.

Khan, who now runs his nonprofit academy full-time with funding from donors such as Bill Gates, may also have a hand in revolutionizing higher education, said Annie Murphy Paul in Time.com. Two Stanford professors who offered a free online course this year say Khan was their inspiration; 70,000 people signed up within days. MIT, Harvard, Yale, and other universities now offer gratis online courses. Elite education may soon be “available to all comers, with consequences we can only begin to imagine.”