Salman Khan is one of my heroes. No, not Bollywood’s Salman Khan. I mean the Asian American educator and founder of the Khan Academy.
Khan’s father is from Barisal, Bangladesh and his mother is from Calcutta, India. He himself was born and raised in New Orleans, LA. And he is anything but a bad boy.
Bill Gates is one of the fan of Khan’s Academy . He says – “This guy is amazing,” he wrote. “It is awesome how much he has done with very little in the way of resources.” Gates and his 11-year-old son, Rory, began soaking up videos, from algebra to biology.
Then, several weeks ago, at the Aspen Ideas Festival in front of 2,000 people, Gates gave the 33-year-old Khan a shout-out that any entrepreneur would kill for.
With over 3,200 videos on everything from arithmetic to physics, finance, and history and hundreds of skills to practice, Khan’s academy on a mission to help you learn what you want, when you want, at your own pace.
Before he started the most popular education site on the Web, Salman Khan was neither an educator nor an entrepreneur. His outsider status helps explain why he’s been able to solve a problem that schools and other startups never could: how to harness technology to change the way kids learn.
But it wasn’t until a few years later, in the summer of 2004, when his cousins were visiting him in Boston, that he discovered that one of them, Nadia, could barely come to grips with maths. Salman suggested to her mother that he could work with Nadia over the phone to help improve her grades.
She agreed. He supplemented conference calls with Yahoo! Doodle; soon the young girl’s grades started to improve. “For me it was fun because I could help her and math’s was something I love,” Salman, whom friends call Sal, says.
Soon after he started posting videos online, Salman noticed that there were days when 20 people had viewed his lessons. “I thought, ‘there are only six of my cousins who would watch this…which means the other 14 are people from around the world.’
That was a pretty neat idea.” Shortly, Salman started receiving letters of gratitude from kids around the world. One wrote saying he had only passed algebra because of the videos; another said he used to hate maths until he started viewing the Khan lessons. “I was getting 20 of those type of letters a day at one point…. The itch to do more of it was getting too strong,” he says.
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