In 2004 Salman Khan, a millennial entrepreneur, began remotely tutoring his cousin whom was lacking behind in one of her subjects. Khan started by tutoring her through phone calls and texts, but migrated to using Yahoo Doodle, a device that allows him to draw and demonstrate how to work through problems. His cousin, Nadia, improved dramatically in class, so much so that the tutoring grew into several cousins. This created a problem though, Khan didn’t have enough time to do his job then go and tutor each cousin individually. Khan adapted, he decided to make recorded videos and post them on Youtube so that his cousins could go on whenever worked best for them and watch and learn.
Khan’s videos started becoming a hit, people from all over the world were trying to get outside help on their subjects and his videos explained everything clearly. Khan realized that there was some potential with this business idea, and Khan Academy was born. He decided to get off of Youtube, and create his own website and nonprofit learning platform. The videos helping any age with almost any subject, explaining it step by step so that anyone could understand. Khan recognized that there was a problem in teaching and decided to make tutoring an easy task for the student. They are able to get ahead and get different views on how to solve the problems because of this idea. Khan has delivered world class education to anyone, anywhere.
I started using Kahn Academy close to 10 years ago for various things, and the expansion of material covered and technologies used has been remarkable. It started out with just some YouTube videos that were nice to reference, and became full blown courses I would take. Neat to see the full story!
Wow! This post makes the story of Salman Khan and Khan Academy so clear and understandable. I really enjoyed learning a brief history on how the very helpful Khan Academy Website came to be. Khan truly is an entrepreneurial thinker. Khan Academy has helped me on several occasions, and knowing the outline of the story impresses me even more. It is so cool that he went from simple and individual phone calls to extensive video-lesson series’ on the world wide web.
I’ve used Khan Academy on and off for years and it has always been helpful. It’s humble beginnings are proof that the good idea is often overrated and that success has more to do with being disciplined and establishing integrity within the business, as opposed to trying to reinvent the wheel.