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Thursday, October 28, 2010

Salman Khan gets a glowing video testimonial from Bill Gates


That's because he's a really, really good teacher. No, this is not Sallu bhai we're talking about here but his namesake, a Harvard MBA and former hedge fund manager who runs Khan Academy, surely the world's most unusual educational institute, from his home in Silicon Valley, California.

"This guy is amazing," Gates wrote in an email quoted in David Kaplan's article in the September 6 issue of Fortune. "It's awesome how much he has done with very little in the way of resources."

Kaplan continues:

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. Ruminating on what he called the "mind-blowing misallocation" of resources away from education, Gates touted the "unbelievable" 10- to 15-minute Khan Academy tutorials "I've been using with my kids."

So what is Khan Academy?

According to Kaplan:

Khan Academy, with Khan as the only teacher, appears on YouTube and elsewhere and is by any measure the most popular educational site on the web. Khan's playlist of 1,630 tutorials (at last count) are now seen an average of 70,000 times a day ... Khan Academy has received 18 million page views worldwide.... Most page views come from the U.S., followed by Canada, England, Australia, and India. In any given month, Khan says, he's reached about 200,000 students. "There's no reason it shouldn't be 20 million."

Isn't that an incredible statistic?

What is also interesting is the way Kaplan structures his feature, which is not only a profile of Khan but also a look at individual achievement and a study of how venture capital companies and entrepreneurs sniff out the next big idea.

Read the article here: "Bill Gates' favourite teacher". You can visit Khan Academy here.

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