LE02

                        In this post, I will dwell upon the POM concepts that can be learnt from the innovative educational organization, Khan Academy.

Introduction :

                            Khan Academy is a non-profit educational organization. Its founder is Salman Khan, a Bangladeshi American. He is a graduate of MIT and Harvard Business School. The organization is on its track in changing the old methodologies of teaching and make studying enjoyable to students. It provides more than 3500 free Youtube lecture videos in subjects like mathematics, physics, astronomy, finance, history, economics, chemistry etc.

Salman Khan

 Vision :

                            This could be the DNA for a physical school where students spend 20 percent of their day watching videos and doing self-paced exercises and the rest of the day building robots or painting pictures or composing music or whatever.

Mission :

                           Providing a high quality education to anyone, anywhere.

Logo of Khan Academy

Technical-human-conceptual skills :

                          Khan Academy is run by a small group of members which comprises people from different backgrounds. They include software engineers, designers, deans of different departments etc. The top management has Salman Khan in Executive Director position and Shantanu in COO position. They efficiently coordinate among themselves so that they can carry on such a huge task in an effective manner. They are also aided by volunteers, part-time contributors from around the world.

Innovation :

                      The academy started with Khan remotely tutoring his cousins interactively, some topics in Calculus, using Yahoo Doodle images. He uploaded a video in youtube and made it public but didn't expect that it would garner a huge response from all over the world. He got comments from different generations, different regions of the world, appreciating the content of the video and asking him to upload some more videos. It then gave him the innovative idea that why not upload videos from all the subjects covering all the topics which will be of great help to the students all over the world. This one idea led to the formation of the most innovative educational organization of 20th century, Khan Academy.

New business/revenue models :

                             Khan Academy is a non-profit organization funded by donations. It has backing from Bill and Melinda Gates foundation and Google. Its total revenue is about $1,50,000 in donations alone. It also earns $2000 per months from ad companies. This clearly shows that if you have an innovative idea to get into entrepreneurship and which has the right content, attracting investors is not difficult.

Strategy :

                               There are students around the world who go to schools unwillingly and study without evincing any interest. To create interest among them, innovative and creative methods of teaching are required. The antiquated methodologies followed by the educational system is laying a lot of stress on the tender minds without actually teaching anything comprehensively. Khan Academy's vision is to target such students and offer them the way of teaching which they can enjoy. Also, there will be different types of students, some who have the gifted ability to understand quickly and some who are slow learners. Applying the same teaching method to all the types will not yield any fruitful results. Through video lectures, one can maintain his own pace of learning depending on his capability. He has the facility to pause, stop, resume, rewind or fast-forward the video. 

                               Students normally do not get constructive feedback for their performance, which they can use to improve their credentials. The academy provides proper feedback and tests the student thoroughly to make sure that he understands the concept comprehensively. This is an important feature of the tutorial. There are a lot of students following the academy's website regularly and the strategies applied by Salman Khan proved to be fruitful to the organization.

A snapshot of teaching methodology adopted by Khan Academy

Teamwork :

                                 The Khan Academy has a very small team of employees performing their duties efficiently with suitable team work. The team assigned duties among themselves and each member concentrates on a specific sphere so that he can gain expertise in his respective segment. Working as a successful team led by an able leader like Salman Khan is secret behind the stupendous success of the organization in such a short span of time. 

Entrepreneurship :

                                 Entrepreneurs have various ideas to start their own businesses. Some start firms in production and manufacturing field and some in services field. But some start organizations which change the face of the world because of the services offered and such organizations take the creators to new heights which they cant imagine even in their dreams. Salman Khan is one such kind of an entrepreneur. He runs a non-profit organization yet he receives funds from many renowned organizations and trusts. He need not look out for angel investors or run around banks for funds. All this is because of the field which he selected to work.