Khan Academy to 4 Million Unique Monthly Visits

Forbes Video Network

Khan Academy is growing rapidly, thanks to economic backing from contributors such as Google and Bill Gates. Over 2600 videos are now offered, with more created every week.

Over the last month, Khan Academy saw 4 million unique users. That’s up from 1 million in the same period last year, and up from 3.5 million in October (asked by dbigthe)
The Khan Academy team is currently made up of 22 people, and they’re hiring ~1 more per month. (asked by dbigthe)
“I’d say that 90% [of the videos are shot] in 1 take. 99% are 2 takes.” (asked by johnsmcjohn)
“I will definitely do much more advanced mathematics in the next year than what we have now.” (This resulted in Michael Nielson, leading quantum computing expert and author of the standard text on the subject, to offer his assistance right in the thread) _TC

h/t Carpe Diem

Khan Academy is growing very rapidly -- adding topics, content, and better ways for teachers to use the content in the classroom. As more people get involved in the creative department, expect to see higher production values creeping into the routine.

As to whether KA will ever grow into an accredited provider of educational credentials, that depends a lot on where Salman Khan wants to go with the idea. At this point, he seems happy with the idea of creating a "log" of online activities as a type of student transcript. As the real world's attitudes toward education evolve, such informal proofs of mastery may be sufficient for many apprenticeships or jobs.

What seems more likely, is that an enterprising education entrepreneur will combine the best of Khan (mastery learning), Knewton (adaptive learning), and other e-learning methods into a low-cost, for-profit online institute for learning, from kindergarten to post-university and adult lifelong learning. The idea would include test prep, and a wide range of basic certifications, along with homeschool credentials at least through high school level.

College level accreditation for traditional degrees would likely require affiliation with established educational institutions. That would require deep pockets, given the mercenary nature of most university administrations. In today's economy, it might be best for such a startup to grab a profitable niche and expand from there, following a well-crafted long-term plan.

Why Do Teachers' Unions Hate Salman Khan?

Recent Salman Khan talk at TED
Watch the video and you'll get an idea why the powers-that-be in the huge $multi-billion education racket hate this unassuming self-made educator.

Imagine: A man without teaching credentials dares to use YouTube to create a free to all educational empire that hopes to move education out of the 19th century into the 21st. A man who makes teaching videos from his home closet studio -- videos which threaten the "dumbing down" culture of government education.

Unless you watch the video, then visit KhanAcademy.org to learn the details of the system, you may wonder what all the fuss is about.

Some of you may even be tempted to join the government unions with their pitch-forks and torches, marching up the hill toward Salman Khan's modest home. There have always been those with the compulsion to kill anything they can't understand. Sadly, most of them ended up in education, unions, government, the legal profession, the environmental left's dieoff.orgy movement, or the media.

But imagine if Salman Khan actually succeeds in his goal. Imagine the unleashing of the human mind into a world of knowledge, science, and technology that spiraled upward like NASA's dreams of a space-future from back in the 1960s, or Kurzweils ideas of an exponential future?

It's got to be better than the Idiocracy. Why not give it a chance?

Khan Academy: Evolving to Define the Future of Education

Khan Academy is a rapidly growing set of online learning videos. Microsoft's Bill Gates has enrolled himself and his son, Rory, in Khan's free online school, heaping praise on Salman Khan's online labour of love.

The above video describes some of Khan's future goals for his ambitious project, and how it may well change the future of education.

Unlike overpriced university programs, Khan omits the indoctrination and focuses strictly on the education. Even better, he makes subjects easier to learn -- even the very difficult subjects such as differential equations. Khan is expanding the number of videos and video courses on a regular basis. And as you can see from the video above, he never stops planning for the future.

Check out Khan Academy and the Khan Academy YouTube Channel to learn something you didn't know before.

Hat tip to News Alert

Bonus!: The following video is a delightful 1 hour 23 minute inside look into the origins and future of Khan Academy, presented by MIT alumnus Salman Khan to the MIT Club of Northern California.

How to Build an Online Video Education Empire

First, obtain a solid education in computer science, math, engineering, finance, business, and banking. Obtain the use of a large closet, for a production studio. For basic production equipment, get a $200 Camtasia Recorder, $80 Wacom Bamboo Tablet and a free copy of SmoothDraw3 on a home PC. DO NOT take education classes, and do not go through the teacher certification process and above all, DO NOT join a teachers' union!

"I'm starting a virtual school for the world, teaching things the way I wanted to be taught," explains Khan, 33, the exuberant founder and sole faculty member of the nonprofit Khan Academy, run out of his small ranch house, which he shares with his wife and infant son.

...every day, his lectures are viewed 70,000 times -- double the entire student body of UC Berkeley. His viewers are diverse, ranging from rural preschoolers to Morgan Stanley analysts to Pakistani engineers. Since its inception in 2006, the Khan Academy website has recorded more than 16 million page views.

At a time when conventional education is under stress, his project has caught the attention of educators and venture capitalists such as John Doerr, who just invested $100,000 to help pay Khan's salary.

Jason Fried, CEO of tech company 37signals, said he invested in Khan's nonprofit because "the next bubble to burst is higher education. It's too expensive. It's too much one-size-fits-all. This is an alternative way to think about teaching -- simple, personal, free and moving at your own pace."

...His approach is learn-as-you-go. Students can start anywhere in the curriculum. Stumped? Simply stop the video, and repeat. He's off camera and conversational. Lessons are bite-size. The modules offer immediate feedback -- what's right, what's wrong. There's conceptual progression.

...Khan's mother is from Calcutta; his father was a pediatrician from Bangladesh. His parents divorced when he was 3, and his father died when he was only 13. By high school, he was growing up in a New Orleans suburb with a hardworking single mother and a fiercely protective elder sister.

Valedictorian of his high school class, with a perfect math SAT score, he always regretted the way educators failed to show the beauty of what they taught. He dreams of a world free of dense textbooks, crowded lecture halls and bored students. Even children in developing nations can learn on a $200 refurbished PC. "There's no higher social return on investment," he said. "We can educate a million kids, for all time. We can build a lecture library that continues to deliver.

"This is the operating system for a whole new school." _Physorg

Salman Khan is driven to build his online educational system. He quit his well-paid financial job to devote full time to Khan Academy. If you hope to achieve comparable or better results, you will need to exhibit similar enthusiastic commitment to your own online education empire.

Current bloated bureaucracies of "education" are not focused on the education of students, and focus more on indoctrination than on education. Clearly a student-centered approach is necessary -- one that provides an education rather than an indoctrination.

Khan Academy Update: A Tsunami of Learning Online

H/T News Alert
Since we last looked at Khan Academy, the free online learning site has expanded from math, physics, finance, and banking, into history, biology, chemistry, and brain teasers.

The over 1200 learning videos are hosted on YouTube, available free, 24 hours a day.

Salman Khan has retired from his financial job to devote his full time to expanding the amazing learning universe of Khan Academy. Khan does not receive financial remuneration for his prodigious work. Instead, he takes satisfaction in helping to explain math, science, finance, and many other topics to tens of thousands of students every day.

Calculus in 20 Minutes

Calculus is a prerequisite to most worthwhile courses of study in university. The calculus videos at Khan Academy are fairly focused and succinct. Other fairly good free online calculus courses are available at YouTube-EDU from a choice of schools. But if you are in a hurry to learn calculus, I have seen no quicker online method than the following 2 videos. H/T Carpe Diem

Partial List of Online University Lecture Sites

Al Fin blog will soon be returning to its original purpose: providing access to the tools and information needed to survive to the next level. The central tool is one's self -- one's body and mind. Self development and self education are crucial. Never has higher level education been more economical or available than now. Below is a partial list of websites devoted to online lectures. You can find more such sites on the Al Fin sidebar dealing with specific subject areas, as well as many links to tutorials, free textbooks and journals, and specific online courses.

Lecture Fox: This site links to thousands of lectures in video, audio, and text formats, from top universities around the world.

Academic Earth: Previously covered here, this website appears to be growing into what may be come the go-to site for video lectures online.

Free Science and Video Lectures Online: This is a blog that covers a different subject area of online lecture videos in each post. The archives are extensive.

World Lecture Hall: This site contains a large searchable list of online lecture topics in a wide range of subjects.

Cosmolearning: Wide range of course topics particularly in science and computer science.

LearnersTV Nice selection of lectures, animations and notes on the sciences, engineering, computer science, medicine, and management. (added 7 Aug 09)

There are many more such sites available, and I will be mentioning more as I become more familiar with them. Also check out the Online education category below.

More:

Video Lectures Net

Online Neuroscience Lectures

Theoretical Physics Talks and Conferences

101 Lectures on Open Source educational technologies

NPTEL: Engineering, Technology, and Computer Science course lectures from IIT

Khan Academy lectures on math, science, banking, and finance (added 6 Aug 09)

FreeVideoLectures.com (added 7 Aug 09)

http://www.lecturesarchive.com/5726.html (added 30 Oct 09)

Open Courseware Finder -- Expansive Search Engine (added 30 Oct 09)

Take Any Class for Free (added 30 Oct 09)

Update: You Tube Edu: This You Tube channel contains entire video courses from about 100 different prominent (mainly) US universities. You Tube Edu has been downgraded by Al Fin to a non-essential resource. The idea was sound, but it has been mishandled and badly botched. You can still find some useful videos at the site, but it deserves to be last on the list rather than first.

Khan Academy: A Constantly Growing Universe

The Khan Academy video on the normal distribution above, was uploaded 3 days ago. As of today, there are 821 videos at Khan Academy on YouTube. The goal and ongoing mission of Khan Academy is to provide videos to "help anyone learn anything they want to learn".

As ambitious and impressive as it is, Khan Academy is just one man's attempt to help increase the human intellectual capital of the planet. The internet makes this kind of free, distributed, long-distance, learn-at-your-own-pace education much easier to provide. But it is the human mind of Salman Khan that conceived, created, and committed his time to making Khan Academy work.

Only a few humans, relatively speaking, possess the multi-disciplinary knowledge, expertise, and competence that the creator of Khan Academy possesses. But humans are capable of teaming up to provide a broad range of shared expertise, insight, wisdom, and experience across many different fields of knowledge. It is becoming possible to give oneself an incredibly broad education for the cost of your time and internet access. Thousands of capable humans are committed to making that option possible for you. If you know of someone who might benefit from their efforts, pass it on.

Khhaaann!!! No, Not that Khan! Khan Academy -- An Amazing Place for At-Home Learning at Any Age Anywhere on Earth

Khan Academy is a free online library of over 700 learning videos that make learning easy. This marvelous intutive-learning website is a labour of love from Salman Khan, investment professional and holder of multiple advanced degrees from Harvard and MIT.

Perfect for the homeschool student who is studying for the SAT, for the budding young engineer or scientist, or for anyone wanting to get better at math, physics, management, finance, banking, probability, pre-engineering etc. Example: have you been curious about Singapore Math? Khan Academy offers a series of videos to give you a good idea of what the program is all about.

Every homeschool parent should be aware of Khan Academy, as should anyone studying for the SAT or GMAT, or anyone who needs a better understanding of math, physics, probability or finance.