Career Path

http://www.khanacademy.org

A few years ago, Salman Khan, an MIT graduate who was working as an analyst for a hedge fund, started tutoring his young cousins in math over the phone.

He began using YouTube to post videos of his lectures on different topics – math, science, history and more. His technique was to talk while the video focused on his Yahoo Doodle-based writings on a blackboard. His young cousins began telling their friends, who then told their friends. Other people browsing YouTube found the lectures and forwarded them to their friends. Khan’s video lectures viral, and he now has a huge following.
In a recent talk at the Good Experience Live conference, Khan told about quitting his well-paying job at the hedge fund after getting so many notes from his students.

Today Khan Academy (www.khanacademy.org) has more than 1,400 videos, with an average of 200,000 unique student visitors every month. It is rated by YouTube as its most-watched open course – more than those of MIT and Stanford. Khan says students like his conversational style and the opportunity to learn at their own pace in a stress-free way. He is grateful that feedback shows the videos support multiple learning styles and have found favor with gifted students as well as students with learning disabilities. He also makes a point that while he started doing 20-minute videos due to YouTube restrictions, that has turned out to be an important selling point – the idea of bite-sized learning.