For a long time the academia has been going gaga over the enormous education potential of the Internet. The Utopian dream of having quality education available for all has seduced many. Efforts have been made to put as much information as possible onto the net. Institutions like MIT have begun to make their lectures available to all. But there is a fundamental problem. The content and level of the material should match with the student. There was need and demand for content which doesn’t require and engineering degree to understand and is broken into bite sized pieces.
Enter “Salman Khan”, not the celebrity we are familiar with, but an alumnus of Harvard and MIT. His aim was to provide quality education for everyone. Armed with just a camera and the wonderful platform of Youtube he went on the change the world. Till date he has made over 1100 videos that explain topics from high school algebra to financial crisis in simple to understand terms. Providing a quick and easy way to brush up concepts, his videos are currently viewed by over 70,000 students a month.
He was awarded the 2009 Tech Award in Education (ref: http://www.techawards.org/laureates). The Tech Awards is an international awards program that honours innovators from around the world who are applying technology to benefit humanity. Khanacademy, the not-for-profit organization founded by him has the comprehensive collection of links to his videos. Currently efforts are underway to make translated versions of his lectures available.
The URL is http://www.khanacademy.org/. Useful but forgotten concepts from mathematic s to economics can be refreshed. This would undoubtedly help in preparation for interviews and also to satisfy your curiosity.
Pratik Sule
(IIM Calcutta ’09-‘11)
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