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By Bhagyashree Garekar, US Correspondent
WASHINGTON: What started out as a mathematics lesson for a school-going cousin is today a video library of 1,200 tutorials on YouTube, used daily by thousands who want to master things as complex as differential calculus or as simple as carry-over addition.
The creator of this popular tutorial trove is Mr Salman Khan, a former Silicon Valley hedge fund analyst who said his video clips - no longer than 20 minutes each - help make up for some of the deficiencies in traditional classroom learning. Apart from maths, for which he is mostly known, he deals with physics, chemistry, biology, economics, statistics and finance for learners ranging from kindergarten children to college sophomores.
The 33-year-old employs simple software programmes to draw diagrams, chart graphs and write words as he talks enthusiastically about the topic.
The videos get about 60,000 views a day with a total of 12 million views since he began posting them online five years ago, said Mr Khan.
Among the 200,000 visitors a month that his website KhanAcademy.org attracts are students from Britain, Canada, Australia, Italy, Sweden, India, the Middle East and Singapore.
The MBA graduate from Harvard Business School, who also has a bachelor's in Mathematics and a master's in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, had never imagined a career as a tutor. But in 2004, he got roped in to help his cousin with pre-algebra. They lived in different cities, so the tutoring had to be online.
Before long, other family and friends joined in and his student population grew to more than a dozen. Scheduling lessons became a complicated affair and he ended up recording the lessons and posting them on YouTube where, unexpectedly, students across the world began accessing them.
Ms Pei Chi, a biomedical engineering student at Singapore's Temasek Polytechnic, is one of them. For the last year or so, she has been using the Khan videos to get up to speed on maths, which has been her weakness. 'Not all teachers are perfect so it's good to be able to get some extra help to improve my scores,' she said.
After some years of making the videos at night while working full-time during the day, Mr Khan decided to incorporate the not-for-profit Khan Academy in 2008 and last September quit his job.
He sees no limit to the videos he can create. 'I concentrated on maths and science because that's where there is the greatest need,' he said from his home in Mountain View, California. He wants to provide lessons in 'nearly everything' from grammar to philosophy to law.
Nor does the tutoring end with the videos. Users can sign into a Web application that can generate endless problems on any given topic for students to solve. If they get stuck, there are hints on how to proceed to the next step and links to explanatory videos. Behind the screen, an analytical tool keeps track of the student's progress.
'It closes the loop in the traditional classroom model,' said Mr Khan. 'In a class, the teacher delivers a lecture aimed at an average student, followed by homework where there is little help if the student has difficulties, followed in turn, by tests and then the class moves on to the next lesson, no matter if the student has scored a C.'
The Khan Academy improves on this by allowing self-paced learning that provides plenty of practice until the student achieves proficiency defined as scoring 10 answers right in a row. Only then does he move on to the next level.
All this, for free. Mr Khan relies on his rheumatologist wife to bring home the bacon. They have an infant son. He earns about US$1,500 (S$2,100) a month from the advertising that YouTube inserts into the video and shares with him - enough to pay for the servers and the broadband. He hopes to be self-sustaining in a year, and is in talks with philanthropic foundations so he can expand his operation.
Mr Paul Pickett, a father of five in Salt Lake City, Utah, said two of his children, aged nine and 14, benefited from Mr Khan's website. 'The schools helped but they have limited budgets and limited time. And I could not afford private tutors.'
While videos are Mr Khan's calling card now, he envisages in the long run a worldwide virtual school where students can interact with one another in a learning environment.
This article was first published in The Straits Times.
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