Sal Khan

Salman Khan (born October 11, 1976) is an American educator who founded Khan Academy, a free online education platform and an organization with which he has produced over 6,500 video lessons teaching a wide spectrum of academic subjects, originally focusing on mathematics and sciences. He is also the founder of Khan Lab School, a brick-and-mortar school associated with Khan Academy.

As of January 2020, the Khan Academy channel on YouTube has more than 5.6 million subscribers and the Khan Academy videos have been viewed more than 1.7 billion times. In 2012, Time named Salman Khan in its annual list of the 100 most influential people in the world. In the same year, Forbes magazine featured Khan on its cover, with the story "$1 Trillion Opportunity."

Salman Khan was born in Metairie, Louisiana, to a Bengali family. His father was from Barisal, Bangladesh, and his mother was from Murshidabad, India. He attended the public school Grace King High School, where, as he recalls, "a few classmates were fresh out of jail and others were bound for top universities." He also worked as a cartoonist for the high school newspaper. He graduated valedictorian in 1994.

Sal Khan is an alumnus of The University of New Orleans. Khan attended the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), graduating with Bachelor of Science and Master of Science degrees in Course 6 (electrical engineering and computer science), and another bachelor's degree in Course 18 (mathematics), in 1998. He was class president in his senior year.

Khan also holds a Master of Business Administration from Harvard Business School.

In 2002, Khan was a summer intern at PARC. From 2003 to late 2009, Khan worked as a hedge fund analyst at Connective Capital Management.

Khan Academy

In late 2003, Khan began tutoring his cousin, Nadia, in mathematics over the internet using Yahoo!'s Doodle notepad. When other relatives and friends sought his tutoring, he moved his tutorials to YouTube where he created an account on November 16, 2006.

The popularity of his educational videos on the video-sharing website prompted Khan to quit his job as a financial analyst in late 2009. He moved his focus to developing his YouTube channel, Khan Academy, full-time with the aid of close friend Josh Gefner. Khan consequently received sponsorship from Ann Doerr, the wife of John Doerr.

His videos received worldwide interest from both students and non-students, with more than 458 million views in the first number of years.

Khan outlined his mission as to "accelerate learning for students of all ages. With this in mind, we want to share our content with whoever may find it useful." Khan plans to extend the "free school" to cover topics such as English. Khan's videos are also used to educate rural areas of Africa and Asia.

Khan published a book about Khan Academy and education goals titled The One World Schoolhouse: Education Reimagined.

Khan Academy, initially a tool for students, added the Coach feature in 2012, promoting the connection of teachers with students through videos and monitor tools.

By 2020, Khan Academy's videos on YouTube had been viewed over 1.7 billion times.

Khan believes that supplementing traditional classroom education with the technology being developed by his Academy can improve the effectiveness of teachers by freeing them from traditional lectures and giving them more time for instruction specific to individual students' needs.

Stanford AI researcher Andrew Ng has named Khan as a huge inspiration for the founding of Coursera, one of the first Massive open online courses (MOOCs) platforms.

Schoolhouse.world

Sal Khan, in a partnership with Long Beach Unified School District, launched Schoolhouse.world, a free nonprofit initiative to connect students with math support from teachers. The service uses topics from Khan Academy in order for teachers to see what concepts should be taught via video conferencing.

Khan is married to a Pakistani physician, Umaima Marvi. The couple live with their children in Mountain View, California. Khan has said this about his beliefs:

If you believe in trying to make the best of the finite number of years we have on this planet (while not making it any worse for anyone else), think that pride and self-righteousness are the cause of most conflict and negativity, and are humbled by the vastness and mystery of the Universe, then I'm the same religion as you.