He went to public schools, where, as he recalls, a few classmates were fresh out of jail and others were bound for top universities. Khan grew up in a suburb of New Orleans, where his mother, who is from Bangladesh, raised him on her own by cobbling together a series of jobs and businesses. “This is going to spread like wildfire,” he said. Shelton predicted that there would be “a bunch of knockoffs” that would take the Khan approach and try to expand on it. “What Khan represents is a model that’s tapped into the desire that everyone has to personalize the learning experience and get it cheap and quick,” said Jim Shelton, assistant deputy secretary for innovation and improvement at the Education Department. Khan with inspiring its profit-making venture: the Floating University, a set of online courses taught by academic superstars, repackaged and sold to Ivy League colleges and eventually to anyone who wants to pay for them.

Khan to help its faculty spice up their presentations.Īnd a New York-based luxury real estate company credited Mr. Stanford Medical School, which allows its students to take lectures online if they want, summoned Mr. Thirty-four thousand people are now taking the course, and many more have signed up. Two Stanford professors have drawn on his model to offer a free online artificial intelligence class. Khan’s efforts have captured imaginations and spawned imitators. Khan, 35, has become something of an online sensation with his Khan Academy math and science lessons on YouTube, which has attracted up to 3.5 million viewers a month.īut in education circles, Mr. The software program unleashed in this classroom is the brainchild of Salman Khan, an Ivy League-trained math whiz and the son of an immigrant single mother. For an hour, this crowded, dimly lighted classroom in the hardscrabble shadow of Silicon Valley hums with the sound of fingers clicking on keyboards, pencils scratching on paper and an occasional whoop when a student scores a streak of right answers. He stops at each desk, cajoles, offers tips, reassures. He can see that a girl sitting against the wall is zipping through geometry exercises that a boy with long curls over his eyes is stuck on a lesson on long equations and that another boy in the front row is getting a handle on probability.Įach student’s math journey shows up instantly on the laptop Mr. Jesse Roe, a ninth-grade math teacher at a charter school here called Summit, has a peephole into the brains of each of his 38 students.

Salman academy