Khan Academy Launches Educational Videos in Hindi; Aims to Disrupt Traditional Tuition Model In India
Non-profit educational organization Khan Academy has launched a portal for Hindi speaking students in India. As per founder Salman Khan, who has been featured in the as Time’s 100 Most Influential Persons list in 2012, Khan Academy in Hindi aims to disrupt the traditional tuition model and provide high quality educational videos for free to every student.
Forbes had once featured Salman Khan with a cover story titled: “$1 Trillion Opportunity”.
Salman, who is an American teacher, entrepreneur, and a former hedge fund analyst launched Khan Academy in 2006 to provide high quality educational videos for free to any student who wishes to learn a particular subject. All videos are available for free on Youtube, and at the time of writing, there are more than 2 million subscribers of their official channel.
Named as Khan Academy Hindi, the portal was launched yesterday in association with Central Square Foundation (CSF), which is a philanthropy fund focused on education & promoted by ChrysCapital founder Ashish Dhawan. The Youtube channel of Hindi version already has 3,000+ subscribers.
As of now, their special Hindi channel has hundreds of videos related to teaching Maths topics. Soon, there would be 3000+ Maths videos, in additional to special focus on Science stream later. To start with, videos released by Khan Academy Hindi will cover syllabus of National Council of Education Research and Training (NCERT) for math.
One interesting trivia: Even Bill Gates uses Khan Academy for his kids. In an interview, Salman Khan said, “So what’s happening is “I cannot afford tuition so I am using Khan Academy” is changing to “I can afford it but I use Khan Academy”. Famously, Bill Gates uses Khan Academy for his kids, and he can of course afford a tutor. So my message to Indian students is look, you don’t need to spend all this money (for tuition).”
As per Sandeep Bapna, India country manager of Khan Academy, “After the US, Khan Academy sees India as a huge market but not to make profit. We shall provide customized and localized high-quality content in different languages,”
With more than 20 million visits a month, Khan Academy is extremely popular in USA, which amounts of 70% of it’s traffic.
When asked about their revenue model, Salman Khan said that 80% of their revenue comes from philanthropists, and in India as well, they will rely on this model. Besides, students regularly give them small amounts ($5, $10) as a token of thank you.
Some of the biggest names in corporate sector such as Bill Gates, Reed Hastings (of Netlfix), Eric Schmidt (of Google) and Carlos Slim have already backed Khan Academy.
