Closing General Session featuring Sal Khan

Sal Khan is the founder of the Khan Academy (khanacademy.org), a nonprofit with the mission of providing free, world-class education to “anyone, anywhere.” Khan Academy has over 26 million registered students in 190 countries. A former hedge fund analyst with degrees from MIT and Harvard, Khan is also the author of The One World School House, which explores the potential impact of the web as a teaching tool. It may be one of the most influential books about education in our time.

 

Khan’s journey began when he was helping a young cousin with math in 2004, communicating by phone and using an interactive notepad. When others expressed interest, he began posting videos of his hand-scribbled tutorials on YouTube. Demand took off, and in 2009 he quit his day job. The Khan Academy website now provides self-pacing software and unlimited access to free resources, featuring a library of over 7,000 video lessons in more than 36 languages, and on a wide range of subjects, including math, science, computer programming, history, and economics. Up to 14 million learners visit the website each month, and as of August 2015, they’ve received 580 million lessons and completed 3.8 billion practice problems.

 

Khan’s first book, The One World Schoolhouse: Education Reimagined, was published to great acclaim in 2012. Innovators as varied as George Lucas and Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Muhammed Yunus have hailed it as “a must-read.” Al Gore had this to say: “Since its founding in 2006, Sal Khan’s project—the Khan academy—has revolutionized our thinking on the potential and promise of unfettered, open-access online education. In his new book The One World Schoolhouse, Khan presents his vision and blueprint for how online technology can, and should, play an integral role in educating communities across the globe, closing the opportunity gap and providing high-quality education for all.”

 

Khan has been profiled by 60 Minutes, featured on the cover of Forbes Magazine, and recognized as one of TIME Magazine’s “100 Most Influential People in the World.” A growing number of classrooms around the world are using Khan Academy to help build student mastery of topics and to free up class time for dynamic, project-based learning.