Salman Khan

Salman Khan is an American educator, and the founder of Khan Academy, a not-for-profit organization. He has dedicated his life to providing education to the masses. He has created a free online education platform with learning videos on a wide spectrum of subjects from mathematics and science to basic finance and investment.

Background

Born in New Orleans, Louisiana, Sal holds degrees(3)from MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) in math, electrical engineering, and computer science, and has a MBA from Harvard Business School. His dad was born in Bangladesh, and him mom is from India.

Prior to his fulltime involvement with the Khan Academy, Sal worked as a hedge fund analyst. All of this came about as a result of Sal tutoring his cousin, Nadia, in math using Yahoo’s Doodle notepad.

Shortly thereafter, an avalanche of requests from other relatives for tutoring, motivated Sal to distribute his tutorials on YouTube. This started on November 16, 2006. Given much positive feedback to his video sharing website, he left his job at the hedge fund in 2009 to focus on his YouTube channel fulltime.

Averaging in excess of 20,000 hits per video, students worldwide have gravitated to his learning model. Teaching in a more relaxed, concise and practical way, Sal has been able to make a significant impact on education.

Good Education

Good education is his driving force, and he has outlined his mission as “accelerate learning for students of all ages. With this in mind, we want to share our content with whoever may find it useful.” His free education model covers topics ranging from venture capital and investing to SAT prep. He reaches students in remote areas of the world as well through his online platform.

Sal is dedicated to empowering others with his new model of learning. In addition to being featured on PBS News Hour and CNN, the Khan Academy received the Microsoft Tech Award for education in 2009, and Google provided $2MM in 2010 to support the expansion of courses and its core library. Bill Gates indicated that he uses the academy’s Exercise Software to teach his kids.

Salman Khan has created a better learning model for now, and well into the future. He is in the process of unleashing the potential of each individual around the world, while revolutionizing the field of education. He has set the standard for many creative folks to follow.

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