Coming soon: education for anyone, anywhere, on a device

Silicon Valley-based Salman Khan’s free online education initiative Khan Academy is now set to roll out in India. The not-for-profit platform, one of the world’s largest online educators, with over 30 million users worldwide, on Sunday announced a five-year partnership with Tata Trusts aimed at making localised content accessible to students across the country. While Tata Trusts did not disclose the amount of funds being allocated for the initiative, Khan said it will be in millions of dollars, to ensure that students in India get access to world-class education.

“Our primary focus so far has been English. We now have announced a Hindi portal. The announcement we are making today is just the tip of the iceberg. Over the next 4-5 years Khan Academy wants to be an Indian organisation. We will have a team in India similar to what we have in the US.

“When I wrote our mission of ‘free world class education to anyone, anywhere’ it felt a little bit delusional. When I sit in India and see what we can do here, I feel that the vision is less delusional,” Khan said at a media round table.

Tata Trusts Chairman Ratan Tata said that though the Trusts have been supporting education for almost 100 years, mostly in the traditional form, the initiative by Salman Khan is refreshingly different. “He has created a concept for providing knowledge to anybody, anywhere at any time, provided they have a device. It’s something that can, in fact, change the world and the illiterate to the literate as we move forward,” Tata said.

A former hedge fund analyst, Khan had started tutoring his cousins as a hobby before turning the idea of providing free online education into a full-time mission in 2009.

While Khan Academy’s English content is already available on YouTube, through the partnership with Tata Trusts, the Academy plans to make itself more relevant for Indian students in two stages.

The initial stage of two years will involve developing educational resources that are tuned to the particular needs of middle- and low-income students in urban environments.

This includes developing an android app and a technology platform that enables a seamless user experience across desktop and mobile. The second stage will involve moving into vernacular languages such as Marathi and Bengali, targeting rural areas.

When asked how long he plans to continue supporting philanthropists, Khan said: “I believe that initiatives and ideas that solve a social problem have to be done through a not-for-profit model. If you are able to show and quantify actual benefits to society, there will be people to support and scale it.”

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