Khan Academy

I know blogs should focus on one theme or overarching main subject to maintain a good readership base. So far I have written about nice cafes and bars. So lets be honest, the main theme and obviously the main focus of my life has been food (with some random comments about what I'm wearing- yes I too am laughing at what I've written).

But I am going to be unable to maintain one theme for this blog. I really should have called it the ramblings of...

However, I do not want to take away from how amazing I think the Khan Academy is. This is something meow and carn (who will from now on be called mr. google as he does not like the bogan-ness of his name: a stain on his intellect) introduced me to.

The khan academy is an organisation started by Salman Khan. He completed 3 degrees at MIT (that really says enough doesn't it) before pursuing an MBA at harvard and like a lot of men with incredible intellect was caught by a hedge fund analyst group.

Being from an Indian family he was asked to tutor one of his numerous cousins which he happily did in a creative and engaging manner. He was then bombarded by requests from all of his extended family and friends and thought it would be more practical to put up these tutorials on you tube.

These tutorials went on to become the most watched teaching sessions on the internet and he quit his lucrative job to focus on delivering quality education through the internet. His videos are now watched by students struggling with concepts not only in America but in countries like India and Africa where quality teaching is often hard to access by the poor.

Now having spent a few days trawling through his website- I can atest his teaching methods are very engaging and would have been useful in highschool and college.

However, it is not just the mathematics and science subjects that are fascinating but the website's breakdown of current political situations such as Greece's role in the European Union (which I did not really understand until I watched the tutorial on it).

So if you ever want to learn anything whether it is about the French revolution or Art history have a look at this website:

http://www.khanacademy.org/

But that is not the main reason I decided to blog about Khan academy. I thought it was great to hear about someone utilising thier intellect and abilities to help the most vulnerable in our society, instead of living only for thier own personal gains.

Bill gates said about Salman Khan, "I'd say we've moved about 160 IQ points from the hedge fund category to the teaching-many-people-in-a-leveraged-way category. It was a good day his wife let him quit his job."