Bravo Khan Academy!

I brought my daughter Kara last Tuesday to Loyola Student Center, a tutorial and review center along Katipunan Avenue in Quezon City, to help her prepare for her quarterly exams in Geometry.  She said she was having difficulty and feared she would fail in the exams.  I forked out P800 for two hours of review which I fervently hope helped her only to find out three days later that I could have saved that P800.

Three days after, I saw the video that one of my friends in Facebook posted about Khan Academy.  He also wrote on his wall "Go back to school for free.  And you don't have to leave home."  It's home-based and best of all, it's free.  Fantastic!  I viewed the video and found out that Khan Academy, a non-profit educational organization created and sustained by Salman Khan, is one of the 5 winners of Google's Project 10 to the 100.  Google awarded the academy $2 million "to support the creation of more courses and to enable it to translate their core library into the world's most widely spoken languages."  Checking out its website, I was introduced to a free online collection of 2,000 videos on mathematics, science, history and economics.  Yes siree, Geometry is included.  If only I saw this website earlier, my daughter need not go to a review center for her Geometry exams.

How did Khan Academy come about?  It all started when Salman Khan, a Bangladeshi American, began tutoring his cousin in mathematics using Yahoo!'s Doodle notepad. He decided to distribute the tutorials on YouTube when more relatives and friends sought his help. The popularity of his tutorials and testimonials of appreciative students prompted him to quit his job in finance in 2009 and work for the Academy full time.  Sal Khan's long-term goals are to provide "tens of thousands of videos in many subjects" and to create the "the world's first free, world-class virtual school."

Bravo Salman Khan!  You are laudable for making the dream of a quality education within the reach of everyone.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khan_Academy
http://www.project10tothe100.com/index.html

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• Google Announces $10 Million For Project 10^100 Winners, Khan Academy Wins (techie-buzz.com)
• imabonehead: Is the Khan Academy The Future of Education? (video) | Singularity Hub (singularityhub.com)