Tata Trusts, and Khan Academy, a Silicon Valley-based not-for-profit education initiative founded by educationist Salman Khan, announced that they were entering into a five-year partnership to leverage the power of technology to provide free, world-class education for anyone, anywhere in the country.
The partnership will focus on developing tech-enabled, high quality and localised education resources across India by providing a personalised, mastery-based learning experience.
A former hedge fund analyst, Khan, who began the initiative as a teaching platform for his cousins back in the mid-2000s, is now has 30 million registered students and has delivered over 580 million lessons and over four million exercise problems.
Speaking to the media, Tata Trusts, Chairman Ratan Tata said: “I would like to emphasise how important this initiative is to Tata Trusts. We have been in education for almost 100 years but mostly in the traditional form of education, which involves giving grants to institutes or providing scholarships for people to study overseas. Sal Khan has created a concept which is refreshingly different, of providing free education to anybody, in terms of providing access. 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.”
“Khan Academy exists to empower students of all levels, all over the world. Our goal is to use technology to humanise the education sector on a global scale,” Khan said. The initiative will also aim to collaborate with public and private sector partners to empower and equip students, families and teachers.
Khan said he had met Union Minister for Human Resource Development Smriti Irani during his India trip and she was receptive to the idea of what the Academy was doing. Khan had also met Prime Minister Narendra Modi when the latter visited the United States in September this year.
Khan said this is the first time that the Academy, which now employs around 100 people, is setting up a dedicated team in India. “All that we wish to achieve is not going to happen overnight, but we have this vision,” he said.
“By 2009-10 I decided to turn it into a not-for-profit and since then it has been an ever-accelerating ride. It shows how much hunger there is for people around the world to tap into their potential. Until recently, our primary focus has been in English. My family has roots in India, so it’s also very close to our hearts. A few days ago, we also announced the launch of our Hindi portal,” Khan elaborated.
The partnership will be phased into two stages. The initial stage of two years will involve developing a robust set of educational resources that are tuned to the particular needs of middle- and low-income students in urban environments.
Building upon the Academy’s existing tools, major efforts will be dedicated to developing a technology platform which enables a seamless user experience across desktop and mobile, apart from creating high-quality academic content aligned to local curricular standards and in a relevant language.
The initiative will also support the adoption and use of these resources by the learners. The second stage will involve branching into additional content areas, based on the experience of the first phase, and strengthening the ecosystem to help learners in a diverse set of environments.