He soon learned, as he’s joked in speeches, that “they preferred me on YouTube.” Khan’s cousins could watch the videos whenever they wanted, rather than waiting until he got off work. To supplement the calls, he filmed explanations and posted them on YouTube. He lived in Boston and they lived in New Orleans, so he’d coach them over the phone. As he describes it, he was just trying to help a seventh-grade cousin-and later, other young relatives-with math. So when Khan charged down the Oregon Trail of online learning, he wasn’t discovering new territory. With the rise of the Internet, many educational institutions entered the online-learning market, hoping to broaden their reach, and for-profit companies began offering software for schools as well. By the early 1980s, Apple computers had infiltrated many schools, and a whole generation of Americans in their thirties can recall rainy days spent playing Oregon Trail or MathBlaster-ways to turn kids’ love of watching stuff on screens into real learning. The quest to deploy computer technology in classrooms has been going on almost since the genesis of personal computers themselves. What makes Khan’s videos so appealing? Has he invented a teaching tool that works? And what do his discoveries mean for the broader goal of improving education? Seven years later, they and his problem sets have become a pedagogical phenomenon, attracting fame, controversy, and, beginning last year, funding from Microsoft founder and philanthropist Bill Gates. Khan began making these videos around 2004. Students can also work math problem sets, proceeding through a sequence that stretches from arithmetic to calculus. In video after video, Khan’s disembodied voice explains concepts as his pen swiftly draws illustrations on a digital board. At, Salman Khan, a former hedge-fund analyst, narrates more than 2,700 free lessons, each about ten minutes long, on everything from polynomials to valence electrons. But over the past few years, millions of decidedly enterprising people have turned on their computers to watch, of all things, math and science lectures.
Watching videos online usually means goofing off.
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