Sal Khan: Reimagining Education

Chances are if you haven't completed an online tutorial from the Khan Academy - http://www.khanacademy.org - you know someone who has. For his work to bring access to free education resources to "anyone, anywhere," the Heinz Family Foundation awarded Khan Academy founder Sal Khan the 19th Annual Heinz Award.

While in Pittsburgh, Mr. Khan delivered a Simon Initiative Distinguished Lecture at Carnegie Mellon University explaining why he left his lucrative career as hedge fund analyst to devote his full attention to what began as a hobby designing online educational math videos and practice exercises for family friends and cousins. Today, the Khan Academy reaches over 10 million unique students per month. Mr. Khan outlined his growth plans for Khan Academy and how "education reimagined" can become a reality.

The Simon Initiative at Carnegie Mellon coalesces the university's decades of interdisciplinary research into technology-enhanced learning with the goal of continuously improving learning outcomes, both for CMU students, and for millions of people throughout the world. The Simon Initiative convenes experts in cognitive psychology, computer science and human-computer interaction who together are working to unlock the potential of human learning. It also features the Simon DataLab, the world's largest open repository of learning data, where researchers and course developers anywhere can both contribute to and use a catalog of thousands of data sets and analytical tools.

For more, visit: http://www.cmu.edu/simon