Khan Academy is an American

non-profit A nonprofit organization (NPO), also known as a nonbusiness entity, nonprofit institution, not-for-profit organization, or simply a nonprofit, is a non-governmental (private) legal entity organized and operated for a collective, public, or so ...

education Education is the transmission of knowledge and skills and the development of character traits. Formal education occurs within a structured institutional framework, such as public schools, following a curriculum. Non-formal education als ...

al organization created in 2006 by Sal Khan. Its goal is to create a set of online tools that help educate students. The organization produces short video lessons. Its website also includes supplementary practice exercises and materials for educators. It has produced over 10,000 video lessons teaching a wide spectrum of

academic An academy (Attic Greek: Ἀκαδήμεια; Koine Greek Ἀκαδημία) is an institution of tertiary education. The name traces back to Plato's school of philosophy, founded approximately 386 BC at Akademia, a sanctuary of Athena, the go ...

subjects, including

mathematics Mathematics is a field of study that discovers and organizes methods, Mathematical theory, theories and theorems that are developed and Mathematical proof, proved for the needs of empirical sciences and mathematics itself. There are many ar ...

science Science is a systematic discipline that builds and organises knowledge in the form of testable hypotheses and predictions about the universe. Modern science is typically divided into twoor threemajor branches: the natural sciences, which stu ...

literature Literature is any collection of Writing, written work, but it is also used more narrowly for writings specifically considered to be an art form, especially novels, Play (theatre), plays, and poetry, poems. It includes both print and Electroni ...

history History is the systematic study of the past, focusing primarily on the Human history, human past. As an academic discipline, it analyses and interprets evidence to construct narratives about what happened and explain why it happened. Some t ...

, and

computer science Computer science is the study of computation, information, and automation. Computer science spans Theoretical computer science, theoretical disciplines (such as algorithms, theory of computation, and information theory) to Applied science, ...

. All resources are available free to users of the website and application.

History

Starting in 2004, Salman "Sal" Khan began tutoring one of his cousins in mathematics on the Internet using a service called

Yahoo! Yahoo (, styled yahoo''!'' in its logo) is an American web portal that provides the search engine Yahoo Search and related services including My Yahoo, Yahoo Mail, Yahoo News, Yahoo Finance, Yahoo Sports, y!entertainment, yahoo!life, and its a ...

Doodle Images. After a while, Khan's other cousins began to use his tutoring service. Due to the demand, Khan decided to make his videos watchable on the Internet, so he published his content on

YouTube YouTube is an American social media and online video sharing platform owned by Google. YouTube was founded on February 14, 2005, by Steve Chen, Chad Hurley, and Jawed Karim who were three former employees of PayPal. Headquartered in ...

. Later, he used a drawing application called SmoothDraw, and now uses a Wacom tablet to draw using ArtRage. The video tutorials were recorded on his computer. Reading positive responses in ''

USA Today ''USA Today'' (often stylized in all caps) is an American daily middle-market newspaper and news broadcasting company. Founded by Al Neuharth in 1980 and launched on September 14, 1982, the newspaper operates from Gannett's corporate headq ...

'' prompted Khan to incorporate Khan Academy in 2008 and quit his job the same year to focus full-time on creating educational tutorials (then released under the name ''Khan Academy'') Khan Lab School, a school founded by Sal Khan and associated with Khan Academy, opened on September 15, 2014, in

Mountain View, California Mountain View is a city in Santa Clara County, California, United States, part of the San Francisco Bay Area. Named for its views of the Santa Cruz Mountains, the population was 82,376 at the 2020 United States census, 2020 census. Mountain V ...

. May-Li Khoe served as Vice President of Design at Khan Academy from 2014 to 2019, contributing to the organization's user experience and design strategy during her tenure.

Funding

Khan Academy is a

501(c)(3) A 501(c)(3) organization is a United States corporation, Trust (business), trust, unincorporated association or other type of organization exempt from federal income tax under section 501(c)(3) of Title 26 of the United States Code. It is one of ...

non-profit organization A nonprofit organization (NPO), also known as a nonbusiness entity, nonprofit institution, not-for-profit organization, or simply a nonprofit, is a non-governmental (private) legal entity organized and operated for a collective, public, or so ...

, mostly funded by donations from philanthropic organizations. On its

IRS The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) is the revenue service for the Federal government of the United States, United States federal government, which is responsible for collecting Taxation in the United States, U.S. federal taxes and administerin ...

form 990 Form 990 (officially, the "Return of Organization Exempt From Income Tax") is a United States Internal Revenue Service (IRS) form that provides the public with information about a nonprofit organization. It is also used by government agencies t ...

, the organization reported $31 million in revenues in 2018 and $28 million in 2019, including $839,000 in 2019 compensation for Khan as CEO. In 2010,

Google Google LLC (, ) is an American multinational corporation and technology company focusing on online advertising, search engine technology, cloud computing, computer software, quantum computing, e-commerce, consumer electronics, and artificial ...

donated $2 million for creating new courses and translating content into other languages, as part of their Project 10¹⁰⁰ program. In 2013, Carlos Slim from the Luis Alcazar Foundation in Mexico, made a donation for creating Spanish versions of videos. In 2015,

AT&T AT&T Inc., an abbreviation for its predecessor's former name, the American Telephone and Telegraph Company, is an American multinational telecommunications holding company headquartered at Whitacre Tower in Downtown Dallas, Texas. It is the w ...

contributed $2.25 million to Khan Academy for mobile versions of the content accessible through apps. The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has donated $1.5 million to Khan Academy. On January 11, 2021,

Elon Musk Elon Reeve Musk ( ; born June 28, 1971) is a businessman. He is known for his leadership of Tesla, SpaceX, X (formerly Twitter), and the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). Musk has been considered the wealthiest person in th ...

donated $5 million through his Musk Foundation.

Content

Khan Academy offers classes with educational videos hosted on

. The website is meant to be used as a supplement to the videos, because it includes other features such as progress tracking, practice exercises, and teaching tools. The material can also be accessed through mobile applications. The videos enable students to acquire knowledge at their own learning speed according to the concept of

mastery learning Mastery learning is an instructional strategy and educational philosophy that emphasizes the importance of students achieving a high level of competence (e.g., 90% accuracy) in prerequisite knowledge before moving on to new material. This approac ...

. They are therefore used by teachers to teach according to the principle of Flipped Classroom. The videos display a recording of drawings on an electronic blackboard, which are similar to the style of a teacher giving a lecture. The narrator describes each drawing and how the drawings relate to the material being taught. Furthermore, throughout the lessons, users can earn badges and energy points, which can be displayed on their profiles. Non-profit groups have distributed offline versions of the videos to rural areas in Asia, Latin America, and Africa. Videos range from all subjects covered in school and for all grades from kindergarten up through high school. The Khan Academy website also hosts content from educational YouTube channels and organizations such as Crash Course and the

Museum of Modern Art The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) is an art museum located in Midtown Manhattan, New York City, on 53rd Street (Manhattan), 53rd Street between Fifth Avenue, Fifth and Sixth Avenues. MoMA's collection spans the late 19th century to the present, a ...

. It also provides online courses for preparing for standardized tests, including the

SAT The SAT ( ) is a standardized test widely used for college admissions in the United States. Since its debut in 1926, its name and Test score, scoring have changed several times. For much of its history, it was called the Scholastic Aptitude Test ...

AP Chemistry Advanced Placement (AP) Chemistry (also known as AP Chem) is a course and examination offered by the College Board as a part of the Advanced Placement Program to give American and Canadian high school students the opportunity to demonstrate thei ...

, Praxis Core and

MCAT The Medical College Admission Test (MCAT; ) is a computer-based standardized examination for prospective medical students in the United States, Canada, Australia, and the Caribbean Islands. It is designed to assess problem solving, critical ...

and released LSAT preparation lessons in 2018. It also has a collaboration with independent chemists, which are mentioned in "Meet the chemistry professional". Khan Academy has also supported Code.org's Hour of Code, providing coding lessons on its website. In July 2017, Khan Academy became the official practice partner for the College Board's Advanced Placement.

Khanmigo

Khanmigo is a

chatbot A chatbot (originally chatterbot) is a software application or web interface designed to have textual or spoken conversations. Modern chatbots are typically online and use generative artificial intelligence systems that are capable of main ...

designed to assist users with mathematics, science, humanities, and coding inquiries, as well as aiding in learning these subjects. Khan Academy introduced Khanmigo on March 14, 2023. It was initially based on

GPT-4 Generative Pre-trained Transformer 4 (GPT-4) is a multimodal large language model trained and created by OpenAI and the fourth in its series of GPT foundation models. It was launched on March 14, 2023, and made publicly available via the p ...

, a

large language model A large language model (LLM) is a language model trained with self-supervised machine learning on a vast amount of text, designed for natural language processing tasks, especially language generation. The largest and most capable LLMs are g ...

OpenAI OpenAI, Inc. is an American artificial intelligence (AI) organization founded in December 2015 and headquartered in San Francisco, California. It aims to develop "safe and beneficial" artificial general intelligence (AGI), which it defines ...

. Users can have access for $4 per month. Users who want to register must be over 18. The pilot provided access to approximately 65,000 students across 53 school districts. In November 2023, Khanmingo Writing Coach was introduced to provide essay-writing support for students and analytical insights for teachers. In August 2024, Khanmigo for Teachers, a set of free generative AI tools for educators, was announced in partnership with Microsoft. In December 2024, Khanmigo was featured on an episode of

60 Minutes ''60 Minutes'' is an American television news magazine broadcast on the CBS television network. Debuting in 1968, the program was created by Don Hewitt and Bill Leonard, who distinguished it from other news programs by using a unique style o ...

with host Anderson Cooper, who tried the Writing Coach on one of his essays from middle school.

Language availability

Khan Academy videos have been translated into several languages, with nearly 20,000 subtitle translations available. These translations are mainly volunteer-driven with help from international partnerships. The Khan Academy platform is fully available in English (en), Bangla (bn), Bulgarian (bg), Chinese (zh), French (fr), German (de), Georgian (ka), Norwegian (nb), Polish (pl) Portuguese (pt), Spanish (es), Serbian (sr), Turkish (tr) and Uzbek (uz), and partially available in 28 other languages.

Official SAT preparation

Since 2015, Khan Academy has been one of the official

preparation websites. According to reports, studying for the SAT for at least 20 hours at Khan Academy is associated with a 115-point average score increase.

Pixar in a Box

In 2015, Khan Academy teamed up with

Pixar Pixar (), doing business as Pixar Animation Studios, is an American animation studio based in Emeryville, California, known for its critically and commercially successful computer-animated feature films. Pixar is a subsidiary of Walt Disney ...

to create a new course named Pixar in a Box, which teaches how skills learned in school help the creators at Pixar.

Official Test Preparation

Khan Academy also provides free test preps for PSAT/NMSQT, LSAT, Praxis Core, and

Khan Academy Kids

In 2018, Khan Academy launched an application called Khan Academy Kids for children aged two to seven to learn basic maths, reading and social skills.

Teachers

Teachers can set up a classroom within Khan Academy. This classroom allows teachers to assign courses within Khan Academy's database to their students. Teachers can also track their student's progress as they work through the assigned tutorials.

Criticism

Khan Academy has been criticized because its creator, Sal Khan, lacks a formal background or qualifications in

pedagogy Pedagogy (), most commonly understood as the approach to teaching, is the theory and practice of learning, and how this process influences, and is influenced by, the social, political, and psychological development of learners. Pedagogy, taken ...

. Statements made in certain mathematics and physics videos have been questioned for their technical accuracy. In response to these criticisms, the organization has corrected errors in its videos, expanded its faculty, and formed a network of over 200 content experts. In an interview from January 2016, Khan defended the value of Khan Academy online lectures while acknowledging their limitations: "I think they're valuable, but I'd never say they somehow constitute a complete education." Khan Academy positions itself as a supplement to in-class learning, with the ability to improve the effectiveness of teachers by freeing them from traditional lectures and giving them more time to tend to individual students' needs. In February 2024, a

Wall Street Journal ''The Wall Street Journal'' (''WSJ''), also referred to simply as the ''Journal,'' is an American newspaper based in New York City. The newspaper provides extensive coverage of news, especially business and finance. It operates on a subscriptio ...

reporter tested the math tutoring capabilities of Khan Academy's AI chatbot Khanmigo and found that it made basic calculation errors.

Recognition

* In 2012, Khan Academy won a

Webby Award The Webby Awards (colloquially referred to as the Webbys) are awards for excellence on the Internet presented annually by the International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences, a judging body composed of over three thousand industry experts a ...

in the category Websites and Mobile Sites, Education. * In 2016, Khan Academy won a Shorty Award for Best in Education.

References

External links

* {{Authority control 2008 establishments in California 501(c)(3) organizations Charities based in California American educational websites Articles containing video clips Educational organizations based in the United States Education companies established in 2008 Educational technology non-profits Education-related YouTube channels English-language YouTube channels Science-related YouTube channels Mountain View, California Online nonprofit organizations Open educational resources Educational organizations established in 2008 Online tutoring Shorty Award winners Mentorships