Education revolution: working together to maximize its scope

I remember the first time I heard about the Khan Academy: during lunchtime with some coworkers, someone asked us what we thought about that revolutionizing method of teaching and learning. I must admit that, as working for a technology firm, our attention derived from talking about education to how to manage that scale of information and support concurrent users from a technology perspective (“Their cloud infrastructure must be amazing!”), and then discussing over their business model and how to replicate that. Now, I have realized that Khan Academy is so much more than just IT and profit: it is revolution at its purest form. 

Having read about his venture once more makes me stop and wonder about something: How does he want to reach people? This might sound like a very easy question. After all, Khan Academy is posted on the biggest existing network, the World Wide Web and internet is accessible for everybody…isn’t it? Well, that’s true to only some extent, and the members of this institution are aware of that:

Image from: https://www.khanacademy.org/coach-res/reference-for-coaches/how-to/a/offline-programs

We know now that there are constraints that could limit this non-profit scope. But Khan has inspired so many people that many are joining its initiative to spread knowledge. There are some options that I think are worth mentioning.

• While going through the article Where In The World Are The 1.2M Raspberry Pi Microcomputers? I found something very interesting. There is not only an online way to access Khan Academy, and the offline option is not necessarily having a USB with a collection of videos. This San Francisco based team also created an offline version called “KA Lite”. Although it might not be as complete as the online version, that can actually help this content being spread to places that do not have a quality bandwidth. And there are even affordable ways of having it work: it can run on a Raspberry Pi based server, or a not-so-costly computer.
• If Khan Academy lessons cannot reach children in developing countries, at least they should reach teachers, attract them and motivate them to learn more, so they could later bring that knowledge to the classroom. Create a snowball effect, and keep it rolling. That is something governments and some private companies are aware of too. Nowadays, there are initiatives from Latin American governments to offer subsidized laptops, so they can get easily access to better training and material. There are also grants from technology companies destined to give money to better equip teachers with the right computers (tablets, laptops).

Having a revolution like Khan, and knowing that there are more people willing to make its impact as broader as possible is inspiring. Knowing that this is something that will keep going and will (and is already) changing so many people’s lives can make us dream for a better future.