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Trying Out a Nonprofit Online "Academy"

There's a nice piece in the San Francisco Chronicle today about the "Math Master of the Internet"-33-year-old Salman Khan, a hedgefunder turned...

Siobhan O'Connor
By Siobhan O'ConnorDec 16, 2009
Siobhan O'Connor
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There's a nice piece in the San Francisco Chronicle today about the "Math Master of the Internet"-33-year-old Salman Khan, a hedgefunder turned education maverick who, inspired by the fact that his free online tutorials garnered 35,000 page views per day, launched his own free "academy" last year.This is obviously part of a larger movement in free, open source, online courses-none of which I've actually tried. But I have watched a handful few of the 1,000-plus videos at the Khan Academy and they're really pretty great. He uses a simple e-blackboard with cheery colors and his cheery voice, and that's pretty much it. This guy has an uncanny ability to make complicated material interesting, even for those of us whose memory of high school math is limited to the creative strategies we used to get out of class. I'm not much if a trigonometry girl, but the biology and banking videos are pretty fascinating, and there are many, many to choose from.For a list of his tutorials, or to watch a few, click here.
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