The Khan Academy

The concepts and the framework for the Principles of Organization Management are numerous and fascinating. Any concept of any subject can be thoroughly internalized only by coupling it to the real world scenarios and quoting examples from the torchbearers and the change agents of  the modern business world. In this pursuit, what better organization than The Khan Academy that has redefined education . This blog is a humble effort to couple the two, and gain a better insight into these concepts.

What Does it actually do?


  The Khan Academy is a non-profit educational organization, created in 2006 by Bangladeshi American educator Salman Khan, a graduate of MIT and Harvard Business School. With the stated mission of "providing a high quality education to anyone, anywhere", the website supplies a free online collection of more than 3,200 micro lectures via video tutorials stored on YouTube teaching mathematics, history, healthcare and medicine, finance,physics, chemistry, biology, astronomy, economics, cosmology, organic chemistry, American civics, art history, macroeconomics and microeconomics, and computer science
Now let us try to relate the concepts learned so far in class with this organization.

Vision

 Vision is one of the most important part of the organization. A vision of an organization defines what an organization is and what does it want to achieve. Vision is a reflection of the future. According to Dr. Mandi, a vision should be almost impossible to realize. Khan academy has a noble vision of providing education to every person in the world. Even though it is close to impossible to achieve this , it does have the ability to inspire a spark in every person working for Khan Academy.

Mission

 Vision without a roadmap is like a dream without any goal, therefore it has to be broken down further to something more tangible. Khan Academy lays down a broad roadmap by  asserting to use technology to accelerate the learning of each individual of all ages. With a clear mission , each person working in this organization , knows on what core aspects , his entire effort needs to be focused on.

Conceptual skills

 In order to be successful in achieving its mission, the Khan academy and for that matter any organization is to have very good command over the macro aspects of business. For Salman Khan it was teaching the world through technology.

Human Skills

 For the success of any organization, it must have a dedicated and motivated team. Khan Academy has been able to effectively penetrate the market, only because it has a dedicated workforce, right from the teaching staff to the technical personnel who take care of the course uploads. A motivated organization which takes care of its people is very important in this regard.

Technical skills 

 Khan academy’s vision can only be realized if it is able to breakdown the vision into very many smaller, well defined achievable goals. With a library with over 3200  videos, peer to peer tutoring and automated assessment of the progress of each student  and the depiction of those results graphically, the academy has managed to attain mastery over the technical skills needed for the success of a business entity.

The Khan academy epitomizes the perfect gelling of all the three aspects or skills in management, which cohere together to form what is known as Scientific Management.

Innovative, new generation organization 

 The Khan academy with its new and innovative business idea has redefined classroom teaching. It has enabled each student to learn at his own pace and made classrooms more relevant than before, as teachers don a new role of mentoring each student rather than engaging in a one way communications with the possibility of many students being left behind. Due to the unique nature of business, each person in an organization has very different roles and responsibilities.

Revenue models

  The project is funded by donations. Khan Academy is a not-for-profit organization, now with significant backing from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and Google. Several people have made US$10,000 contributions total revenue is about $150,000 in donations. Additionally, it also earned $2,000 a month from ads on the Web site in 2010, until Khan Academy ceased to accept advertising. In 2010, Google announced it would give the Khan Academy $2 million for creating more courses and for translating the core library into the world’s most widely spoken languages, as part of their Project 10 .
By choosing such a revenue model , the organization has moved further towards achieving its mission and vision, ie make education available to all. Therefore, each organization needs to  align its revenue model with the vision it has set for itself.

Bounded Rationality

  When Salman Khan started this company , it was a relatively a new concept, therefore he did not have any information about aspects like market penetration, resource allocation, and using youtube as a teaching medium, so Khan , based on the limited information made a decision regarding the business model, this is a perfect example of the concept of bounded rationality.

Final word

 Today organizations need to become more and more flexible and agile to adjust to the ever changing market scenario. The Khan academy is a perfect example of an organization which has put to use an innovative idea for the greater good of the society.