Khan Academy is knocking at the doors of the Rs. 5.9 lakh Cr Indian education market

The Khan Academy was born out of simple desire of Salman Khan to help out his cousin Nadia in mathematics. But since Nadia lived in New Orleans and Salman was in Boston working at a hedge fund, he began tutoring her remotely and would record videos and post them on YouTube. This was circa 2004.

Salman realised that making videos was working as his cousins could watch them whenever they needed to, at their own pace and even multiple times. Soon others stumbled upon his videos, which gave him enough of a business case to set up the now-famous Khan Academy. From then, there was no looking back for Salman.

The next 6 years saw the release of approximately 2,000 tutorials which garnered a viewership of one lakh eyeballs a day. Finally, in 2008, Khan Academy was incorporated as a non-profit, and until late 2009, Salman worked on the academy in his free time. Soon after, he quit his hedge fund job and focused his complete attention on Khan Academy. Currently, the academy has over 90 full-time employees in Mountain View, California.

Khan Academy currently boasts of 31 million registered students, one million registered teachers, 15 million site visits per month, users across 190 countries, 580 million lessons delivered and over four billion completed problems.  Currently, there are courses in Polish, English, Czech, Hindi, Malayalam, Chinese, Swahili, Russian, Indonesian, German, Spanish, Turkish, Xhosa, Urdu, Arabic, Bengali and many others. The team intends to add more Indian languages in the coming years.

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So how does this online education behemoth plan to establish itself in the Indian market? The Indian education market is believed to be worth Rs 5.9 trillion and the online education space is believed to touch $40 billion by 2017.  With the growing Internet and mobile phone penetration happening in the country, there are several startups trying to make their presence felt in the education and tutoring space. Embibe, SimpliLearn, Vedantu, Edurekha and Xamcheck are some of the key players in the space.

On this front, the team says it observed that India is currently the fifth largest user base for Khan Academy. Since 2012, the video views have grown at 45 % y-o-o in India, and over 40 % of the user base is from secondary school or college students. The plan of action is to build a team in India in 3 areas – content, growth/adoption, and partnerships and implementation.

Sandeep Bapna, who earlier was a part of International Finance Corporation (IFC), World Bank and had even founded edutech platform Engrami, is now the India Country Manager at Khan Academy.

Sandeep Bapna – India Head, Yin Lu – Head of International, and Arif Kadir – Head – Strategic Initiatives. (with pic)

He says, The sheer scale and diversity of the Indian education landscape presents a significant challenge for any educator. The challenge for Khan Academy will be to deliver sufficiently versatile education resources that can be adapted to, and remain relevant to learners in these different environments. In particular, it will be challenging — but still vital — to reach under-served populations who may lack the awareness and have limited access to broadband networks and devices, among other issues.

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Apart from support from Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, The Board Foundation, O’Sullivan Foundation, Google and Skool Foundation, the non-profit also partnered with Tata Trusts to create specialised, freely available online content tailor-made for India. Apart from hiring Indian teachers, the team will also be creating content in Indian languages based on the NCERT textbooks.