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I could not agree more that higher education has gotten too expensive. Schools have gone from learning institutions to a money making institutions. I'll probably check out a few of these video's every night to refresh myself and learn something new!"I'm starting a virtual school for the world, teaching things the way I wanted to be taught," explains Khan, 33, the exuberant founder and sole faculty member of the nonprofit Khan Academy, run out of his small ranch house, which he shares with his wife and infant son.
Khan has never studied education and has no teaching credentials. His brief and low-tech videos, created in the corner of his bedroom, are made with a $200 Camtasia Recorder, $80 Wacom Bamboo Tablet and a free copy of SmoothDraw3 on a home PC.
But every day, his lectures are viewed 70,000 times -- double the entire student body of UC Berkeley. His viewers are diverse, ranging from rural preschoolers to Morgan Stanley analysts to Pakistani engineers. Since its inception in 2006, the Khan Academy website has recorded more than 16 million page views.
At a time when conventional education is under stress, his project has caught the attention of educators and venture capitalists such as John Doerr, who just invested $100,000 to help pay Khan's salary.
Jason Fried, CEO of tech company 37signals, said he invested in Khan's nonprofit because "the next bubble to burst is higher education. It's too expensive. It's too much one-size-fits-all. This is an alternative way to think about teaching -- simple, personal, free and moving at your own pace."
With a computer science degree from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and an MBA from Harvard, Khan settled into a lucrative position at Sand Hill Road's Wohl Capital Management, while his wife studied medicine at Stanford.
