
How a Tech Non-Profit Became the Hottest Ticket in Silicon Valley - 2arrs2ells
http://www.wired.com/business/2012/06/khan-academy
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raptrajs
The formula is:

1\. Take a hard, tough-nut-to-crack problem, like making education not suck.

2\. Take something that's traditionally been behing high-priced walled gardens
(ie universities) and offer it online for cheap or free.

3\. Put an extremely intelligent, visionary man at the head of it all.

This isn't Pandora for cats. This is making quality education more widely
available and making the process to do so transparent and honest. Bravo, Khan.

~~~
2arrs2ells
Paying a competitive salary (like Khan does) also helps!

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zhemao
What I find weird is that there is no mention of Khan Academy hiring any
educators. Even if your teaching methods are non-traditional, you still
probably need someone with traditional teaching experience to tell you whether
the lessons will actually be effective.

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stchangg
Hi zhemao, thanks for the comment! I'm a Khan Academy developer. I just wanted
to add that we _do_ hire educators. Among them are Beth and Steven who are our
in-resident art history faculty (<http://www.khanacademy.org/about/the-team>).
We also have a dedicated School Implementations team (<http://ka-
implementations.tumblr.com/>) working directly with schools to understand how
Khan Academy can be integrated in classrooms and to evaluate our performance
against independent test results.

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eslavitt
Thanks stchangg! I'm on Khan Academy's school implementations team and just
wanted to add that Maureen, who is also on the school implementations team, is
a former 6th grade teacher. This summer, we also have 2 experienced math
teachers working with us to flesh out a significant amount of our math
content: Chris Talone (teacher at Marlborough, a girls' school in LA, who
taught 7 levels of math simultaneously with Khan Academy this past year) and
Jesse Roe (teacher at Summit, a charter school in San Jose, who taught Algebra
and Geometry to 9th graders with Khan Academy this past year). We're really
grateful for their thoughtful contributions which are grounded in years of
experience teaching math to lots of different types of students.

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Arun2009
Thank you for the great work you're all doing at Khan Academy. Also, I'll take
this opportunity to give a small suggestion :-)

I was wondering if you guys could make Mathematics more problem solving
centric (see www.artofproblemsolving.com for an example approach. Also "The
Art and Craft of Problem Solving" by Paul Zeitz and George Polya's "How to
solve it")

Most of the Mathematics in school curriculum is just plug n' chug work at a
slightly higher level. Students do not get any insights into how really good
problem solvers solve tough problems. Mathematics competitions such as the
regional and international olympiads give students an exposure to such type of
problem solving, but this experience is limited to a narrow pool of students
who through pure serendipity discovered how intellectually rewarding problem
solving can be. Perhaps if training materials were more widely available, more
students would be able to get a glimpse of Mathematical problem solving at a
totally different level.

In a previous life, I used to tutor O-level and A-level students in
Mathematics in Singapore. The transformation some of them had when exposed to
say principles in Polya's "How to solve it" was _phenomenal_. All too often I
wished I had access to more easily accessible training materials that I could
give them (and that I myself could learn from!). I'm sure there are plenty of
teachers in my position all over the world.

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bignoggins
I'm thinking of starting a tech-nonprofit my self. How does it work in terms
of fundraising? Are you raising donations instead of investment? And do you
have to constantly seek donations since you don't really ever have the
intention of making real revenue?

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kkowalczyk
First, a disclaimer: I know next to nothing about non-profits. The fact that
you know even less should give you a pause. If you're serious about this, do
some (or even a lot of) research before asking the most basic questions.

A non-profit status is not about making revenue or not. It's a legal
categorization of your company. So first, you need a company. Then you have to
apply for a non-profit status with the government.

How do you apply for non-profit status? I don't know, you'll probably need to
hire a lawyer specialized in non-profit registration to guide you through that
process. It's also not a one-time thing: in order to maintain your non-profit
status, you have to convince the government every year that you still are a
non-profit.

You're confusing the means with the goal. You don't need non-profit to be
benevolent. You can have crazy profits by day and spend those profits on
benevolent activities by night. You can build wells in Ethiopia, send vaccines
to Nigeria or any other thing that non-profits do without being a registered
non-profit. You can think of non-profits as a way for rich people to do
benevolent things (via donations) without spending time actually doing those
things (i.e. rich person signs a check, a non-profit does the work of sending
a malaria net to africa).

So why people register for non-profit status? First because it gives them a
preferential treatment from government in terms of lower taxes (?), ability to
fund-raise money that is tax-deductible for the donor etc. I'm sure few google
searches will direct you to a much more extensive information.

Given preferential treatment why won't every company register as a non-profit?
Because government doesn't give that treatment to just anybody. There is a
checklist of things that a non-profit can and cannot do. If you're Locke, you
won't like being a non-profit.

That partially answers your "fundraising vs. investment" question. I'm
guessing that "investment" is not even on the table for non-profits due to
government rules so they can either earn their money or do fundraising. If you
think, however, that fundraising is easier than making money, then you're
probably wrong, but that's a whole new topic.

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samstave
Khan Academy is fantastic.

We need a charter school that uses it as the core of its content delivery for
educating on the subjects covered as a test.

I would put my two kids in that school without question.

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astrofinch
These guys make a good argument that you can do just as much good or more by
working a conventional job and donating money to nonprofits than by working
for a nonprofit directly:

<http://vimeo.com/32787159>

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joshzayin
(Current KA intern here.)

That video assumes that nonprofit jobs aren't high-paying, but that's not
always the case. KA, for instance, pays competitively. If you can both have a
high-paying career that enables you to donate while also using your skills to
help advance causes you care about (especially if the skills in question are
skills that many or most people don't have), then by the reasoning in the
video, that's better than either option they present.

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astrofinch
Makes sense.

