Salman Khan flourished even at the peak of the world economic crisis of 2008. The Khan Academy’s online education videos attracted thousands of learners that year. It has gone from strength to strength since then. Khan’s not-for-profit enterprise is funded by the likes of the Gates Foundation, Google and Elon Musk. Today, the academy has 130 million learners from across the world, ranging from school-goers to graduate-level learners. Such is the enduring popularity of online education.
Scaling up
As the world recovered from its economic setback by 2011, a new genre of online courses titled ‘Massive Open Online Courses’ (MOOCs) made their entry, driven by reputed institutions of learning. Though MOOCS have been around since 2008, their institutional origins can be traced to three free online courses offered by Stanford University in 2011. Peter Norvig, Sebastian Thrun, Jennifer Widom and Andrew Ng conducted these courses. Buoyed by the large turnout of learners for these ‘pilot’ courses, Thrun launched his online education outfit, ‘Udacity’, in late 2011 as a for-profit company. A year later, Andrew Ng and Daphne Koller followed suit with their venture ‘Coursera’, which was also registered as a ‘for-profit’ company.
