Currently some school students worldwide are spending a total of 85 to 90 million minutes a day learning on Khan Academy’s online platforms. This use, of the Academy’s free learning tools, is triple that before the COVID-19 lockdown began a year ago, Salman Amin Khan, its founder told CNBC today.

This raises the hope that perhaps students are not entirely missing a year of education due to the pandemic. But many students, especially from families with limited or no access to computers and cellphones or with limited internet service, appear to have been lost, says Khan, who is 44-years-old. In the U.S. alone, based on recent math tests scores, about 10 to 15% of students have “dropped off the school radar,” he said.    

Based in Moutain View, in California’s Silicon Valley, Khan Academy’s mission is “to provide a free, world-class education for anyone, anywhere.” It offers online learning tools from Kindergarten to some college level courses, including in math, science, computing, history and English.

The tools include practice exercises, instructional videos, and a personalized learning dashboard which enable students to learn at their own pace, in and outside the classroom. Over 6,500 videos offer simple explanations of key learning building blocks for students ages 2 and up, as well as adult learners. The focus is “on skill mastery to help learners establish strong foundations, so there's no limit to what they can learn next.”

The academy also offers free online tools for parents and teachers, including a dashboard, to better understand what their children or students are up to and how best to help them.

A year ago, when schools first started closing in the U.S. due to the pandemic lockdown, Khan Academy began creating resources for parents, students, and teachers to help everyone learn remotely.   

In 2020, Daily Schedules, which provides a template for planning a student’s day when schools were closed, was the most popular resource. The day planner “is a breakthrough. Feels like the pieces of the puzzle are slowly coming together,” a family, with children who were learning remotely, told the academy.  

The academy also launched a daily livestream show. Top episodes include a conversation with Bill Gates, the major philanthropist and founder of Microsoft, about the coronavirus; and a conversation with Dr. Anthony Fauci, the head of the U.S. effort against COVID-19, about vaccines and how to safely reopen schools.

With help from its teachers, the academy quickly produced webinars for teachers who were seekings ways to adapt to remote learning. The top webinars in 2020 were getting started with remote learning, 7 tips for effective remote learning, and motivating and engaging students who are remote.

The academy’s tools are used by over 100 million students worldwide and its YouTube channel has more than 6.5 million subscribers. In 2020, one of the most watched videos on the channel was the You Can Learn Anything video.

The academy’s resources are being translated into more than 36 languages in addition to the Spanish, French, and Brazilian Portuguese versions of its site.

The number of students using the academy’s tools is remarkable considering that it does no advertising. It has attracted students worldwide largely by word-of-mouth publicity. Many students, who use the tools, improve their test scores which boosts their confidence.  

In 2004, Salman Khan started tutoring his cousin Nadia with her high school math course work. Soon he was tutoring several cousins, and then, dozens of others. In 2009, he founded Khan Academy with the financial backing of Ann Doerr, who has a BS and MS from Rice University, Houston; she is the wife of Silicon Valley venture capitalist John Doerr.

Today the academy has more than 150 employees, including software developers, teachers, designers, scientists and content specialists. It can offer free education because of funding from several philanthropists. Donors, who have given over $10 million, include the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and John and Ann Doerr, as well as companies like Google and Bank of America.

The academy’s tools are a big help to students in India. Already nearly half a million subscribe to its YouTube India channel, which includes videos in English, Hindi and Gujerati. Yet no Indian American, including seven who are on the Forbes 400 list of wealthiest Americans, has donated more than $1 million to Salman Khan’s efforts. Will some of them fund the translation of the academy’s tools into Hindi and the other major Indian languages?

Bill Gates, philanthropist and co-founder of Microsoft; Laurene Powell Jobs, widow of Apple founder Steve Jobs; and Ratan Tata, former chairman of the Tata Group of companies in India are among Khan Academy’s advisors..

Prior to founding the academy, Salman Khan worked as an analyst at Connective Capital Management, a hedge fund based in Boston. He was born in Metairie, a suburb of New Orleans, Louisiana. He told a reporter for The Dawn that New Orleans is “the one part of the US that looks like India: big roaches, humid weather, corrupt government and spicy food.”

Khan’s mother Mahooda was born in Murshidabad, near Kolkatta, India, and his father Jamal Khan, a pediatrician, was from Barisal in Bangladesh. He was brought up by his mother, who worked several jobs to raise her son as a single parent, according to The New York Times.

Khan attended Grace King High School, a local government-run school in Metairie, where a few classmates were fresh out of jail and others were bound for top universities. While in high schoool, he sketched cartoons for the school's newspaper, wanting to be a cartoonist or an architect. He played guitar and sang - or “growled” - in a heavy metal band.

In high school, he gradually developed an interest in theoritical physics, Khan told Joint Venture, a blog run by a Silicon Valley community group. So he took advanced mathematics courses at the University of New Orleans. In 1994, he graduated at the head of his high school class.

While in college, at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Khan took seven or eight courses a semester, with plans to become a doctor or a lawyer. He earned two Bachelor’s degrees from MIT in math and computer science. He was elected class president in his senior year. Khan went on to earn a Master’s in electrical engineering and computer science, also from MIT. In 2011, at age 35, he was one of the youngest commencement speakers at MIT’s graduation ceremony, accordng to Wired.

Khan spent two years in California working for Oracle, the software firm. He then earned an MBA from the Harvard Business School. While at Harvard, he reconnected with Umaima Marvi, a Pakistani woman he knew from M.I.T. Marvi was completing her medical education at Harvard. The two married in 2004; one of their wedding receptions was held in Karachi. The couple live in Mountain View, California, with their two children Imran and Diya.

Recently, Salman Khan teamed up with Shishir Mehrotra, a college friend, to start Schoolhouse.world, another nonprofit. Mehrotra is the co-founder and chief executive of Coda, which provides the technical platform for Schoolhouse. Coda offers online tools for employees to work together remotely, including a single platform to create worksheets, documents, presentations and to-do lists. Mehrotra’s company was valued at about $640 million in a 2020 funding round, according to Forbes.

With the help of volunteer tutors and support from the online platform Zoom, Schoolhouse currently offers free tutoring in high school math via video worldwide. About 10,000 students in New Hampshire and two other American states are using the service. Khan told CNBC that, given the response from volunteers who are eager to help, “we can tutor thousands” of additional students.

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