Ali Hasan
Elon Musk stays in the news irrespective of what he does. Now he’s in the news for a fairly good reason which is due to a donation of $5 million to Khan Academy. He donated the amount through his non-profit arm Musk Foundation.
This is not the 1st time that musk is donating. He’s done donation before as well. Prior to Khan Academy, Musk Foundation donated $480,000 in grants for water filtration in Flint, Michigan, and $424,000 to supply laptop computers to Flint middle-schools.
Elon Musk, along with his brother Kimbal, founded the private charitable foundation in 2002 and provides philanthropy in several areas, including education, renewable energy research, human space exploration research, pediatric research, and the development of safe artificial intelligence to benefit humanity.
“I just want to give a huge shout and thank you to Elon Musk and everyone at the Musk foundation. For their credible generous support for Khan Academy, they just recently gave a $5 million donation to Khan academy,” Khan Academy founder Sal Khan said on Tuesday. He added that this donation will help the Khan Academy and its team to accelerate their content, software, and learning more engaging for over a million of students and teachers around the world.
Sal’s Khan Academy, which was founded in 2008, focuses on creating a set of online tools that help educate students, by creating short lessons in the form of videos. The Khan Academy’s website also provides supplementary practice exercises and materials for educators, which are free to users of the website and application.
Khan Academy has 120 million registered users and 20 to 30 million students are using the platform every month. “We have about 200 million hours of learning. I view this type of investment in what we’re doing is really foundational for us to be able to build a multi generational institution, so that future Elon Musks of the world are also able to tap into their potential,” Sal Khan added.
As millions of kids take online school classes from home globally including in India, government along with private education sector have a great responsibility to offer online e-Learning to more than 60 million college students and 1.5 billion school students worldwide.
In addition to English, the platform is also available in nearly 30 languages including Bangla, Bulgarian, Chinese, French, German, Georgian, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Spanish, Serbian, Turkish and Uzbek.
While the platform has been recognised by various organisations, Khan was listed among TIME’s 100 Most Influential People in 2012. Many criticise that Khan lacks a formal background in the field of teaching and some of its content has been called out for being erroneous. However, none of this has affected the platform as it continues to grow.
