I came to know of Salman Khan through a report in Times of India. He is a hedge fund manager of Indian origin in California, USA. His 700 videos on You Tube have become quite a hit with students abroad and in India.

I visited the site of this math tutor, and then to the site of his Khan Academy. It is a great work done for the student community. American students and their parents, rather the whole lot of student community over the world that can understand English should be happy to know and use his endeavour to teach different topics of the subject. One can check it by going to the site.

It’s often embarrassing for a student to ask a teacher too many questions, especially when it is about something basic that he or she is expected to know. On Internet, the student can choose his own time that he finds best to learn better. He can also pause a video or watch it as many times as they like.

Salman Khan has established a not-for-profit Khan Academy. Educated at Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Khan developed his tutoring hobby when a younger cousin was having trouble with sixth-grade math. As word of his knack for teaching spread among relatives and family friends, Khan got tired of explaining the same things over and over, so he created videos and posted them on YouTube. He formed the Khan Academy.

Khan’s video clips have developed a following far beyond that immediate circle of relatives and friends. Internet has made him a global guru for maths. He gets e-mails from around the world – including requests for videos on specific topics and help solving particular problems. He now claims about 600 videos on subjects spanning math, physics and even the tanking economy.

A YouTube tutorial on calculus integrals has been watched almost 50,000 times in the past year. Others on angular velocity and harmonic motion have gotten more than 10,000 views each. Khan keeps churning out the clips for which he works on for about three hours a night. According to University of Miami education professor Walter Secada, who specializes in how math is taught, ‘The Khan videos he reviewed are accurate.’

I am sure the media of You Tube and Internet will make the learning easy for billions of children all over the world. I wish Indian teachers use this medium to spread the knowledge. Let many more Salman Khans come forward to spread the knowledge about the various subjects. Should we still worry of the shortage of teachers?