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WHY ARE BILL AND MELINDA GATES SALMAN KHAN'S GREATEST FANS? (Because they know his online tutorials make world-class math education free to anyone anywhere.) At the time a hedge fund analyst, Salman Khan began posting math tutorials on YouTube in 2004 to assist a cousin who lived in another city. Seven years later, he has posted more than 2.000 tutorials, which are viewed nearly 100,000 times around the world each day. Khan is the founder and faculty of the Khan Academy (www.khanacademy.org) -- a not-for-profit organization with the mission of providing free world-class education to anyone, anywhere. It now consists of self-paced software and, with over a million unique students per month, the most-used educational video repository on the internet (over 30 million lessons delivered to-date). All 2000-plus video tutorials, covering everything from basic addition to advanced calculus, physics, chemistry and biology, have been made by Salman. Prior to the Khan Academy, Salman was a senior analyst at a hedge fund and before that had worked in technology and venture capital. He holds an MBA from Harvard Business School (www.hbs.edu), an M.Eng and B.S. in electrical engineering and computer science from MIT (web.mit.edu), and a B.S. in mathematics from MIT. Bill Gates in the above video describes what Salman Khan is doing as "the start of a revolution". Consequently The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (www.gatesfoundation.org) is now helping to fund Khan Academy's expansion to embrace other subjects than math, and to develop data-rich analytical software that will be a boon to teachers. In the video below, Salman outlines his current work and his vision for the future with a mindblowing TED speech that earned him a long and loud standing ovation from the appreciative audience in California. ********* ********* ********* WHY ARE BILL AND MELINDA GATES ALSO DAVID CHRISTIAN'S GREATEST FANS? (Because they know that bringing his "Big History" into high schools would be a truly breakthrough online experience for students.) David Christian teaches an ambitious world history course that tells the tale of the entire universe -- from the Big Bang 13.7 billion years ago to present day. Christian has a D. Phil from Oxford University (www.ox.ac.uk), is by training a historian of Russia and the Soviet Union, and he has written on the social and material history of 19th-century Russian peasantry, in particular on aspects of diet and the role of alcohol. In the 1980s he became interested in the bigger picture of world history, and in 1989 he began teaching courses on "Big History", surveying the past on the largest possible scales, including those of biology and astronomy. Christian says that among other things, looking at the big picture of history shows how the asteroid that wiped out dinosaurs was great news for our own ancestors, how language has enabled collective accumulated learning to produce the creative and powerful species we are today, and how the internet has now made possible a single global brain of 7 billion interconnected individuals. Christian is a member of the Australian Academy of the Humanities (www.humanities.org.au), and over the next few years he will also be working with the support of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (www.gatesfoundation.org) to create an open online course in "Big History" for high school students around the world. Bill Gates founded Microsoft in 1975 and worked at the company until he retired from day-to-day responsibilities in June 2008. His interest in education led him to Christian's "Big History" lectures on Teach 12. After enthusiastically taking the course, he and Melinda initiated the Big History Project (www.bighistoryproject.com) with the goal of creating a new online course targeting 9th graders that could both reinvigorate interest in science and math and offer a truly breakthrough online experience for students, teachers and administrators. Its high school course contains 20 teaching units that bring together the insights, methods and skills of academic disciplines that are normally taught in isolation from each other. Disciplines include History - which typically focuses on people and the events that define them, Cosmology - which studies the origin and structure of the universe, Physics - which examines the interrelationships between matter, energy, forces and motion, Biology - which explores where life came from and how it operates, Geology - which examines our dynamic planet's past, present and future, Astronomy - which studies the night sky and the celestial bodies that populate it, and Sociology - which studies human social activity. In the above video, David Christan mesmerizes his TED audience with the inspirational approach and the awesomely vast scope of his timeline-related coverage. ********* ********* ********* "WE ARE EDUCATING PEOPLE OUT OF THEIR CREATIVITY!" "We need a radical rethink of today's school systems to cultivate creativity and acknowledge multiple types of intelligence." Watch this thought-provoking animated talk by Sir Ken Robinson from RSA Animate (www.thersa.org), which has achieved more than 5 million downloads from YouTube and is influencing teachers, schools, and education authorities all over the world. He argues that students with restless minds and bodies should be cultivated for their energy and curiosity instead of being ignored or even stigmatized as they are at the moment. "We are educating people out of their creativity," Robinson says. He challenges the rigidly narrow way that we educate our children at the present time, and he urges a radical rethink of our school systems to cultivate creativity and acknowledge the multiple types of intelligence that are now known to exist but for centuries have been suppressed. ********* ********* ********* GO TO EDUCATION REVOLUTION PAGE 2