10-year vision overview

A free, world-class education for anyone anywhere

The next century needs a step change for human potential in which ALL learners are able to achieve their potential. We believe that aggregate human capability could increase tenfold if the tools, incentives and mindsets are in place. That is what we are creating alongside students, teachers, parents and partners. By doing this around the world, we can elevate billions of learners for many years to come and accelerate the rate our society advances in everything from science to industry to art.

In ten years, a young girl in a slum of Mumbai who only has access to her family’s low-cost smartphone will be able to self-educate from Khan Academy. In ten years, a middle-class student in the suburbs of Atlanta can interact with Khan Academy daily to get help, do homework, develop passions and learn at their own pace. In either case, the work done and evidenced on Khan Academy profiles can be used to plug into real college and career opportunities.

More tangibly, in ten years, Khan Academy will enable every k-14 core subject to be either learned independently or in conjunction with a physical classroom. This should be true in at least 4 major regions like the US, India, Mexico and Brazil. That learning will be tied to a scaffold of recognized exams that allow students to prove competency. In addition, learners will be able to construct portfolios of their work on Khan Academy profiles and receive community feedback.

This bundle of competencies, portfolios and peer-assessment can then start to be used as an alternative credential to high school diplomas. It should be viewed by colleges and employers as being more robust and credible than traditional diplomas because of the rigor and richness of the information in the bundle. Because of this, these profiles can be used to directly connect students to college and workforce opportunities. This will even motivate participation from students on more traditional pathways.

This competency model should empower more and more students to truly master mathematics, science and humanities before they attend college and receive credit for that knowledge. For those looking to attend college, it could shave 1-2 years of time and investment necessary for a degree, dramatically increasing higher education completion rates and capacity while lowering cost and enabling students to earn income sooner.

By providing these alternative credentials, we will liberate more classrooms and students to focus on true competency, creation and mindset rather than seat-time and traditional grades, which reinforce a fixed-mindset. Like Khan Lab School, more schools can be a place to build relationships, foster creativity, and prepare for the broader world rather than a place to sit passively and be judged. Over time, the depth of our offering should only increase so that Khan Academy optimally empowers any learner or educator to implement their own version of a KLS-like narrative that is tied to real life empowerment.

To be relevant, it is important that we see traction with students and teachers as we build out the offering. With this in mind, we should see 100x the usage/traction in 10 years than we see today.

Khan Academy has been set up from day one as a non-profit so that we have the focus and staying power for long-term systemic transformation for the world. The very fact that we have already made a large impact and have a real chance of doing what is described in this document is a historical anomaly. To not have a go at it, given the opportunity, would be a loss for humanity. Billions of people are waiting for us. Onward!