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Khan Academy

Khan Academy- An organization to provide worldwide free education

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Online education is reaching out to more students in need with every passing day. Millions of students around the world have benefited from the concept of e-learning. The best part about online education is you can learn around the clock and play the role of both student and a teacher. There are so many short-term courses that are launched due to the ease of e-learning on the e-learning platforms like Khan Academy. So, even if you are an educator, here you can play the part of the student as well.

Sal Khan
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A non-profitable organization – Khan Academy

Most of the organizations maintain two plans, one for everyone and the other package for the paid users. It can either be a type of subscription process or a fixed amount that varies from course to course. But, none of the online e-learning platforms gives every course package for free because they are the most profitable organizations.

But, Khan Academy is doing an exceptionally good job with an aim for educating the mass. Khan Academy is a non-profit American educational organization created by Sal Khan. He created the organization in 2008 with a passion to create world-class education for everyone. One can visit the website of Khan Academy and start watching videos for any course they like from school to graduation level.

About the Founder

Salman Khan, famous as Sal Khan, is the founder of the Khan Academy. Born on 11th October 1976, Salman belongs to a Bengali family. Born and brought up in the United States, Salman went to Grace King High School followed by The University of New Orleans.

For higher studies, he went to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and earned a bachelor’s degree in Electrical Engineering and Mathematics as well. Salman completed his master’s in Computer Science and went to Harvard Business School and acquired an MBA. After completing his studies, Salman joined Connective Capital Management as a hedge fund analyst.

How Khan Academy was founded?

A lot of successful businesses emerged as a solution to a critical situation. Similarly, Salman didn’t have any plan to create a free educational organization at an international level when he worked as an analyst.

It was back in 2003 when Salman started tutoring his cousin as she was facing trouble with Mathematics. Salman used Yahoo’s Doodle notepad to teach her and eventually, more family members joined it. The demand started rising as he was doing it for free until one of his friends suggested to record the tutorials and upload them on YouTube. By doing this anyone can have free access to the tutorials at any time from anywhere in the world. So, in 2009, Salman quit his analyst job and devoted towards creating his YouTube channel, Khan Academy. While doing so Salman received funding from Ann Doerr, wife of the famous American investor, John Doerr.

When Salman started Khan Academy, he added courses from multiple aspects of higher education such as arts, computer science, etc. But, the main focus of the website was to create high secondary mathematics videos coupled with online exercise to test yourself. The videos ranged from very basic mathematical operations to complex algebraic problems.

Expansion of the organization

After Salman started at a full pace, everyone kept asking about the business model. But, Salman says there is no business model. He started it as a hobby and now he has the passion to deliver education to anyone and everyone around the world for free. Yes, you heard me right, “for FREE”. Khan Academy, even after a decade of its establishment remains a non-profit organization trying to educate the mass.

Khan Academy became more famous when Bill Gates at the Aspen Ideas Festival mentioned that he was using the videos of Khan Academy to teach his child. After a few days, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation contacted him and provided massive support.

Within 2013, Khan Academy’s website witnessed around 6 million monthly active users and more than 10 million views. The website had more than 4,000 online tutorials that were useful for both the students and the teachers and the parents as well. Khan’s videos were limited to a 10-minute span which kept it crisp and not monotonous at the same time.

Funding

Since Khan Academy is a non-profit organization, the company runs from the funding received from donations, especially philanthropic organizations. Google donated $2 million in 2010, AT&T donated $2.25 million in 2015, and Carlos Slim donated to the institution for making Spanish version of the videos.

Critics

Despite doing a commendable job and service for the society that is in sheer need of education, many people pointed out that the videos lack the skill of professionalism. Some experts pointed out technical errors as well. But, the valuable content that Khan Academy is providing is huge compared to some of the glitch or inaccuracy

Udemy

The E-Learning Platform Of Udemy Serves Dual Purpose At Its Best

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By this time, we have already concluded that e-learning has become very demanding and important. Not only in India but also across the entire world students are benefited from these platforms. Many people have the idea that these platforms are only good for those preparing for competitive exams like JEE or NEET. But, this is just the wrong concept. Many websites have come up these days that provide online coaching for basics like Excel, PowerPoint, Java, etc. You can learn anything and everything with the help of these platforms. Udemy is one such online platform that allows us to learn, teach, and explore. The founders of Udemy are Eren Bali, Gagan Biyani, and Oktay Caglar. They founded the platform in 2010 intending to strengthen the educational culture around the globe.

About the Founders

Eren acquired a bachelor’s degree in two subjects from Middle East Technical University. He acquired a bachelor’s degree in Computer Engineering and a BS in Mathematics. After he graduated, he worked as a Front-end Developer at Gunlukbasin.com. In August 2005, he co-founded Eofer and became the CEO of the company.

Eren also worked at Lead Flex Developer at Dovetail.tv and as a Developer at BitGravity. In 2007, he co-founded Knowband and joined speedate.com as Director of Engineering. Currently, he serves as the Chairman of Udemy and CEO (also co-founder) of Carbon Health.

Gagan went to Mission San Jose High School and graduated in 2005. Later he went to the University of California for acquiring his bachelor’s degree in Economics. Apart from co-founding Udemy, he is also the co-founder of the Growth Hackers Conference. He has prior experience working at Microsoft, Accenture, and TechCrunch. He served as the CEO of Sprig for four years and as the President of Udemy for two years.

Oktay also graduated from the Middle East Technical University with a bachelor’s degree in Business Administration. He is a very close friend to Eren since then. Currently, he serves as the CPO of Udemy.

The founding story

Gagan, co-founder of Udemy said that 9 to 5 job bored him very much. He worked at Accenture as a Strategy Consultant but he wasn’t satisfied with his job. He wanted to do something more challenging and was fascinated by the start-up culture. This is when he decided to co-found Udemy along with Erena and Oktay.

When they founded the company the other two co-founders apart from Gagan continued working in other companies as well. But, the three of them put their hundred percent in making this project successful.

The Business model

The most unique and best feature of Udemy is anyone and everyone can create a course. A student can be an instructor and vice versa. If you want to learn something new and already good in a different subject, you create a course and at the same time sign up for a new course. This feature attracted thousands of instructors within a few months. And, by the end of 2010, Udemy witnessed 10,000 registered users.

Growth, Success, and Investors

Though Udemy was publicly released in 2010, Eren started working in it from 2007. He built software for a virtual online classroom and later decided to make it free for everyone. To give his idea a perfect start, he fled to Silicon Valley and finally launched the website on 11th May 2010. Before launching Udemy, they approached many investors for funding. But, unfortunately, every single one turned them down. So, they provided the funding from their pocket and finally released it.

Once the platform went public, the response was unexpectedly high. So, they decided to conduct another funding round and they raised $1 million in August 2010. Next year, the company raised $3 million in Series A funding round lead by Groupon investors. In the Series B funding, Udemy raised $12 million and $32 million in Series C funding.

Some of the investors include Norwest Venture Partners, Insight Venture Partners, Learn Capital, etc. The Series D funding took place in June 2015 and Udemy raised $65 million from it. This was followed by another round of funding in 2016 where it raised $60 million from Naspers Ventures.

Udemy currently has more than 50 million students and 57,000 instructors. There is a variety of courses that are available in 65 languages. Udemy gives a chance to learn and educate others at the same time.

coursera

Coursera Is Taking Massive Open Online Courses To New Heights

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Have you ever realized that after the advent of online education, millions of students have been benefited? Extra knowledge has become a pre-requisite for landing either a lucrative job or making it into one of the finest institutions around the globe. But, everyone can’t pay for extra courses when basic education seems far-fetched. Especially in a developing country like India, e-learning is the need of the hour. Because most of the population belongs to middle-class society and they need the privilege to acquire proper education. Learning the crucial need to educate the world, especially the young minds in an affordable way, MOOCs are needed. In 2012, two professors from Stanford University, Daphne Koller and Andrew Ng founded Coursera. Coursera has become one of the largest and successful websites for MOOCs. And, this platform mainly focusses on making people learn about the emerging demanding topics like AI and ML.

About the Founders of Coursera

Daphne Koller’s research area is mainly based on the application of artificial intelligence in biomedical sciences. She is an Israeli-American professor in the department of computer science. In 1985, she graduated from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem at the age of seventeen and received her master’s degree at the age of eighteen. Daphne went to Stanford to acquire her Ph.D.

She received the ACM-Infosys Foundation Award in 2008 which came with a cash prize of $150,000. In 2012, she along with another Standard professor, Andrew Ng, co-founded Coursera. She served as the co-CEO of the company and later as the President. Daphne left the company in 2016 and joined Calico as the Chief Computing Officer. Later, she left Calico to start her company, Insitro, a drug discovery start-up. Daphne is also the recipient of the MacArthur Fellowship.

Image Source: Google

Apart from being one of the most famous and successful computer scientists, Andrew is also an investor, writer, and businessman. His parents were immigrants from Hong Kong and thus he grew up in London. He went to Carnegie Mellon University and acquired his bachelor’s in three subjects in 1997. He majored in computer science, economics, and statistics. Later, he went to the Massachusetts Institute of technology and acquired his master’s degree in 1998.

Andrew joined Stanford University in 2002 and co-founded Coursera in 2012. He is also the co-founder of Google Brain and the former Vice President and Chief Scientist at Baidu. He was listed in Time magazine’s 100 Most Influential People in 2012. Andrew has also founded AI Fund that financially backs the AI-based start-ups.

The Beginning

Both Andrew and Daphne were inspired by the online courses of Stanford in the fall of 2011. They were driven by the idea of how an online learning platform is advantageous to millions of students out there who cannot afford to take coaching classes. Moreover, through this platform people can learn from the best professors in the world.

When they founded the website, Stanford, Princeton, the University of Michigan and the University of Pennsylvania joined their hands to contribute. It included many specialization courses as well. The content of Coursera eventually became very elaborate.

Growth, Funding, and Investors

The first funding that Coursera raised was an amount of $16 million. It was led by Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Buyers and New Enterprise Associates. The series B funding took place in 2013 where Coursera raised $63 million from World Bank Group. The amount of funding raised shows how fast it was gaining popularity. In the next round of funding, the start-up raised around $60 million from EDB Investment. After a few more rounds of funding, Coursera’s valuation crossed $1 billion at the end of 2019.

To date, Coursera has established a relationship with 200 partners across twenty-nine countries. Apart from college and other educational institutions, Coursera has also come into partnership with many government agencies.

Strategies and Business Model

Within one year of its product going public, Coursera made an annual revenue of $1 million. Students from all over the world signed up for the courses especially because of the valid certificate provided after the completion. After a couple of years, Coursera decided to provide financial aid to the students who cannot pay the course fee.

After this, more students started enrolling and learning new skills. The students were highly benefited as the certificates were only given after passing the assignments with 80% gradation. This is one of the best features of Coursera that they are genuinely interested in educating people and not just making money.

Currently, Coursera has 47 million users around the world. The company has 450 employees and the headquarters is situated in California.

logo vneda

Vneda : One-stop Solution for All Organizational Learning Needs

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The market is evolving at a fast pace, and along with that, the need for skilled and well-educated employees is also increasing as everyone realizes the value of knowledge. Organizations are losing millions because they are unable to take care of their knowledge. According to a study published by the International Data Corporation (IDC), It’s estimated that poor knowledge-sharing practices cost the Fortune 500 companies a $31.5 billion annually. And therefore, organizations are looking for better options to enhance employees’ skills and knowledge, which eventually, helps them to increase their productivity. This Edu-tech startup named Vneda is one of resource providing company, which is on the mission to solve these problems by their services.

What is Vneda

Vneda is an Edu-tech startup that started on 8th March 2018. It provides a unified learning solution for skill development, knowledge management and knowledge sharing among organizations and their employees. It provides a hybrid approach for the corporate, NGOs and government organizations for the better utilization and administration of knowledge resources. Vneda allows users to manage their knowledge and enhance it through knowledge sharing with the use of smart tools.

Users can create and consume digital content such as podcasts, videos, articles, e-books, courses on the platform. They use Proprietary Algorithms for the curation and indexing of the content. Vneda helps users to manage and store their important data on a cloud-based server, and apart from this, it also provides doorstep delivery of physical books from approx 1.5 lac+ book library.

founders Vneda

Vneda works on employee recognition as well by rewarding the users for consuming and sharing knowledge, to cultivate a habit of knowledge-sharing in them.

Co-founders

Vneda is an idea of two colleagues, Aman Sharma, and Ritesh Kumar. Aman Sharma is a Computer Science graduate who had an interest in developing something new and innovative. He developed many B2B and B2C products in the last seven years. Ritesh Kumar is an IT graduate and is a technology expert (Full Stack Developer), who likes to work on both the front end as well as the back-end of the product’s website and application.

Founding Vneda

When Aman Sharma ventured into the corporate learning market, he researched and found this market, especially in India, was relatively new and yet to be explored. There was not much focus on knowledge management and knowledge sharing. And because of this lack of focus, they were losing big monies and resources. On the contrary, this market got its due importance and was flourishing in the developed nations. From this fact, he drew his assumption that the knowledge sharing and knowledge management market would find its due recognition in India as well.

What is unique about Vneda

There is no single platform that caters to all the learning needs of an organization. They have to manage and opt for different platforms for digital learning and development, knowledge sharing, knowledge management, corporate library, knowledge repositories, etc. Having multiple platforms leads to increased costs for the organization, it becomes problematic for employees to manage and use so many platforms. On the contrary, Venda is a single corporate learning solution that caters to a wide range of learning needs such as corporate learning and development, knowledge sharing, knowledge management and much more.

It also helps in uniting external knowledge to internal knowledge. Vneda is providing a platform where publishers can publish their content that can be consumed by the users.

Accomplishments

It’s never been an easy task for entrepreneurs from convincing investors to invest in their ideas to users for adopting their services. Vneda was started with the seed investment of its co-founders, and since then, they are bootstrapping. Yet the hard work pays, as the company is catering to 25,000+ users across 13 corporate, like Axis Bank, Honda 2 Wheelers, Volkswagen, Orient Electric are to name a few.

How it works

Vneda works on two pricing models; one is free where a user does not pay a single penny for using the knowledge sharing and management platform. And then the other where the organization is charged a subscription fee. Under this, the organization gets a subscription to the created and curated content, which includes third party premium content and physical book delivery.

The vision

Vneda was created with a vision to construct an ecosystem of shared knowledge. The team is working to achieve a larger goal to create the knowledge management & sharing culture in all communities. But at present, they are focusing on their ideal target audience and eyeing to close 100 corporate by the end of this year and become profitable. Vneda is now a team of 10 hard working fellows putting efforts to create a strong tech product that can be integrated with any other existing system to make the knowledge access experience easy and interesting.