For years, write-ups on Salman ‘Sal’ Khan in the press in India featured a mandatory reference to his movie-star namesake (as does this; we get the irony). Contemporary education’s greatest disruptor is part Indian, on his mother’s side, but India longed for a meatier claim on the man whose revolutionary video-based learning platform has transformed the learning experience for kids from the U.S. to Mongolia. In early December, that wish was fulfilled as Khan Academy rolled into India in alliance with, who else, the Tatas. Edited excerpts from a telephonic interview on how cracking India will be far more complex than anything the organisation has done so far:

How did the tie-up with the Tata Trust come about?
Last year we said India is a place we really wanted to focus on. We started talking to a lot of people. Obviously there is a large diaspora out here in Silicon Valley. We met a gentleman who is an associate of Mr [Ratan] Tata who let the Tata Trust know that Khan Academy is serious about India and is looking for a partner that can help establish it here. Everyone said that if we can work with anyone, it’s got to be the Tata Trust. It is a holistic partnership. The trust is providing multimillion-dollar support and will also advise us and connect us with other potential partners.

Take us through your vision for India.
We are in the process of setting up a not-for-profit called Khan Academy India. India is the first country where we are doing something like this outside of the U.S.: It’s going to use the Khan Academy platform but will otherwise be an Indian organisation.

We will create content in all the major languages, starting with Hindi and English, aligned to Indian curricular standards, such as the National Council of Educational Research and Training (NCERT) syllabus. We will first cover mathematics. The content will be available across devices. Smartphones are becoming cheaper and cheaper. I met with some folks in the telecom industry, and I know now that the Indian market is going to advance faster than I thought. You can imagine a world in five years where a student in any part of India who speaks any of the 10 major Indian languages can take out a phone and find help on any subject. It is like a free tutor for anyone. There won’t be a live person on the other side but there will be explanations, resources, practice, and feedback on any academic topic that is relevant to them.

You can also imagine the parallel effort where you take these resources and work with partners to put them on the ground. In India there are schools that are underresourced. You may not have faculty ready for certain types of subject matter. Can our platform be integrated with a school’s pedagogy? A bit further out, are there even new types of schools we could create?

How is the India use case different?
In the U.S., a lot of students say, “I want to understand what is happening in class,” or “I need to prepare for a test tomorrow,” or “I need to do this homework.” The use case in India is an even bigger social need. Here the tuition industry is such a big deal because so many students don’t feel they are getting fully prepared through just the normal school day. We can help them and their families. But we also want to partner schools where we can help improve the quality of teaching.

What are the early learnings from the country?
We haven’t yet started doing deep pilots in India, but there are many organisations that have used Khan Academy in schools they set up. They seem to be having good outcomes. When I was in India for the launch, almost every student I met could access Khan Academy on fast Internet connections—but that was selection bias. India is complex, and we don’t want to pretend that we will snap our fingers and figure out everything.

One of the big problems in India is that students in, say, Class 5 are only proficient in Class 2 or Class 3 subjects.
With NCERT we are going to start in the second grade and go all the way through to early college-level mathematics. Our goal is to reach all the grades and all the major academic subjects. Addressing the lag that you point out is core to our philosophy. The value of on-demand videos or our guided experiences is precisely that. The real problem of kids struggling with algebra very often has nothing to do with algebra. They struggle because the equations involve decimals and they were weak in decimals, or the equations involve exponents and they were a little dark on exponents. Going to the root of the problem is exactly what Khan Academy targets.

How do you look at the large number of ed-tech firms operating in India?
There are innumerable ed-tech companies the world over. Our somewhat unique position as a not-for-profit is that we focus on impact. Our meetings are all about how we can improve the lives of as many students as possible. If there are partners in telecom or ed-tech or other partners who want to work with us to further that mission, we are always open to it. The more people that are in this space—for profit or not for profit—the better.

This is a question a few of my startup friends wanted me to ask you. What was the journey like between quitting your job in 2009 and getting funding from Google in 2010?
It was stressful. One of the most stressful times of my life. I was living off savings. We had just had our first child. I was doing a very non-mainstream thing, and when I met people at dinner parties, they kind of looked at me strange, like, “What have you done, have you gone crazy?” The transition from a job is very hard for every entrepreneur. You have to be very centred. For Khan Academy, what gave us traction was that people were clearly getting value from the platform. Among those who noticed us were folks in Google, and Bill Gates, and Ann and John Doerr. They talked to me and realised that I was kind of running on vapours (laughs). That’s never an easy thing.

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