Khan Academy India Talent Search 2017

Hi, I'm Sal Khan, founder of the Khan Academy, and I just want to let you know about our India talent search. As you might know, Khan Academy, we're a not-for-profit with a mission of providing a free, world-class education for anyone, anywhere.

To us, that means that if you are a villager someplace and you don't have access to a formal school, then you might be able to access a low-cost smartphone and then be able to self-educate yourself. One day, you can prove what you know so you could get a job or go into higher education. But ideally, you're using Khan Academy in conjunction with the classroom, where the classroom can allow students to learn and work at their own pace.

It can give data to teachers, free up class time for more open-ended projects, or peer-to-peer learning or Socratic dialogue. So, we have a call out for the talent, the teaching talent in India, to work with us by being part of this talent search.

One, you'll get a chance to practice making videos yourself, and we're looking for folks in math and science initially, but eventually all subjects. It's really a way for us to find talent—talent that can help us create content that will educate tens of millions of learners throughout India. So, the opportunity here is, I think, pretty exciting. There will be prizes, but maybe the biggest prize of all is the opportunity to contribute and to help your fellow citizens.

And now, I'm going to hand it off to Anand, who is our head of content in India.

I'm really, really excited to invite you to Khan Academy India's second talent search. We've been looking for teachers to help us reach our mission of creating content that's relevant to the Indian learners. Now, one big piece of this is to map our content to the Indian syllabus, which means the content that you create will be used directly by teachers and students—millions of them—to help their school experience directly.

Now, another big piece of what we want to do for India is to make Khan Academy's content available in all major Indian languages. We already have Khan Academy available in a few Indian languages, but we really want to take it to the next step over here.

Now, to achieve both of these, in my opinion, the most important thing is to find the right content creators—not just creators who are passionate about their subjects but also creators who are really passionate about making education available to millions of learners. That’s the primary purpose of this talent search. We'll be looking for science and math teachers and content creators in five languages: English and Hindi, but also Kannada, Tamil, and Marathi.

We’re looking to give out ten winners or give out prizes for ten winners—one winner and one runner-up in each of these five languages. So, if you are a creator or if you know a creator, make sure you spread the word and help as many people know about this talent search and help us find the right content creators to get closer to our mission.

The last date for sending your entries is December 17th, and now I'm happy to introduce two of last year's winners who now work with us—Mahesh and Ram—to say a little bit about their experience with Khan Academy.

Hi, my name is Mahesh Shanay. I was the winner of last year's India talent search and now the newest and proud member of the Khan Academy team India. Over the past two and a half years, I've been making YouTube physics videos, and so I've learned a great deal about video creation. However, two days with this team and I realize I have so much more to learn. We are a small team of passionate people but with a huge mission—a mission to educate tens of millions of young lives of India. If you feel you too have the same passion, here's an opportunity to join us.

Hi, I'm Ram, one of last year's talent search winners. I love physics, and I've been teaching it for a long time. What I'm excited about is that now I can help millions of kids in the country love physics the way I do. Since the entire content is free, that means even the kids who do not have a short quality education can now educate themselves using my videos.

So, if you want to help us in achieving our mission, please do send us your videos, and trust me, the video creation process is a lot simpler and more fun than it seems like. Now, when we evaluate your videos, we will look a lot more at your content depth and explanation rather than fancy visuals or production value. So, make sure that—or rather, don't hesitate to just point your camera at a piece of paper or a board as you explain your idea.

Now remember that the last date is December 17th, and make sure you spread the word!