The business of preparing students to take the SAT exam was a $310 million-a-year industry in 2005, according to the Washington Post. Today it has been ballooned “anywhere between $1 billion and $4 billion,” said Forbes. Fox Business asks, “Is SAT Tutoring Worth the Cost?” Private SAT tutoring can easily cost $125 a session in major cities like New York—often even more. One upscale Manhattan tutoring company offers private tutoring starting at $195 per 50 minutes.
Claudia Dreifus of the New York Times has had a casual discussion with Salman Khan of Khan Academy. Few of her questions were: Youtube is a search engine where producers can upload short videos at no cost. Would the Khan Academy have been possible without this technology? Last April, when administrators at San Jose State university wanted to use Harvard’s online version of Professor Michael Sandel’s “Justice” course as the basis of their undergraduate philosophy class, some San Jose State faculty members protested, saying the school was shortchanging students. Were the professors resisting progress?
Monthly 5.4 million online users hit Khan Academy and tens of thousands of schools use this educational video platform. But we live in a world where an estimated 65% of population lacks access to Internet. Even in the United States, not all schools have required bandwidth. It prompted Jamie Alexandre, a former intern at Khan Academy, to build a platform called KA Lite to run Khan Academy offline.
YouTube has hit a billion regular monthly visitors. Such milestone, also reached by Facebook last October, further solidifies Cisco’s projected dominance of video in the cyberspace. “If YouTube were a country, we’d be the third largest in the world after China and India,” the company said in a blogpost announcing it now has a billion unique visitors every month. “Nearly one out of every two people on the internet visits YouTube.” Launched in February 2005, a year after Facebook, YouTube operated from a small office above a fast-food restaurant in San Mateo, California.