Tata Trusts strategic five-year partnership with Khan Academy

Mumbai: Tata Trusts, promoted by the $108-billion Tata Group, have entered into a strategic five-year partnership with Khan Academy as the lead founding partner to leverage technology to provide free, world-class education for anyone, anywhere in India, says a report in Mint newspaper.

Promoted by Salman Khan, a former hedge fund analyst in the US, the academy seeks to disrupt the traditional model of tutoring in India. The collaboration will adapt and build upon Khan Academy’s existing resources and tools to serve the specific needs of the Indian learner.

The partnership will also work with other partners to build a supportive educational ecosystem to employ these resources to empower students and teachers, in particular the underserved who may otherwise lack access to quality education options.

Interacting with reporters on Sunday, Ratan Tata, chairman, Tata Trusts said Tata Group has been contributing to conventional education for 150 years but chose to associate with Khan Academy as it is providing free education accessible to anyone and anywhere in India.

The format of the Khan Academy-Tata Trusts programme is divided into two, with stage one (2016-18) of incubation and stage two (2018-21) of scaling. Under incubation, for the first two years, the programme will focus on devising the product and content to serve urban middle as well as low income students aged 8 to 24 in select Tier 1 and Tier 2 cities. This incubation stage will focus on Hindi and English.

Stage two will focus on scaling up use of resources for urban students, including translation of product and content offering into three vernacular languages to be determined at a later stage—although tentative options could include Marathi, Tamil and Bengali.

The second stage would also include designing and piloting interventions for rural students in select geographies as infrastructure issues are resolved.

Tata said he met Khan through a mutual friend in the US with the idea of the alliance for India.

Khan said, “As soon as we started talking, the dots started connecting quickly. We will focus on creating content in the first phase and we are building a team in India led by Sandeep Bapna. We need to catalyse the new types of learning model.”

Tata did not divulge details of the investment adding the funding will help Khan Academy to meet its requirement to create content. “At the Trusts, we are positive that this collaboration will empower a generation of Indian learners through web-based personalized resources,” said Tata.

Tata Trusts have an annual investment of over Rs.550 crore in philanthropic work of which 80% is allocated to programmatic partnership for specific initiatives reaching out to over 4 million households.

Khan Academy is trying to address these issues through various public and private partnerships to empower and equip students, families and teachers.

He had said Khan Academy, whose free video tutorials were used by many, including Microsoft Corp. founder Bill Gates, aspires to play the role that libraries did for previous generations but in the virtual world.