AltSchool: Two Education Innovators

Salman Khan and Max Ventilla

AltSchool’s founder Max Ventilla isn’t alone in his quest to improve the education system. One of the most well-known thought leaders in personalized education is Salman Khan, whose nonprofit Khan Academy provides students with free online courses and tutorials. Ventilla was inspired to see how technology could support real-world learning when he first saw Khan at a TED Talk a few years ago. Education could be much more meritocratic if each student had a living portfolio and could show their learning over time, Ventilla remembers thinking.

Incorporated in 2008, Khan Academy has been hailed as an educational watershed. The system lets students learn at their own pace and has been translated into more than 36 languages to educate people of all ages and economic backgrounds around the world.

Khan, an MIT graduate and a former hedge-fund manager, wrote The One World Schoolhouse, which laid out his vision of what education should be. He would get rid of homework, grades, set time schedules and age-determined grade levels. Khan also said that having all students learn the same material on the same schedule didn’t make sense. Khan went on to open his own private school, the Khan Lab School, in 2014.

Salman Khan is the founder of Khan Academy, a widely known series of online personalized education programs.
Photo by Ronn Seidenglanz

Although Ventilla and Khan are both invested in personalized, high-quality education, their business approaches are fundamentally different. Khan Academy’s nonprofit approach relies on funding from donors and grants, allowing the company to provide free lessons to millions of online students relatively quickly. AltSchool’s data may also benefit enormous numbers of students in the long run, but its for-profit, research-heavy approach means the company must take slower, more calculated steps in order to see its loftiest goals come to fruition.

They’re different models, both intended to make effective education widely available, and Ventilla is quick to credit Khan for his inspiration and support.

“When I read his book more than a year after starting AltSchool, it was as if someone had written down all the things I was starting to believe,” Ventilla says.