Khan Academy Review - Is it the right choice for you?

For many people worldwide, good education is out of reach. Especially in countries with a lower standard of living and harsh conditions, getting proper education is unattainable for many, even though getting educated is often the best way out of poverty.

KhanAcademy is a non-profit with the mission to solve this problem by creating free, high-quality educational content for all types of learners worldwide.

Let's see who their platform is best for in this full review!

What is KhanAcademy?

KhanAcademy is a free online learning platform focused on providing high-quality educational materials on all types of academic topics like math, computer science, physics, biology, economic studies & many more!

The platform was founded by Salman Khan in 2008 and has since become one of the most popular free online learning platforms worldwide. Today, more than 50 million people visit the site every month. It's completely donor-financed, meaning you can watch any content on the platform completely for free and without any restrictions.

Courses

Core to KhanAcademy is their library of free courses. As mentioned before, they focus mostly on academic education for levels ranging from elementary school to college levels. Many of the KhanAcademy videos are also made available on YouTube, where KhanAcademy has more than 7 million monthly subscribers.

The most popular language for courses is English, while many courses have also been translated to other languages like Spanish, German, French, Portuguese, etc.

KhanAcademy mobile app

KhanAcademy also has both an iOS and an Android app, so that you can learn on your phone, while you're travelling, etc.

Pro & Cons

Who is KhanAcademy for?

KhanAcademy has courses for types of learners, whether they are 1st grade or 3rd year of university. The content is focused on academic disciplines, like Science, Computing, Arts & Humanities, Economics, Language Arts and more.

Almost anyone learning general academic disciplines can find some value in KhanAcademy courses.

KhanAcademy pricing

All content on KhanAcademy is completely free for anyone. The site relies on donations from individuals and organizations to keep creating new content and to finance their operation.

Learning & Customer support

Since KhanAcademy is a non-profit organization, their resources are even more limited than those of commercial learning platforms, so don't expect to receive a lot of learning support. They do have a self-service knowledge base though, which is helpful for questions about your account.

KhanAcademy also offers guides for parents and teachers that are meant to help these user groups understand how the platform works.

Overall, courses are not as interactive as they are on other platforms and the support from the instructor could be missing for someone struggling with the course.

If learning support is important to you, check out alternatives like Udemy, or Codecademy. They don't have guaranteed support, but most of the more popular courses do give you some type of feedback.

Certification

When you take a course on KhanAcademy, you don't automatically get a certificate for it. The teachers on KhanAcademy can decide for themselves, whether they want to give away certificates to their students or not.

If the course you're taking has certificates, this is what they look like:

These certificates are not accredited and will not be recognized by institutions like governments, universities or companies.

Create a KhanAcademy account

To create a KhanAcademy account, click the "Sign Up" button in the top right corner of the KhanAcademy homepage.

From there, KhanAcademy will ask you for some information to personalize your learning experience. You can then sign up using your preferred signup method.

Popular courses on KhanAcademy

US history

Learn about the history of the US in this extensive course collection.

Check out the course

Macroeconomics

Learn all about Macroeconomics in this extensive collection of courses.

Check out the course

Intro to JavaScript

Learn about JavaScript with this full course.

Check out the course

KhanAcademy instructors

Lots of instructors on KhanAcademy are (school) teachers. They usually have an academic background in the field that they're teaching and are able to share their knowledge in an easy-to-understand way. If you regularly watch YouTube videos, you might have encountered a few of them already.

They are biologists, physicists, writers, historians, among others.

Summary: Is KhanAcademy worth it?

Especially in countries where the access to schools or knowledge in general is more complicated, KhanAcademy is an excellent solution. Khanacademy also distributed its content to multiple areas without internet access as offline versions. You'll love KhanAcademy for its:

• Free content library

• High quality courses

• Variety of available languages

• Mobile app

That being said, if you want to get learning support when taking a course, you might want to take a look at some of the KhanAcademy alternatives below.