Khan's Academy

The Khan Academy is a non-profit educational organization, created in 2006 by Bangladeshi American educator Salman Khan. With the stated mission of "providing a high quality education to anyone, anywhere", the website supplies a free online collection of more than 3,200 micro lectures via video tutorials stored on YouTube. It teaches mathematics, physics, chemistry, biology, cosmology, microeconomics, etc

It had all started when Khan started to tutor his cousin through Yahoo's Doodle notepad. After repeated requests from his cousins and other persons who happened to see the videos, Khan decided to post the videos on Youtube. The videos were an instant hit and attracted a lot of viewers.

The basic idea behind the success of Khan's video method is its easiness and flexibility. You can watch the lesson anytime you wish. The videos are also of high quality with humour that doesn't make you feel bored.

These are all apparent reasons. Whats behind the hood? Silently, Khans is revolutionising the education system. A school has created a model where in students are given lectures to be watched as homeworks and actual homeworks are done in the school. This way teachers can interact more with students encouraging them and understand them.

Day 2 - Thoery X and Y Managers

The class started with a an introduction to Pygmalion Effect. The effect says that the greater the expectation is placed on a person, the higher their performance is. It is named after a Scultor who made a female out of his  own

ivory statue by his wish and fell in love with her.
The basic of this theory is simple. If you think positively (optimistic) and expect more out of a person, this will increase the confidence level of the person and he could do more. Something in line with "The Secret" by Rholanda Byrne.

The comes the Theory of X & Y Managers. This theory explains how productivity can depend on the attitudes of both employees and managers.

Theory X Manager and Bad Employees:
Here the employees are not motivated towards work and the manager assumes them to be lazy. This would not help the organization (or the Manager and the Employees eventually) as a Manager has always have to motivate his employees. The performance of the employees would degrade more and more.

Theory X Manager and Good Employees:
Here the Employees are motivated but the Manager is not able to recognize them. Even if he recognizes he would not acknowledge their work. This is a dangerous situation as this will terribly demotivate the employees and will also cause irregularities in the work. This would also lead to attrition as this the employees would not get the recognition and so the job satisfaction under the manager.

Theory Y Manager and Bad Employees:
Even if the employees are not motivated, a good manager can himself motivate the employees. If employees doesn't perform well, a manager should identify the reasons and solve the issues. If rightly motivated and recognized the performance of the employees will go up.

Theory Y Manager and Good Employees:
This is the ideal condition required for an organization. As both employess and the manager are self-motivated the will work in synch and work effectively and efficiently. This will result in increase in production.

Day 1 - June 21

The class started with an expectation thanks to the next class students who already informed us about the unusual ways Dr.Mandi's classes went. The first set of questions i remember coming from him were
1) What did you learn from Facebook? (I suppose this is what he meant.)
2) How much do you spend for a day?
3) What are the actual oppurtunity costs that you pay being in NITIE?

Though I have indirectly come across each one of these questions before, the direct manner with which these question were posed, I should say, HIT HARD right on the face. For Instance, I never thought I am spending 1000+100+ Rs a day just by being here in NITIE. Also the oppurtunity costs which we are losing is tremendous when we count the two year earnings and the exponential growth that is missed by being out of the market. Unless the time in NITIE is effectively used, this cannot be justified.

The video on the Mandi gave a glimpse of what the event actually is. Having heard a lot about the Mandi, the video showed how the concepts are implemented in Mandi.

The EEE:
Management is all about Effictiveness and Efficiency. Effectiveness is doing the right thing and Efficiency is doing things right. If both are mastered, it will make one a very good manager.

The Tower Building Excercise:
The excercise was conducted to show us that how conventionally goals are set way below the standards of potential. Even the performer who was about to build the tower rated lower than his potential. He aimed at 10 blocks where in reality he built 18 blocks. My count of 18 is mostly based on assumption.

The second was that the same person has to build the block but blindfoled. He can take the guidance of a person. While most has decreased their expectation on the performer, few have retained. I had increased my expectation  to 2 more counts from 18 to 20 based on the following assumptions.
1) The person has already felt the cubes with his fingers while doing the first experiment. So he can easily get along with the blocks even without seeing them.
2) Since he had already done the experiment, the ice is broken for him. Now on second time, he will naturally develop the inner drive to improve his performance than before.
3) Also there will be no apprehensions about the tower being visualized as sloping down, reduced pessimism is optimism gained.
4) If the guide and the performer are co-ordinated, they can work in synch with the guide as the eye and the performer as the hand arranging it.