The tutoring revolution: How it could transform education

Raymond Jiang was scrolling through Instagram this past June – a way to pass time during a summer of no camps or social gatherings, after a high school freshman year that ended early – when he came across a post from education innovator Sal Khan.

For this 16-year-old son of Chinese immigrants living in the suburbs of Tulsa, Oklahoma, Mr. Khan was something of a rock star. Mr. Jiang had used Khan Academy, Mr. Khan’s nonprofit offering free online classes, to pass trigonometry and pre-calculus the summer prior. Now, he saw, Mr. Khan was looking for people to join his newest enterprise: schoolhouse.world, a free, global, online tutoring network.

Mr. Jiang loved calculus. He was thrilled by the idea of working with Mr. Khan himself. So he applied to be one of the organization’s first math teachers.

A few states away, Carl McGrone was also “driving around online just to have something to do,” as he puts it. A 52-year-old Mississippi native who works in a Waterloo, Iowa, pork processing plant, Mr. McGrone was studying to get his high school diploma when he came across Mr. Khan’s new venture.

Although he is not usually “a guy to get involved with something online,” Mr. McGrone signed up to be one of the first students with schoolhouse.world. He met Mr. Jiang in algebra class. 

“Raymond – he took me to a whole new level,” Mr. McGrone says. 

The teen just had a great way of explaining facts, he says. Mr. Jiang, for his part, says he bonded with the older man over their shared interest in wrestling. 

“There are so many things I like about it,” says Mr. Jiang, who has tutored everyone from adults such as Mr. McGrone to teenagers worried about their grades. “It makes

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