The annual list of TIME magazine’s 100 most influential people includes some obvious choices — Barack Obama, Mitt Romney, the entertainment world’s flavors of the month — and some truly dreadful ones — Iran’s supreme leader — but some of the choices are worthy of note.

One is Salman Khan, who has helped challenge longstanding ideas about the best ways to educate kids:

Like a lot of great innovators, Salman Khan didn’t set out to change the world. He was just trying to help his teenage cousin with her algebra from across the country. But from a closet turned office in his Silicon Valley apartment, Sal, 35, has produced an amazing library of online lectures on math, science and a host of other subjects. In the process, he has turned the classroom — and the world of education — on its head.

The aspiration of khanacademy.org is to give every kid a chance at a free, world-class education. The site has over 3,000 short lessons that allow kids to learn at their own pace. Practice exercises send students back to the pertinent video when they’re having trouble.

Another is Catholic Archbishop Timothy Dolan, who helped spread the word about the Obama administration’s health care regulation overreach.

[I]n 2012, this priest with a mien dating back half a century did something few other American Roman Catholic leaders have managed in recent times: he put himself and his church back in the center of the national political conversation, a public square long dominated by Protestant evangelicals.

In leading the opposition to a proposed Obama Administration rule that would have required Catholic organizations like hospitals to pay for contraceptive services for female employees, Dolan successfully argued that such a policy violated the nation’s principles of religious liberty.