Khan Academy: The future of education?

now CNN's sanj Gupta on assignment for 60 minutes take a moment and remember your favorite teacher now imagine that teacher could reach not 30 kids in a classroom but millions of students all over the world that's exactly what S Khan is doing on his website Khan Academy with digital lessons and simple exercises he's determined to transform how we learn at every level one of his most famous pupils Bill Gates says come this teacher to the world is giving us all a glimpse of the future of Education the story will continue in a moment 35-year-old Sal Khan may look like a bicycle messenger but with three degrees from MIT and an MBA from Harvard his errand is intensely intellectual in his tiny office above a tea shop in Silicon Valley he settles in to do what he's done thousands of times before we've talked a lot now about the demand curve in consumer surplus now let's think about the supply curve he's recording a 10-minute economics lesson it's so simple all you hear is his voice and all you see is his colorful sketches on a digital Blackboard in this video we're going to talk about the law of demand when KH finishes the lecture he uploads it to his website where it joins the more than 3,000 other lessons he's done in just a couple of years he's gone from having a few hundred pupils to more than 4 million every month has it sunk in to you that you are probably the most watched teacher in the world now yeah I you know I I I I try not to say things like that to myself you don't want to think about it too much because it can I think paralyze you a little bit so if we get rid of the percent sign we move the decimal over he's a mass a library of math lectures 12 + 4 is 16 starting with basic Edition and building all the way through advanced calculus taking the limit as Delta X approaches zero it's the exact same thing but he's not just a math whz he has this uncanny ability to break down even the most complicated subjects including physics biology astronomy history medicine how much reading do you do ahead of time it depends what I'm doing if I'm doing something that I haven't visited for a long time since high school I'll go by five textbooks in it and I'll try to read every textbook I'll read whatever I can find on the internet let's talk about one of the most important biological processes Salon has tackled so many subjects that if you watch just one of his lectures a day it would take over eight years to cover it all huge time scale magnetic north is kind of the geographic location and then let's say that this is the point xal basic introduction light if this does not blow your mind you you have no emotion did you ever think about putting yourself visually in the video look if there's a human face there especially a funnyl looking human face and it's actually hard to focus on the math 4,000 is 2,000 * 3 is 6,000 I don't have to shave I don't have to comb my hair I just press record make a video there might be spinach in my teeth who cares the format is so simple why does it appeal to so many people I've gotten a lot of feedback it really does feel like I'm I'm sitting next to the person and we're looking at the paper together let me get my trusty calculator out I'm 95% of the time working through that problem real time or I'm thinking it through myself if I'm explaining something and to see that it is is actually sometimes a messy process that you know it isn't always this clean process where you just know the answer um I think that's what people like the kind of humanity there it all started in 2004 when S Khan was working as a hedge fund analyst in Boston and his cousin Nadia a seventh grader in New Orleans was struggling with algebra he agreed to tutor her remotely and wound up posting lessons on YouTube they helped Nadia but then an odd thing happened total strangers started using them too I started getting feedback like you know my child has dyslexia and this is the only thing that's getting into him I got letters from people saying you know we're we're praying for you and your family that's pretty headyy stuff you know people don't say that type of stuff to a hedge fund analyst normally so in 2009 Khan quit his job and working from a desk set up in his closet devoted himself fulltime to Khan Academy it's a nonprofit with a simple but audacious mission to provide a free world-class education for anyone one anywhere if that goal sounds far-fetched for a guy working in his closet consider what happened next there's a website that I've just been using with my kids recently called Con Academy khn just one guy doing some unbelievable 15minute tutorials I was like those videos for NAIA not Bill Gates I have to I have to look I have to take a second look at some of this stuff that's right Bill Gates one of the smartest and richest men in the world was using salon's free videos to teach his own kids two weeks later I got a call from from Larry Cohen who's Bill Gates's chief of staff and he says you know you might have heard Bill's a fan you know I'm like shaking I'm like yeah I heard you know and and he's like if you have time you know i' love to fly you up to Seattle and then I was looking at my calendar right then and for the month completely blank I was like yeah you know I think I could you know fly in you know between like laundry and a bath I can just and meet with Bill that was just two years ago today with the help of more than $15 million in funding much of it from The Gates Foundation and Google KH has been able to hire with competitive salaries some of the most talented engineers and designers in the country the KH Academy office has the intense Vibe of a Silicon Valley startup the team is working to create software they hope will transform how math is taught in American classrooms and once they've done all of these they really understand proper fraction we visited a class in the Los Al School District outside San Francisco where the new Con Academy software is being piloted grab your computer log in and then open Con Academy right away you notice something different there are no textbooks and no teacher lecturing at the Blackboard instead students watch con videos at home the night before to learn a concept then they come to class the next day and do problem sets called modules to make sure they understand if they get stuck they can get one-on-one help from the teacher less lecturing more interaction what you think of as homework you do at school and school work you do at home it's called flipping the classroom and seventh grader Loren for says using KH Academy at home has given her math a big boost I'm not a big fan of textbooks I thought that K Academy was a lot easier cuz it's on a screen it's easy to find the concept you want to do and now with the videos do you find yourself rewinding it playing it again if if you need to a lot yeah you do that at home yeah usually when I watch a video it's because I'm having trouble on the practices so if I don't understand the video I can always rewind it or pause it so that I can go back to the module and do what I learned but what's the hardest part about learning this way I don't really think there's a hard part even kids who don't have a computer at home can flip the classroom East Side prep in East paloalto keeps its computer labs open until 10: p.m. so kids like sixth grader Al Hernandez can take as much time as they need to learn a concept my mom she went to school in Mexico some things she can't explain to me but some like she can't so like I take long to like try to finish my homework how did you used to do in math pretty bad like got a third grade level math so you know Con Academy has helped me it's like it's like open doors that I couldn't open it's helped me a lot a lot of people have talked about the idea that uh flipping the classroom uh is is sort of what What's Happening Here you take a little bit of issue with that I kind of view that as a as a step in the direction the ideal direction is using something like Con Academy for every student to work at their own pace to master Concepts before moving on and then the teacher using K Academy as a tool so that you can have a room of 20 or 30 kids all working on different things but you can still kind of administrate that chaos KH Academy has created a dashboard so teachers like Courtney Cadwell can monitor each student's progress so right now they're all working on things and you can see that real time yes so as you sit here and look at the dashboard you see how the students are doing individually you see how they're doing as a whole class and you can figure out who you need to help exactly and here I can track their progress over time I can see who's rushing ahead who's lagging behind I can see if they begin to stagnate a blue bar indicates a student knows a concept orange they're still working on it but if a red bar pops up is kind of the red flag to tell me hey it's time to step in and intervene and I can see oh so you can see not only that it's red but specifically what the problem they miss and you can see the number of seconds they spent on each problem I feel like I'm using my time more effectively with my students because instead of making the assumption that the entire class is weak in this area and I need to spend time reviewing this I can really pull those three four five kids do a mini Workshop address those needs and allow those other students to move on to problem solving activities or Project based learning with their peers so far the National Education Association has supported not profit technology like KH Academy in the classroom as long as teachers are trained properly but as with any new innovation Khan says there are always some Skeptics I've seen some subset of teachers who say oh what is this video thing you know live human interaction is important and the reason why that that bothers me a little bit is that no that's exactly what we're saying in fact we exactly agree with you that what we're trying to do is take the passivity out of the classroom so that you as a teacher will have more flexibility does it minimize the role of the teacher does it make it less impactful no I think it's the exact opposite we kind of view teachers playing the role of more like a coach or Mentor which once again I personally believe is a much higher value thing than a lecturer KH Academy's math program is being piloted in 23 schools mostly in California preliminary test scores from a handful of classrooms have shown improvements especially for students who are struggling official state assessments will be available this summer in the time Chief Operating Officer shantanu Sinha says they're Gathering massive amounts of data not just from American classrooms but from every Con Academy user around the world so you could say how many problems were done over the last 24 hours how many was it right now in the last 24 hours we had close to 1.8 million wow not total but just one day just in a 24-hour period and when you take a look at total users over the last 18 months 41 million visits from the United States we can look you know from India made 1 7 million Australia 1.4 million right it is pretty amazing to think that millions of people all over the world are using Khan Academy right now yeah I it's a gold mine on how to understand you know what what paths through learning are most effective Khan says they look at all that data and constantly make changes to their software platform we can start fine-tuning things the way that Amazon might fine-tune their button to help you buy that book or find the book that you want or Netflix says what's the right movie for you we now get to do with education Eric Schmidt the pioneering chairman of Google says he's seen a lot of failed attempts to integrate technology into education but says what S Khan is doing is different many many people think they're doing something new but they're not really changing the approach because with Saul he said what we're going to do is not only going to make these interesting 10-minute videos but we're going to measure whether it works or not he was the guy to sort of make this happen what why do you think it was him and not some person who was an educator who had a background in this area Innovation never never comes from the established institutions it's always a graduate student or a crazy person or somebody with a great vision sa is that person in education in my view he built a platform if that platform works that platform could completely change education in America 17 over9 is equal to 1.88 inside classrooms it's just KH Academy math for now but salom believes his strategy can be used to teach subjects like history and science and not just in elementary schools but high schools and even colleges but no matter how big or how successful KH Academy gets Z con promises he'll never put a price tag on it the for-profits have to mold themselves much more to the education establishment than we do as a not for profit we're like what's our mission to educate children as well as possible I've said it enough times and it's in our mission statement a free worldclass education for anyone anywhere and that's what sixth grader Alex Hernandez says he needs has anyone in your family ever going to college no so that's a pretty big deal for you think you're going to be able to do it with help or like with more like studying or like Con Academy I think I can get that I think you can too

Channel: CBS News

Views: 297,375

Keywords: khan, academy, future, education, teacher, free, online, educational, videos, bill gates, google, eric schmidt, sal khan, 60 minutes, sanjay gupta

Id: 9kh60v5PxMk

Length: 13min 27sec (807 seconds)

Published: Mon Mar 12 2012