Rethinking Education - Sal Khan: 3 MIT Degrees, 85,487,485 Lessons Delivered

Video Statistics and Information

Video
Captions Word Cloud
Reddit Comments
Captions
So how many of y'all have been to the site, know a little bit about Khan Academy? Oh, good, this is very good. That's probably why you're here, actually. It's a silly question. So as most of y'all, I guess, do know Khan Academy is most known for the videos. And we're going to be doing more videos, and this is a super exciting collaboration. But we're also doing a lot more, and I'll talk more about that. But so we're all on the same page, I'll show you a little montage of some Khan Academy videos. Up the volume. [VIDEO PLAYBACK] -And the notation usually is a capital sigma. -All of these interactions are just through the gravity over interstellar, almost you could call it intergalactic. -So the right slot is i plus 1. -This animal's fossils are only found in this area of South America, a nice clean band here. -They create the Committee of Public Safety, which sounds like a very nice committee. -Notice this is an aldehyde, and it's an alcohol. -It's some type of an infectious disease. -Exactly. -So the key is, when you start to look at data, you have to look at all aspects of it. --[INAUDIBLE] there 30 million, plus the 20 million from the American manufacturer. -If this does not blow your mind, then you have no emotion. [END PLAYBACK] [LAUGHTER] [APPLAUSE] And y'all are the first audience that actually does appreciate why that should blow your mind. So it's exciting that we could share that moment. So that is where we are now, as Dean Waitz introduced. We've had over 90 million video views now. We've had over 100 million exercises done. It's actually about $2 million a day now. And that's growing at a fast pace. So we have about 3 and 1/2 million unique students a month. And that's growing at kind of a surreal pace for us. And in the internet world, you're so used to like million here, million there, 10 million in Facebook. You lose sight of it. And that's why i did a little back-of-the-envelope calculation. The number of unique students we had last month is more than six times the number of students that Harvard has graduated in its history, just a little estimation thing right over there. But that's where we are now. And I think we do have a lot of time to do Q&A, and we can talk a lot about where we're going. And I think a lot of y'all know some of this, how this kind of happened or started. And it's all been a little bit happenstance and lucky circumstances and the right things happening at the right time. But as a lot of y'all know, it started in 2004. I was an analyst at a hedge fund, actually at 9 Newbury Street. And I had just gotten married, and some family was visiting me from New Orleans, which is where I grew up. And my one cousin in particular, Nadia, she was 12 years old, and I remember she was super sharp. I hadn't seen her for a couple of years. When you talked to her, you felt like you were talking to someone your own age. It was actually 4th of July weekend, and we were waiting for the fireworks over the Charles River. And we kind of had got our spot, and we had a couple hours to wait for the fireworks to start. And so as I think as many of y'all would do to kill time, I started giving my family brain teasers. [LAUGHING] And I think, like you've probably experience with most of your family, they're probably like, Sal, stop, we don't feel like thinking. This is a vacation. But Nadia said, no, no, no, don't tell me the answer. I want to solve it. And I literally remember, 12 years old-- and these are the type of stuff-- these are things you might see in a computer science interview. But she was working it out on the sand, and I was really impressed. She didn't shut her brain off. She wanted to engage the problem. She was logical. She was analytical about it. And I told her, and I said, Nadia, you should go to MIT. And when I said that, I saw her mom kind of give her dad, my uncle, a little bit of a look. I didn't know what that meant. And so the next morning, her mom, [INAUDIBLE], told me, Sal, thank you so much for being like a big brother figure to Nadia and her brothers, and they really look up to you. And we love that you think so much of them. But I actually want to let you know that Nadia is actually having trouble with math in school right now. And I said, oh, no, that's impossible. I mean, the girl who was doing those-- the stuff that she was tackling, I've seen college students who can't do problems like that. And she was tackling them, and she was engaging the problem. And on top of that, we share a certain amount of DNA. [LAUGHTER] So and when Nadia actually woke up, I said, what's going on, Nadia? I have trouble believing what your mom just told me. And Nadia said that she's having trouble with units, kilograms to decigrams, or ounces to whatever. And I just told her point blank, I was like, I definitely understand how that can be confusing. I mean, even now, sometimes I multiply, divide by. But, I told her, what you were doing last night is 10 times deeper. And the conversations that we've had about politics or philosophy or whatever else, 10 times deeper than unit conversion. And she was kind of a little bit-- she actually didn't believe. Is this like a pep talk or whatever else? So I told her, I was like, look, when you go to New Orleans, how about we do a little bit of tutoring? We'll get on a phone. We'll figure out some way to look at each other's writing or whatever else. And she agreed. I think more than anything, she just liked the fact that someone was taking interest in her life. So we started. And frankly, the first month or so was pretty painful. Her confidence was completely blown. Her brain was shut off. It was a completely different Nadia when you asked her a simple units question. Kilo means 1,000. Kilometer is how many meters? Long, awkward pause-- 1,000? Are you sure? And it was like, this is the same girl who was doing these complex logic problems, just because she was completely disengaged. But eventually, we finally got through that hump. And after too much, actually-- once she got it, and she got it kind of all together, she almost got angry. She was, I can't believe that that was the reason that I was tracking into the slower math class, that simple idea. So after that, I was like, OK, I've worked with one cousin. This worked. And the whole time I was on the phone, I could kind of hear her two younger brothers wanting to be part of the scene. So I started tutoring them. And then the way our tutoring sessions were going, I would kind of give them a problem, and if they knew how to do it, great. If they didn't know how to do the problem, I'd give them a hint or a step. And we'd work the next one. And so I said, well, maybe I could write some simple software. I was here working at a hedge fund, and I hadn't been using the coding side of my brain for a little while. So I was like, oh, this will a fun little project. And so I started writing this little JavaScript thing to generate these problems for them, these little random numbers. And if they didn't know the steps, it would give the hints for those steps. And I started telling Arman and Ali and Nadia, do these problems, and we can talk about them the next day. And the next day, I'd say, oh, how many did you do? Oh, I did 14. I did 15. How many did you get right? I think I got them all right. And so I didn't believe them. So I put a database behind it. [LAUGHTER] But it was just that simple, very primitive thing that I was doing part time, starting giving me all this information. Wow, they didn't know how to do that type of problem. Boy, I've been really gauging where they are in the completely wrong way. Or now they need the practice so that they can really bone up on that concept. Or why is Ali, who is eight years old, doing that problem at 3:00 in the morning? Which was actually one of the things that I discovered when I was doing little SQL queries on their little problem logs. [LAUGHTER] And so that was there, and I started getting more and more cousins involved, and I was tutoring the, after work. And by November of 2006, I was at a friend's dinner party, actually another MIT alum. It was [INAUDIBLE]. He did his PhD here. And I was showing off the software that I was doing, my cousins are using it, and I think it's really helping them, and all the rest. But my only complaint was I was doing these tutorials, and it was getting hard to scale. That connection that I had with Nadia, the one-on-one connection, even when you start having two, three, four students, it started to become difficult. I tried to do conference calls, and those were a mess. And he's the guy that told me. He's like, well, I don't know if this will work, but why don't you make some lectures and put them up on YouTube, and maybe you can get some of the stuff out of the way for your tutorials. And I said, no, no, no, no, no. YouTube is for cats playing piano. [LAUGHTER] It is not for serious mathematics. And so then I went home that weekend, and I kind of thought about it a little bit. And I got over the idea that it wasn't my idea. [LAUGHTER] And decided to give it a shot. And I put a couple of those videos out there on YouTube. And I remember that first screen, do you want to make this public or private? And actually, I was tempted-- past because I was embarrassed. What if these aren't good or whatever? And I said, well, maybe if I could password protect it. But YouTube didn't have any functionality like this. So I guess I'll make it public. But what are the odds that anyone else is going to see this stuff? So I put it out there, and I started pointing my cousins to it. I was like, hey, before we do this, why don't you take a look at these? This might be good review. Or here's some stuff you can look at if you forgot the last time we went over this idea or that idea. And I joke a lot about this, but it's completely true. After a couple weeks, I had about 30 videos out there. And they were very simple, very primitive. And you could actually sort on YouTube by upload data. And you can see those original videos, very primitive. And I asked my cousins, are these useful. What do you think of them? And they told me that they preferred me on YouTube than in person. [LAUGHTER] And I haven't clarified whether it only applies to math videos or is this is broader thing that they don't just-- and it's completely unintuitive. It goes against everything we assume. We always assume that, yes, technology can give you productivity. Technology can give you efficiency. But technology is something that can always only approach the resource intensive, the live version. But here, my cousins were telling me that they preferred the automated cousin to their cousin. And so it goes against that intuitive gut sense of technology in every other domain, but it made complete sense when you put yourself in their shoes. Now Nadia didn't have to feel embarrassed when she forgot how to do something from fourth grade math. She didn't have to feel like she was wasting my time if she wanted to repeat a concept. She didn't have to engage with the content when she wasn't ready to engage with the content. I mean, there were days where I agreed to do this with Nadia, but I had a tough day at work. I'd go home, I'd say, oh, I told Nadia, I guess I better do this. So my energy level wasn't there. And I'm sure there were days that the boy she had a crush on asked some other girl to the prom and so she wasn't completely there, either. But now she could get it when she was ready for it, when she had the question in her mind so she could pause and repeat. And so I got kind of excited, and I kept doing it, just thinking that, at minimum, this will help my cousins now. I didn't have kids at the time. I do now. I said, well, maybe this could help my kids in the future. I could be a little family legacy, a little thing that I could share with-- maybe my great grandkids could use this content. And I read a lot of science fiction books, so it's kind of in that vein of thinking. But there's no reason why you can't. If Newton or Leibniz had made videos on YouTube, we wouldn't have to. [LAUGHTER] There's reason to believe Newton was a little eccentric. He wasn't mainstream like me. [LAUGHTER] So it might not have worked. So I just kept going. The other unintuitive thing thing-- I'd go to dinner parties, and I'd show people the little videos that I was making, and I had my friends from business school I'd show it to. And they're, how are you going to make money off of this? [LAUGHTER] I was like, oh, no, I mean, I have a job. I'm just doing this for fun, and it's for my family, and I'm enjoying it. And I would get these kind of looks like, what part of capitalism do you not understand? [LAUGHTER] But then by this time our fun had moved out to Silicon Valley. And so this will never scale, never scale. You should make a platform and get other people to upload content onto your platform. You should crowd source it. And I said, no, I understand the principle. I have an MBA as well. [LAUGHTER] I understand the principle of getting other people to do your work for you. But I'm enjoying this. And then I said, but that's a good idea. Would you like to do some videos yourself? And they would walk away. [LAUGHTER] But once again, it was just because it was fun. And I just kept doing it. And then comments started to come in on YouTube. And some of those comments were just a simple thank you. And I don't know if y'all spend a lot of time on YouTube, but it's not all positive comments. [LAUGHTER] Not all G-rated comments. And actually, I was kind of hardening the self-esteem of some of the video producers. Once we expose ourselves to YouTube, there will be-- there are times that I want to cry. People can say mean things on the internet. [LAUGHTER] But for the most part-- and this as actually important, and actually, this is important to the genesis of the Khan Academy, because I am someone who thrives off of positive feedback and doesn't do well with criticism. First people said thank you or this helped. And it was random people. It wasn't my cousins. It was people all over the world. And then the comments got more interesting. This is the reason why I'm passing algebra. This is the reason why I'm able to go back to college. This is the reason why, after leaving the military, I haven't seen math in 15 years, I can now go back. This is the bridge that gets me back into that. I got letters from a mother of an autistic child. She said, this is the only thing that works for my child. I got letters, multiple letters, from random people saying that they're praying for me. And I was working at a hedge fund. [LAUGHTER] [APPLAUSE] I'm sure some of my investors had prayed for me, but for different reasons. So I mean, it was just a powerful experience. So I kept going. And the site traffic just kept growing. And you fast forward it to 2009. And actually, there were some interesting events in 2008. 2008, during the financial crisis, all bets were off. In our fund, we parked all of the money in cash. And frankly, all of the responsible fund managers starting reading the Federal Reserve Act over and over and over again. And then I would go to parties, and people would ask, hey, what do you think about this financial crisis? I'd go, oh, this is the difference between illiquidity and insolvency, and this is why credit default swaps are called financial weapons of mass destruction. And people were like, oh, uh-- and I said, well, why am I not making videos about this stuff as well? So I started doing that. And it's funny. I got a call from two major news networks saying that they were using these videos before reporting on the financial crisis. [LAUGHTER] Actually, I got I got one email from an investment banker-- I will not name the bank-- who literally wrote a very short email, I now know what I do for a living. [LAUGHTER] And it's heartwarming, better late than never, right? I'm sure he was getting compensated quite nicely, too, which is a little strange. So that happened. And actually that was first national publicity we had. I was on the Rick Sanchez Show talking about how we should start new banks and all the rest. Poor guy-- things have happened to him since. But in 2009, I had this day job still. I was an analyst at a hedge fund. But I had trouble focusing on it. There's this site. People were writing me letters. The traffic was picking up. And were many other times, you have a bad week at your job and you say you want to quit the job. And you go to your wife, and you look at your finances, you look at your mortgage like, hm, and you look at the different-- no, I'll stay a little bit longer. [LAUGHTER] But by fall of 2009, frankly, this is all I thought about. It would actually have been irresponsible for me to continue managing other people's money. And frankly at that same time, we got a little external recognition. And I got this really powerful letter from this student. We actually have it on our website. The student, no background in mathematics, used Khan Academy for summer, went to the community college and got a perfect score on the placement exam, which had never happened at that community college. So that all happened in a one-week period. So I sat with my wife. We looked at the finances. She was pregnant. We actually had our first baby at that point. And so it wasn't a light decision, but we said, look, we have enough savings that I could take a year off and do it. And so I did. And like all things like this-- the site was doing just great. It was growing exponentially. But the funding-- we set it up as a not-for-profit. Someone should realize the social ROI here, that these videos don't just teach millions of kids now, They can teach millions of kids forever, billions of kids maybe one day. But they just weren't getting traction. And like I was telling a group earlier today, I would go to parties and people ask you what you do for a living. And so, I make videos on YouTube. [LAUGHTER] And I literally heard this, some people were, well, it's good that his wife is a doctor. [LAUGHTER] The meanness isn't just on YouTube. But these things take longer. And I had a little Paypal thing so people could donate. And we were getting $25, $50 here and there. And that was powerful, that a random student someplace would give $20 just out of goodwill. But then all of a sudden in May of 2010 now, all of a sudden a $10,000 donation comes. So I look at it. It was someone named Ann Doerr. And I emailed her. I said, this is the largest donation we've ever gotten. If we were a physical school, you would now have a building named after you. [LAUGHTER] Which I think is a very good deal. I don't know what the going rate at MIT for a building is, but it's well in excess of $10,000. But she actually immediately emailed me back. She was local. She was in Palo Alto. And she said, well, have we should have lunch. And so I met her for lunch. And she's like, where do you want to take this? I said, well, a world-class education for anyone in the world for free. And I showed her why. We can make exercises. That primitive stuff I had done for my cousins, we could hire a competent team to actually build that out. And we could eventually connect kids with each other. I'd keep making videos, the whole dream. And she nodded. I think it was resonating with her. And then she was, well, if I was the largest donation, how are you supporting yourself? And in kind of a proud way as possible, I said, I'm not. [LAUGHTER] And so she kind of nodded. And I went home. And when I was in the driveway, I got a text message from Ann. And she's like, well, you should be supporting yourself. I've just wired you $100,000. And so that's was a good day. [LAUGHTER] [APPLAUSE] And actually Ann's texts have started to become this like bearer of good news since then. Then things started to get really surreal and wacky. And even to this point, it's just been a surreal rocket ship ride since that point. A few weeks later, some folks at Google-- I say there are two major institutions in Mountain View, Google and the Khan Academy. [LAUGHTER] I don't get as many laughs at Google. [LAUGHTER] Some folks brought me into Google. It was a big room. And they were very complimentary. They're like, oh, I don't know if you know that a lot of our kids use Khan Academy. It's really helping them. And it was very flattering. These are some of the best thinkers in the world, and their kids are high performing students and all the rest. And they just point blank, after I talked a little bit about what I was up to, they said, well, what would you do with $2 million? And I said, is this an open question? [LAUGHTER] And they clarified it was education related. [LAUGHTER] I've got needs, you know. [LAUGHTER] But so I told them the same thing that I told Ann. We would build out a virtual school. We would hire engineers, designers. We would make this thing where anyone anywhere could learn. And they kind of nodded. And by this point, I actually had been through this cycle of talking to foundations. And there wasn't a lot-- they liked the idea, but they're like, well, why are we the first to fund you? And you kind of need that initial validation, and I didn't have it. Although Ann donating-- she's the wife of John Doerr, famous venture capitalist. And so that was actually a very powerful initial validation. But actually, I don't think the Google guys knew about it at that point. But then it got even wackier. And then the Google part has a good ending, too, but it got even wackier. Early July 2010, I was running a little summer camp. Because I was just curious. I do a lot of this virtually. It's fun for me to work with kids in a live setting and see what you can do if you actually are interacting with each other. And so I had this game where six kids were playing a game of Risk. And then the other 20 were trading securities based on the outcome of the game of Risk. [LAUGHTER] [APPLAUSE] It's a good game. Frankly the summer camp was all the games that I wanted to play at my birthday parties until that point that I never got any of my friends to play. But now people were actually paying me to let me do it with their kids. And so while it was literally a trading floor of middle school students, I got another text message from Ann. And she said, I'm at the Aspen Ideas Festival. And I'm in a room of hundreds of people. And Bill Gates is on stage right now. And for the past 10 minutes, he's been talking about you. [LAUGHTER] And it's like one of those, pinch yourself. And I was like, is this a joke? Maybe Ann sen it to the wrong-- she knows people that Bill Gates would talk about, so maybe it was a mistake. Who knows? I didn't know. And then I looked at the Twitter feed. I said, some people have tweeted. This is happening someplace. This is in my reality in some way. And so I went home. And it was the most surreal experience. Because like this thing happened, and I was like, what do I do now? Do I call him? [LAUGHTER] And so I don't know if they realized what they were doing to me, but the next two weeks were this strange-- I was still in the closet, still just doing the little videos, and there was this little part of my brain, Bill Gates is-- what? And then I got a call from Larry Cohen, who is Bill Gates' chief of staff. He said, well, you must have heard Bill is a fan. He would like to meet if you have time. [LAUGHTER] And I was looking at my calendar at the moment, and it was completely blank. [LAUGHTER] And I didn't want-- so I was like, maybe at 2:45 I can just fly in, fly out. We can work it out. And so we met. I guess I can call him Bill now. And he said, how can I support you? And it was as weird. His chief of staff said that Bill has three monitors, and he says one of the monitors has Khan Academy up like all the time. And I immediately said, I need to redo some of these videos. Like this is not a child's game anymore. But Bill said, how can we support you? And I kind of said the same thing I told Ann, same thing I told Google. And he kind of nodded. And when he nodded, there were five people in the back of the room who immediately-- you got that right there? And so October of 2010, so this is like a little over a year ago, funding from the Gates Foundation actually hit at the exact same time Google decided to fund us, too, $2 million for 10 projects that have the potential to save the world. And so we were off and running. We were able to get office space. I was able to hire another MIT alum, the smartest guy I knew who was my freshman roommate. He joined. And we started to ramp up. And this is what we started working on. And some of y'all are probably somewhat familiar with this. This is a more sophisticated version of really what I started with my cousins. And the idea here is each of those nodes-- the top one is basic addition. And I'll show you what these look like in a second. But it will generate as much questions as you need to master basic addition. And once you've mastered that, you move on to the next concept. And it's kind of the most common sense way you would implement anything, you would teach anything. It's the way video games work. It's the way you would learn karate or learn a musical instrument. But the one thing that we realized later, especially when we tried to implement it even at a few summer camps and things, as intuitive as it is, it's the complete opposite of the system that we've all been indoctrinated into. In the system that we've all been raised in, what you have is you have a fixed amount of time to learn a concept. And then the variable is how well you learn it. So some of us get an A, some of us get a B, some of us get a C. And it's used not as an assessment to fix. It's used as an assessment to place value judgment on you. You're smart. You're not so smart. You're hard working. You're not so hard working. And the real insanity of it is, in those two weeks, we were supposed to learn basic exponents. And we take an exam. And half the class gets a C, some kids get Ds, 20% deficiencies, 30% deficiencies. Even the A students have 5% deficiencies. We all then move on to logarithms, somehow expecting magically that we expect those same kids who didn't know 20% of basic exponents to now all of a sudden be able to understand the inverse function, to understand what a logarithm is. But that's exactly what we're doing. And the analogy is imagine building a house. And the foundation, you build it. You get the inspector to come in. The inspector goes and says, oh, it's an 80% foundation. Well, that's passing. Let's build a first floor. [LAUGHING] And then you build a second floor, third floor, and then it collapses. And you're like, whoa, what went wrong here? We have to do something. But that's what we're doing in our system. So what we're saying is, and it's the way you learn naturally, instead of the fixed thing being the amount of time and when you learn something and the variable how well you learn it, let's make the fixed thing how well you learn it. Let's make it mastery for everyone, and then the variable is how and when and how long you actually have to learn the concept. And so this is what some of these modules look like. This is actually one that was just contributed by a volunteer. And I showed it earlier today to some students. And this is an open source project to build these modules. So any of y'all who are eager and jumping in here-- and actually, John Resig's here, who is the father of jQuery, built the framework for making these modules. It's mostly JavaScript library. I mean, he should be really giving this talk. But if any of y'all are interested in participating, we would love it. The module you're seeing there is actually contributed by a guy in DC. And it's one of our best modules. And so what the modules do is they'll give you an infinite number of questions. And if you need help, there's the related Khan Academy video. And the idea is you keep doing it until you get mastery. And what's really cool, what I really like about this module in particular, is you're able to do things that you can't even do with a traditional textbook, that you can't even do with a traditional lecture. You change the slope of the tangent line at each point, and by doing so, you're essentially tracing out the derivative of that function. And not all of them are this, but this is what we want all the modules eventually to approach. And eventually we could do simulations, multi-player modules, multi-player games, different things. We're experimenting with goal-setting right now. Now this is another module. And this a more basic one. This is kind of what they looked like when I was starting them for my cousins. This one we're still using. But basic idea, you keep doing it until you understand it, show some level of proficiency. And it's an interesting question of how do you measure proficiency, and I'm happy to talk about that. But if you don't know how to do it, you get the steps and all the rest. I think that smiley face is actually the only part of my original code that's still in service. So when we started, it was literally a year ago. [INAUDIBLE] had joined. We got a call from the Los Altos school district. Is a district adjacent to where I live. And they said, oh, we heard you're doing some stuff. We'd like to meet you. And so we met them. And the school board said, well, what would you do if you could do anything you wanted with a fifth grade class. And we said, well, we'd have every student working at their own pace, mastering concepts before moving on. We think that would free up time to do other interesting projects in the classroom, build things, build robots, whatever, paint pictures, whatever it might be. And the role of the teacher changes from instead of being the lecturer and the grader of problem sets, the teacher will turn into someone who gets a lot of data on how kids are performing, see where all the kids are, and then do focus interventions on students when they're stuck and mentor them on projects and whatever else they might want to do. And so they nodded. They were very sympathetic. They're like, yes, this is differentiated learning. This is the gold standard. But it's very radical. And so when [INAUDIBLE] and I went to the parking lot, we're like, they're very nice, but there's no way they're going to be able to do this. But once again, this is one of these very, I don't know, fated circumstances. They emailed us in two days, saying, can we start after Thanksgiving? And they wanted to start with two fifth grade classes and two seventh grade classes. And so this right over here is a dashboard from one of those fifth grade classes. And so the teacher literally walks around. They would have this dashboard and others. And I'll show you a few of them. But each row here is one of the students. I've blocked them off. Each column there is one of those nodes of that knowledge map you saw. And the model is if a student is green, if that cell is green, the student is doing fine. They already mastered or have shown proficiency in that concept. If it's blue, they're working on it, but there's no need to worry. But if it says red based on some heuristic, and we're always working on that, it looks like the student is stuck. They've done a lot of problems, they've watched the video, they've looked at hints, but it looks like they're still not getting it. And so the model is, well, why doesn't the teacher just go sit down next to that student and do a very focused, one-on-one tutorial? Or even better, why not get one of the other students who have already mastered that concept to sit down and be the first line of attack? And when you do that, and we saw this happening, where the students were starting to teach each other. And actually one of the fifth grade teachers started to have a cadre of fifth grade TAs who essentially the teacher spent a large amount of time mentoring so that the teacher could scale. And then some of those TAs were pretty impressive people-- you know, fifth graders, people. [LAUGHTER] And we realized something very profound was happening. There's that one idea of mastering concepts before you move on, which is really just kind of correcting some of the insanity of the system that we were indoctrinated into. But the other thing that we realized that was happening is in the ed reform debate, student-teacher ratio-- big deal. And obviously, at a very superficial level, the lower, the better, all else things equal. But we realized what was even more important than student-to-teacher ratio is student to valuable time with the teacher ratio or student-to-engaged-time ratio. And here in a traditional model, a teacher spends 90% of their time lecturing or grading problems. That's maybe 5% of their time, 10% of their time sitting next to students and actually forming bonds with them. I mean, I sat in class for years not ever having a real conversation what one of my teachers in grade school. At MIT it wasn't the case. I had very deep-- [LAUGHS] [LAUGHING] There are several people-- I had you for 6002. Oh, really? [LAUGHTER] But all of a sudden, if you take that 90%, and now instead of doing a lecture, they're able to sit down next to students and mentor them and guide them and form connections with them, you're actually increasing the humanity in the classroom, the engagement in the classroom by an order of magnitude. So once again, a very ironic thing. You're using technology, something that people think is a very cold thing-- it's efficient, it's productive, but it's not human-- but you're using technology to actually make the class more interactive, making it more human, making it a more engaging experience than a traditional classroom. And we wanted to arm the teachers with as much data as possible. And I want to make it clear. A lot of the specs for these dashboards, these reports, came from the teachers themselves. They're like, well, it looks like it's working, but I want to see what the students have been up to for the last whatever days. This says the light blue is exercises, navy blue is videos, and there's a lot of other data there. There's these game mechanics. You can see the achievements achieved and things like that. This says what a student has been focused on in any given time period. And the students get that for themselves. And it's funny. Because in some of these, you look at some of the state standards, and they say, fifth graders must understand pie charts. In seventh grade, you must understand multi-layer, two-column bar graphs or whatever it is, right? And in a traditional school system, you have these very unnatural problem sets to teach that. But what we found is when the data is about yourself, it's amazing how fast any age kids know exactly what-- this is not a trivial diagram. But they're able to figure it out. And so the inner circle is the time spent on different videos. Outer circle is different exercises. If you click on any of the exercises, you get a problem-by-problem breakdown. This is one of the more recent problems. Height is how much time spent on the problem. Blue is right. Red is wrong. That little video icon means you watched the video. Question mark means you used the hints. If you click on any of those, you can see the problem that the student had a problem with. We've recently added a feature where you can kind of see the narrative of the problem. Eventually we would like to actually see the student's work as they did it on the problem. We don't have that yet. So it's really showing your work, and it's not just a static, final product. It's actually then doing the problem. This right here is just another report that gives a teacher a picture of everything that's going on the class. But pretty much every class we've done is starting to tell a pretty profound narrative. The horizontal axis is just days working on the site for the class. Vertical is just a raw count of modules completed. And each of those lines is one of the students in the class. And what we're seeing over and over and over again-- right when you started, like you'd expect in any class, there's a group of kids, probably a lot of us were like this when we were in fifth grade, who gets really into it. They're really confident in mathematics. They race ahead, and in the traditional mind, those are the gifted kids. Those are the advanced kids. Then there's a group that are kind of in the middle. They're doing fine. Those are the average kids. And there's a group, they're a little bit slower. They're working on some stuff. Those are the kids that Day 6, they're still at those bottom lines right over there. Oh, those kids are a little bit slow. If we start separating these, we maybe say advanced kids, medium kids, remedial kids. But what we're seeing over and over again is if you let all the students work at their own pace, if you let them fill in all those gaps that they built up, all those little 5%, 10% gaps that they got borrowing numbers, multiplying decimals, whatever it might be, and you allow them to spend as much time as they need to really internalize something, this is an important thing. We've learned to believe that slower is somehow dumber, which is kind of crazy. Because maybe the slower person wants to really internalize something. Maybe they really want to understand it at a gut sense. They don't want to just memorize a formula and get to the next concept. But that's what we've been indoctrinated into. But now all of a sudden, if you give that student a chance to internalize the information, we're seeing over and over again that a student that a few weeks ago you thought was remedial or a slow student becomes the second-best student in the class or the best student in the class. And we're seeing it over and over and over again that you really have this constant flipping of the leadership of who is the best student. And you stop even making these type of judgments. And to some degree, we were fortunate byproducts of the old system, where you do the snapshot, and we just happen to be one of those top lines at the snapshot. And it really does make you think how many people might have been lost at the bottom end. Now the-- [APPLAUSE] Everyone's like questioning the system. Everyone's like, oh, my God, maybe I could have-- [LAUGHS] It's kind of an existential, oh, eh? Which it is. I mean frankly, it really is. Now I think I've hinted at this already, but there's the assumption-- and I don't think it's over here, but a lot of times, there's a knee-jerk reaction, oh, computer-based learning, they imagine some kind of Borg or Vulcan reality of these things plugged into kids' brains, and they're just doing this all day. And I just want to emphasize, it's exact opposite. These classes are more interactive than any math class. More time is freed up to do creative activities than any math class or any science class or any type of class that we've seen. And just to capture a little bit of the energy level, I'll show you a little snippet of a news report that captured the energy level. They don't capture some of the other interesting dynamics that happen in these classes, but it gives a sense of things. Oh, volume. Volume? [VIDEO PLAYBACK] [CHEERING] -What makes fifth graders cheer? Would you believe math? -Yes. -I'm starting to really like math now. -These kids are learning with the help of Khan Academy, an online school. -You got it right. Good job. -Videos that are interactive and fun, explaining difficult concepts in a conversational way. [END PLAYBACK] And there's actually a fun story from when that reporter visited. It was either that classroom or the one right next to it. She saw a little fifth grader doing trigonometry questions, 10th, 11th, 12th grade type of-- maybe for us it actually was fifth grade. [LAUGHTER] But she asked the little girl, do you think this is fifth grade math? And she got a very mischievous grin on her face, and she goes, no. I think it's sixth grade. [LAUGHING] And so I think she's in for a pleasant surprise. [LAUGHTER] But when we started this, the energy level in the classroom was great. They were interacting with each other. Kids were teaching each other. The teachers loved it. They felt like this is why they went into the profession. They were forming bonds with students. They were mentoring students. They were developing their own teaching skills and the students' teaching skills. They were context switching. They didn't know what would happen whenever they walked into any classroom. Some of the kids actually did not want to go to recess. Actually our biggest complaint we got, and frankly it came from some of the boys' parents, were some subset of the boys actually got addicted to it, that they couldn't get them off of it. It's not a horrible problem. But we still wanted to at least see some-- we were little scared to do this because it was so early. By this point, we were like a four-person organization. And so we didn't want to be measured too harshly. But it was like, hey, if you're going to do assessment exams at the end of the year, fine, but just don't judge us too much, because we're still in our early days, and that's why we were a little wary of starting this pilot so early. But we did. The kids take the assessment tests anyway, so we wanted to see the data. And the data told us kind of an interesting story. At the fifth-grade level-- and this is the seventh graders, but at the fifth-grade level, 96% of the students were at grade level or above, which sounds good, but actually this is a high-performing school district, and it was only slightly better than the other classrooms. But even that was a mini victory, because these kids were doing trigonometry. They're doing algebra. In my videos, I don't use the exact same words as the state standard. And in the other classrooms, they are to some degree teaching to the exam. And so now at least these students didn't-- and frankly, they definitely performed no worse. So we weren't doing any harm, and that's an important question to ask. But even more, and we're going to do this this year, the fifth grade assessment did not capture what that girl knew about trigonometry. It did not capture the algebra. There was one student who was working on calculus. And actually at the time, he outstripped our exercises, and he just started watching videos and things like that. But the seventh grade was a kind of mind-opening narrative. And it kind of gels with what we saw in that previous graph. And seventh there's sometimes a misperception, because Los Altos-- I actually cannot afford to live in Los Altos. So it is a very affluent part of Northern California. But the seventh graders were not an affluent group. This was actually an algebra readiness group. It's a euphemism for remedial math. And most of these students were students from the other side of El Camino. Most of these were English-as-a-second-language students. Some of these were students with learning disabilities, some of them severe learning disabilities. Or at least they were diagnosed with learning disabilities. And going into the year, that's the top bar right over there, 23%-- that's the left side, the orange. 23% were at grade level. None were advanced. And even the ones that were at grade level were barely at the threshold for grade level. And you see 6% were very below basic. Far below basic is worse than random when you take an exam. So these were students who were really having-- they just didn't answer the test. And after six months-- and this one really spoke to us-- double the number of students were at grade level. But this was the thing that none of us had ever heard of and we didn't know if it had ever happened before-- 6% of the students were now advanced. This was a remedial math class. This was a class that's normally like the academic graveyard. After you go there, you get further and further behind everyone else. And 6% of those students who were diagnosed with learning disabilities, who were essentially told that you're never going to be an engineer or physicist or whatever, they had now leapfrogged ahead of the students in the average class and were now this year having to be placed in an advanced class. And when they saw that, that's when the district said, well, we have to expand this. And so that's why they are expanding it in different ways at the fifth and sixth grade level and also at the seventh- and eighth-grade level now. Now the last thing I want to show, and I want to take questions and have a conversation after this, I want to show a video that we actually got, a thank you video that we got a couple of months ago. And it's an example of an older student, but it blew our minds. And it really helped frame it for me, is that in education reform, people talk about the achievement gap. Once again, that's important. People's hearts are in the right place. But I think the correct way of thinking about it is the potential gap. Because that generalizes it. It's not about ethnicity. It's not about economics. It's just about human potential. And I think this video kind of speaks to that. [VIDEO PLAYBACK] -My name is Mark [? Halperstat. ?] Growing up, I was really always a C student. I think I was really pretty much always pretty pitiful in school. I don't think I've ever gotten higher than a B+ in any math class ever, particularly. I pretty much thought that the only thing I was good enough to do in college was major in music. And I went off and I got a music degree in saxophone. But I sort of almost felt that it was more I was getting it because I was terrible at everything else. I kind of worked as a saxophone player for a few years. Really what I wanted to do was do electrical engineering. And the last thing that I remember completely not getting was trig identities. So I went to YouTube, and I did a search for trig identities. And Khan Academy was the first thing that popped up. I watched a bunch of videos in the trig playlist to kind of get up to speed. I watched all the videos in the calculus playlist. I watched all the videos in the physics playlist. I watched a bunch of videos on dividing decimals and even on subtraction by borrowing. I watched a lot of videos on arithmetic. That was in 2007. I did that until the fall of 2010. And in the fall of 2010, I took a leap and I decided to go back to school and went to Temple University. I majored in electrical engineering, getting a second Bachelors. And keep in mind, I don't think I've ever gotten above a B+ in math classes, and I was really a straight-C student growing up. And I just finished this year, first year back in college, and I got a 4.0 GPA for the entire year. I got perfect scores on both of my calc final exams and also on my chemistry final exam. I ended both calculus classes, Calc I, II, and chemistry with an average higher than 100%. There are some Khan Academy videos that I probably listened to the same concept over 20 or 30 times. And there is no tutor in the world I could have paid to have sat next to me and repeated the same thing over 20 or 30 times without at least them getting a little bit judgmental or at least them thinking like, oh, well, this guy really is never going to get this concept and he should just give up. Where the understanding really happened was watching those videos and also working through the Khan Academy software and everything. The impact for me in my life, I really see it growing exponentially over the next 20 or 30 years. So from the bottom of my heart, thank you. [END PLAYBACK] Yeah, well, thank you. [APPLAUSE] So I'd love to take questions or comments or anything. Yeah, right over here. The future of assessment? The future of assessment-- well, I think there's a lot of interesting things here. I mean, what's fun about what we're doing is what most people associate as assessment right now are these snapshot things. You get them, snapshot, A, B, C, that's the assessment, or SAT or whatever it is. Now, every interaction with this system is a form of a practice and assessment. We're logging everything. But it's not it's not high stakes in the sense that this is your one shot, and if you don't know it, your future is ruined. It's you can keep trying until you've mastered it like a video game, like a musical instrument, like a martial art or whatever it might be. And so I do imagine a reality where instead of a one-snapshot exam, you have a narrative and data of someone over 12 years. And it's not just a narrative of, do they know exponents or do they know calculus? It's a narrative of, how hard working were they? How much time did they put in? How consistent, how good were when they failed? Did they get back up and do it again? Eventually maybe we can keep data on when the students teach each other, are there statistically significant outcomes when you tutor me verses when you tutor me? And if that's the case, maybe that should be part of your assessment, that you're an effective mentor, that you're an effective teacher. So just that by itself, I think that could be a good direction. And there's even something we've thought about, because how do you give credentials or assessment in a way that's scalable but also in a way that's not cheatable? And we've been playing with the idea, and I don't know if this will ever happen, but the gold standard is really the oral exam, which you get if you're doctoral qualifications and all of the rest. But it's resource-intensive. And you don't even get it at the undergraduate level. But what if you crowd sourced oral exams? So you have Five Ninjas in the [INAUDIBLE]. That's a cheesy name, but you have some title, Admirals or whatever. We'd have to think of a better name. We're Jedis of Calculus. And someone else might be a Junior Jedi. And in order for them to become a Jedi, five current Jedis would have to do a Skype oral exam and maybe you record it. They are now Jedi quality. And then they can get to the next level. And obviously there's incentives for you. And you could even keep stats. And maybe you're always saying no to people, other people are more forgiving. And so you can weight people's votes even. So I think there even is a way to even do oral exams in a scalable way where you actually get real good authentication. But it's an interesting question. We don't know the answer. One thing I would like to see in the whole learning credentialing world, which we all jumble together and we call education, I'd like to see the credential and the learning get decoupled. Because then what you do is actually then institutions can optimize for either. And also then the credential becomes a better [? signal ?] [INAUDIBLE]. None of you guys-- you're going to get an MIT degree. You're never going to have trouble, you go to the next state, at least getting the interview. They're going to say, oh, MIT. I know MIT. But that's not true of the great majority of universities in the country. You could go to Louisiana State University, or you could go to your local community college, and maybe you learned the material as good as the best students out there, but when you go, your resume is still going to be passed over for maybe the MIT who might have not known it as well or the Harvard grad who doesn't know it as well. And so the signaling mechanism right now is broken. So if you actually decouple it so you actually have strong signals that anyone can take that exam, and if you take it, it's as respected as going to a great university. Then all of a sudden, you've kind of done something very disruptive to the whole higher education, even the high school place. But it is something interesting to think about. Yeah? I mean, isn't that snapshot, though, of what we have right now with SATs and GREs? So it is a snapshot, except-- so SATs and GREs are not bad as long as we're beyond the culture of, you only get to take this when you're 17. I'd like to see a world-- and I've actually given this advice to people who are having trouble getting a job. Study for the SAT and do really well on it. If you get 800 on your math portion of the SAT and you do nothing else, you will get an interview even if you're 50 years old. That will get you an interview at whatever job you have. So I'd like to see a reality where, yeah, anyone at any age, there's no stigma associated. It's a one-time, high-stakes, 16 or 17 years old, if I screw up, I'm never going to get into a good university. It should be there are these assessments-- and we can debate whether that is a good assessment. You can always improve on the assessment itself. But yeah, at any time, I didn't do well the first time, but I'm going to make it my goal to eventually do do well on it and then use that as a signal to the world that I can think well and I'm logical and I'll be able to contribute. But it's a fair question. We'd want to make the assessments as good as possible. [INAUDIBLE] Oh, OK. OK, whoever has the microphone wins. A lot of study is being done to individualize the learning profiles, ie, give the child the way he best learns certain content. How do you think about that? So a lot of the psychological type studies or the-- so I have mixed feelings about-- there's a large body of research. And we don't want to seem arrogant about it, but the reality is, it is really hard to determine, especially some of these education studies, how well was the study run? I mean, it's almost impossible to do a truly one-variable change and really pinpoint that that was really the reason why. And I think because sometimes when you focus too much, especially in these areas where it is hard to make a definitive conclusion about this was the cause why the students did as well, I mean, there are theories. It's sometimes a mistake, I think, to just take that and say, oh, I shouldn't try that out. Or this is the best way to do that. And so our approach, I think the way we view it, there's actually two approaches to it. There's the science approach, and there's nothing wrong. I mean, we're trying to do that, too, which is control study, change a variable, very rigorous process. And some of that is going on. But what we want to do culturally is I would call it more of an engineering take on it, which is put stuff out there, get a lot of traction, collect as much good, rigorous data as you can, and then iterate it. And iterate fast. And do AB testing. Do control studies, but in real time. And we have three experiments running right now on our site where we change one variable, two variables. And we're able to run the studies ourselves. Now with that said, we actually have the guy who's leading up our analytics who was actually the head of high frequency trading at Citadel, which is a large hedge fund. And so he also found meaning and all the rest. [LAUGHING] Although I think he found more money than I did before the meaning. [LAUGHING] But what he's also doing besides right running these analytical experiments and all of that is he is looking at the literature. That is something that he enjoys doing. That's actually what he used to do in the hedge fund world. He used to look at the finance literature for something that could be a source of alpha and that he would then implement in some of their algorithms. And so he's now doing that. And in his mind, he thinks 2% of the research is actionable. And so he's out there digging for that 2%. But some of it is good. And so he's out there digging for it, and we are going to implement the stuff that we think is in a very sound way proven to be good. Next question? Who has the microphone? Hi. I had a question about-- I know there's a lot of research to reform education systems in other countries, especially in London, I think. Have you done any research into other methods or plan on marrying the different ways, I guess? It's kind of the same-- I guess there's two parts. Well, I guess on the research side, I mean, it's kind of a similar answer, is that we are open. And I mean, if any of y'all know really good studies that we should be paying attention, really good ways to address this topic or that topic or help students visualize fractions or whatever it is, we want to implement that stuff. So point us to it. What we're resistant to is making that where all of our focus is, because then it becomes hard to build fast and iterate and see what's working. I think another part, I mean, you're kind of hinting at the international. What do we do internationally? It's hard for us right now, and it's a good problem to have, but we're getting pulled in a lot of directions. We actually are getting calls from the ministries of education from countries and saying, oh, we want to run a pilot. We want to do this. And it's very tempting. It's like, wow, that would be big deal. But the more we think about it, any of those one-off initiatives, especially if you're working with the government, frankly, it could overwhelm our-- I mean, we're a 20-person organization now. We've just gotten to 20. I mean, we were one person a year ago. And so we've made the decision that in the very near term, we're going to be very focused on English in the United States and try to be as good as possible. And if we succeed here, then we'll eventually be able to do the rest of the world if we spread ourselves too thin. But one thing we are doing, and this was with some of the Google funding, we are translating the video content into 10 languages. So that is going to be there. Spanish, Portuguese, and Bengali are almost done. And then we have another nine languages in the hopper after that. So just that I think could be valuable. You could put then on thumb drives, DVD players, and bring them out into the field or whatever. It's not the full experience, but even the full experience, the world isn't ready for it because of bandwidth and all the rest. But hopefully those problems might solve themselves. The microphone wins, I'm sorry. Do you have any thoughts about things like proofs, engineering design problems, or even things like compositional writing or public speaking or just other areas in education? Yes, so we have all these other areas of education. So how do you address them with something like a knowledge map or things like that? And our mindset is education is all of these things, starting with basic introduction to new concepts and ideas. And that's what you can do with the videos. Basic practice problems, that one you can do with the exercises. And then you could have less basic practice problems, more do proofs, write essays, write computer programs. You keep going up that chain. And the way we perceive ourselves is, right now the education system has to do all of these things, or should do all these things. And frankly, it's focused right over here. Because it's even failing at this stuff. And it never even gets to some of the stuff that you just talked about. And so if we can make this stuff really good and make it says systematic and be thoughtful and logical about making it better and better and iterating on it and slowly creeping up that, eventually maybe we will have ways for students to write essays and they can peer review. And someone was telling me there's a project here for chunk up essays and another people edit it and things like that. I think there will be ways over the next 5, 10, 20 years to address more and more and more of that. Actually John is working on a project right now for computer science where it will be a hybrid of the exercises and the videos where you can record a video using his tool, and if someone pauses the video, they can actually then edit the code at that state right there. So it's actually an interactive video where the state is changeable. So it's a bit of a puzzle of how. It's a bit of magic to be able to think how you could do that. But yeah, I think that's our job. All of those things are super important. And right now, the solution is if we can take this part off of the traditional teacher's plate, then they can hopefully move to that part. That's an important thing I like to emphasize. We think we're moving teachers up the value chain, not replacing them or anything like that. Microphone? Yeah? Thank you so much for what you've done for education. I'm curious-- I've heard studies saying that there are about 10 million scientists and engineers in America. If you could crowd source to them to help be teachers, kind of like the way you're democratizing teaching with MIT, what would you call on them to help you with? And the second question is, what are some important strategic partnerships you might want to do in the next year, two years, three years to take your work to the next level? There's thousands, millions of engineers and other people who could be mentors, teachers. And even before I started this, I would have loved to somehow, while I had my day job-- I mean, that's what I was doing. I kind of had to work hard to do it with my cousins. And there's actually a project I heard of called Cloud Grandmother. It's literally like a bunch of grandmothers who are there kind of on call. And if you need a grandmother, you press a button, and there's a grandmother. And you can tell them, talk to them, ask them what life was like, where they grew up, and whatever else. [LAUGHTER] And just that I think is a pretty powerful idea. But imagine if it was cloud people who knew math. And you're at Khan Academy. You've watched the videos. You've done the exercises. We say, hey, this person still seems to be having trouble. Do you need help? And all of you guys, maybe you're at MIT or maybe once you're working, you're like, hey, I have lunch from this time to this time. I could be part of the cloud engineering team. I'm having office hours. So if any student needs help, I'm there. And if you have enough of those students, it would be perpetual, year round. At any given moment, you would have 1,000 people waiting to help people. And you have to think about things like safety and all that. But I think you can have a reality eventually where a kid has a problem, click a button, one of us shows up and says, well, let's see. And you would have access to all of their data, and you could be informed, and you could actually help them and it would be recorded or whatever else. We're not anywhere near there yet. I mean, the technology is already there. I mean, in theory that could be built tomorrow. But I think something like that could be pretty-- I think something like that could be interesting for foreign language, too. I have a 2 and 1/2 year old, and I'm thinking about getting him a Skype buddy in like France and Beijing. And so like they can do their 2 and 1/2 year old thing but in each other's languages. [LAUGHTER] And I think that could be the closest thing to cheap immersion type of thing. So, yeah, yeah. [LAUGHTER] Microphone? Oh, yeah, right over there. Hi. You talked about bringing that into that one school near you. And I was wondering if you have thought to bring it to other schools, if other schools have like contacted you. And it just seems like it would be a huge scale problem but really awesome if you could. Yeah, so the question is we did it with those two schools at one school district. How do we scale this thing? Is that even what we should be about? And in our organization, we've decided one thing. We have 3 and 1/2 million students a month. Most of them are not using it in a formal setting. And I think one of our secret sauce is that we've been focused on the student. And so that's always going to be our priority. But this school pilots makes-- I mean, maybe more schools should be doing this. But how do you scale it? How do you do that? And so this year we're doing the whole district of Los Altos. It's not a huge district, but it's on the order of about 1,000 students in fifth and sixth grade. And then we are working with other schools, a couple of charter schools, Summit Prep, Kipp Academy, Eastside Prep in East Palo Alto. And we're seeing how it works in those settings, and can we get similar type of results? And we don't think our role is going to be to hand-hold every school in the country to do this. We would never be able to do that. It would require thousands, millions of people to do that. Our role is to do it with this group right now and then see what works, what doesn't, document what works and then kind of make it self-service, put it out there so that other-- so right now, it looks like from our data about 6,000 classrooms are doing it in some way, shape, or form. We have no contact with them, We don't know if they're doing it well or not. But if we can make it easier, maybe we can make that 60,000 or 70,000. And maybe-- I mean, this is the fun thing about being a not-for-profit-- we have so many people who want to volunteer. And we're not leveraging that right now. But maybe if you guys are like, hey, I want to try this out with a local school, I'm sure most of y'all in this room based on this talk, y'all could go do it. Or you could visit us out in California, visit some of the schools there, see how that works. Then you could adopt your own schools. I think things like that will help the scale. And I don't know if this will work, but the real thing that will happen is-- and this is where I think the rest of education reform maybe fails. It's been all top down. Let's pass a bill. Let's pass a law. Let's do this to union contracts or whatever else. What we're saying is, let's prove the case. And let's show the world that it works. And when, frankly, the mothers of the world see that there's a girl in Los Altos doing trigonometry and their kid is not, they will go to the PTA. And they will say, why aren't you doing this? And it's free. And so there's no reason. Well, we just don't feel like it. I mean, I think the mothers of the world can be a very powerful instrument. [LAUGHTER] One very serious problem we have is that the science and, let's say, engineering teachers in middle and high school don't know what they're teaching. Have you thought about engaging the teachers in your extraordinary program and getting them involved? It's something that comes up a lot. Do we do teacher training? And it was actually something that came up actually very early. Even when I was just doing the videos and it was just a part-time thing, I got a letter from a very large school district, an email, saying, can we use your videos for teacher training? I said, well, why don't you just use it for the students? Oh. no, no, we can't do that. We'd have to use it for-- and I guess philosophically, I mean, we don't mind it being used for teacher training. But in our minds, I think that's where a lot of ed reform efforts have failed, is that they focus so much on the teachers, which is not a bad thing to focus on, but it's usually at the cost of the students. And so in ours-- especially because that's where most of our users are. We're going direct to the student. We would teach teachers if it's teaching teachers on how to become better shepherds of their other students, so if it's a new model. But it's not even clear that I know how to-- it's not clear, I guess is the simple answer. But if it's going to help the end student, we'd be open to it. But yeah, so that's our core philosophy. Yeah, next question? Oh, right over there, yeah. So I've done a lot of learning, and I feel like it's really productive to learn through experience and first-hand learning by actually doing something. You talk about actually being a lab and testing things, for example. So I guess is that one of the goals of Khan Academy is to actually get to that point where we're teaching experiences more than just skills? Or is that [INAUDIBLE] teachers? Yeah, so the question is, and it's related to the question up there, is Khan Academy all about teaching skills or is it eventually going to be experiences? And once again, the experiences are up here, these simulations and games and all, whatever, projects. And so we just have to keep working up that ladder. I mean, I told y'all about that trading game for risk. When I did it with the kids, they each had a piece of construction paper that was one of the colors on the board. And every trade, they had to put a little slip on what the exchange price-- they would give it to me, and I would put it into a little spreadsheet so that I would actually have a chart later on to show them. But even then, I said, man, we should have a little simple trading platform. And if we build it, then everyone could do these. And then you don't have to do it for risk. You could do stuff like decision markets for who's going to win the next presidential election. Who's going to win the Academy Awards? Who's going to win the Booker prize? And then all of a sudden you're doing something analytical and fun and game-like, but to win it you have to start reading a lot of books. And you have to start doing other interesting things. But tools like that enable experiential things that right now are very hard. I mean, it's hard for a teacher, especially one that didn't work at a hedge fund to think about how a trading floor works or what a market maker is and what a specialist is. And we had all of these things with the middle school students. So yeah, we want to get there, but we have a lot ahead of us. Hello. What would you think about MIT's project OpenCourseWare? And do you have any plans integrating with this great project as well? Yeah, and I will tell you, frankly, in 2001-- I don't know how many of y'all-- I don't know if it was '99 or 2001 that MIT OpenCourseWare announced. 2001. But I don't know if y'all remember the environment then. Almost every other major university was exploring some type of like, we're going to monetize this. We're going to create some kind of distance learning thing. People are going to charge money for it. And frankly, it was one of the proudest moments of my life as an MIT graduate when MIT just threw the gauntlet down and said, no, this is for the world. This isn't about us trying to make money off of it. And we're just going to give it away. And so I think that that was kind of a groundbreaking thing that was done very early on at this. And it really changed a lot of people's thinking and was a lot of leadership. I think the things that it's faced is the content wasn't purposed to this consumption. And so I'm actually probably one of the biggest consumers of MIT OpenCourseWare. But it's like Lecture 9 of Thermodynamics. And you're like, OK, well, let's see what happens in Lecture 9. [LAUGHTER] And you go, and I was motivated to get to that nugget that I was trying to understand. So I think there's things that MIT can do and maybe we can do together to make it more special purpose. That's why I'm excited about this project. Because it is coming from the students, by the students, and the faculty, but it is special purposed for this type of reality. So I think it has a much better chance of really becoming something that gets a lot of traction, gets a lot of kids excited and learning about different things. So I see no problem with me in mixing the Khan and the MIT brand-- once again, two major institutions. [LAUGHTER] Yeah, right over there. So I think I recently read that you won a $5 million grant from O'Sullivan's to build a physical building or physical academy. And I was wondering what you were trying to do with it or what your plans are. Yes, so we did get that grant. It's actually for several things. One is to actually expand our faculty. And we actually brought on two art history professors already. I encourage y'all to watch their videos. They're pretty interesting. And they had already made a lot of videos. And no one had seen them before. And we were able to just really give them the validation. So they're there. A part of that grant, about a third, is actually to build a platform so that other people can use the data, the analytics, the platform for their own content. And maybe eventually we can see the videos and the exercises that are really good, and we can expose those to the world. But then another third is to explore a physical thing, a physical experience. And we want to eventually get to a real physical school. But we're going to start this summer with a summer camp so that we get full ownership. And now we're going to be able to do these things for real. We have real people. OK, what are the games? What are the experiments we can do? And as we learn more and more, we can then document them or maybe even make software tools for these experiences and then allow any math teacher or science teacher or whatever teacher in the world to actually do them. But we do want to do a school. Because I think when you do a school, it's not about incremental change. You can rethink everything. You can rethink the whole model of what it means to be a school. Because as soon as students are working at their own pace, why separate them by age group? If teachers aren't giving lectures anymore, do you need to have one teacher , 20 students, one teacher, 20 students, one teacher, 20 students? Can't you have three teachers, 60 students? Can't you have everyone working together? Can't you have older students mentoring younger? Do you have to separate calculus from physics, from chemistry, from biology, from writing, from logical, from computer science? Or can all of that be happening in one big, epic room? And if a student gets inspired-- I mean, it's crazy right now. I was speaking to one of the founders of Facebook, and it's crazy. If a student gets inspired right now in high school and says, I am so blown away by genomics. I want to go do research in that for a month. Too bad, no, no. You have essays due tomorrow. You have a problem set. You have all of this stuff. No, sorry, no creative activity here. You have too many things. You're on the assembly line. But all of a sudden, if students are working at their own pace, there's no such thing as missing school. If your family wants to take a trip to Latin America in October, you can. You're not going to miss school. And you can even do stuff there. Maybe you don't even have one physical site. Maybe you have 20 physical sites distributed around the world. And one site has a couple of teachers that are experts in art history. One site has experts on physics. And so if I'm in one site and I needed help with string theory, I can get on Skype and have an experience with the teacher in London. But I still get the physical experience and the community and the social experience of the students at my site. So there's things that we could completely rethink where we're getting the best of both worlds. We're getting the academic scaffold, and we're getting the projects, the explorations and the startings of things. And we're actually code naming the school we're starting Hogwarts. [LAUGHTER] No, and we'll see what happens. I have a 2 and 1/2 year old. So it's for selfish reasons that I want this school to exist in the next few years. Sal, great talk. Thanks for coming. I think I speak for at least a fraction of the students when I ask, are you hiring? I'm I hiring? Yes, and that's my reason for coming. [LAUGHTER] Frankly, this whole thing is I think predicated on getting the best talent out there. And actually I was at the business school earlier this morning, and they have a case on Khan Academy. And the case was, well, this is great. It's getting traction, but how does this not-for-profit compete with Google and Facebook? And actually that was a question we were asking ourselves. But the one thing we found is-- and I will tell you, we are paying upper quartile of the Bay Area. And that's something our board decided, that this isn't about nickel and diming people who want to do good for the world just because it's a not-for-profit. This is about creating the single best content you can create for the world to use maybe for a long, long, long time. So you don't want to short change what that experience is. So we want to get the absolute best talent. And frankly, the most reassuring thing about this experience is people like John Resig have joined. I mean, Johh-- he literally wrote a cover letter that says, I wrote jQuery, the most-used JavaScript library in the world. And I was like, yeah, I think we'll interview this guy. [LAUGHTER] But he's the most famous of-- I mean, you have more Twitter followers than I do. But he's not the only one. I mean, he can testify for the rest of the team, they are somewhat known figures, or they should be known figures in their fields. I mean, [? Jace ?] who came from Citadel, I mean, there's no better analytics person. I mean, he could be managing $10 billion today, and he could be making $100 million a year. And he's deciding to do this week. We just got-- I won't tell you who it is, but there was another gentleman who was very early at a very prominent tech company that's a very prestigious tech company, and he came, essentially we assumed as a philanthropist. Maybe he wanted to write a check, support us in some way. And he brought his foundation people with him, and we talked a little bit about the projects we want to work on and what we could use and all of that. And then his people kind of walked out of the room, and he just kind of sat there. And we're like, oh, this is weird, like, what is this? And he said, well, I actually want to work here. And I'm like, wow, this guy could like buy an island, build a roller coaster, and pay people to ride it with him. [LAUGHTER] And he wants to like be near us. And so yes, I encourage y'all all to join. And we're looking for awesome, creative people who want to impact people through videos and software and everything else. Oh, up there. Sorry, the microphone wins. Hi, over here. I was just wondering if you could comment on what your thoughts on the scaling education that's inherently experiential. So it could be like the trading game or the chemistry lab or like learning how to play an instrument. These are things that are hard to drill down and be so reductionist in the approach. Yeah, well, like I said, part of any experience, part of it is the more you get the skills, you get the basic concepts, and then you eventually-- so right now at minimum, we're going to get that part off the plate of the resource intensive, which is the human interaction so that humans can focus on the more experiential things. But then over time, we can implement some of these trading games. We can implement ways for students to connect with each other and tutor each other. We even thought maybe you have, after a video, someone can ask a question on a video in a video format, and the next person can answer the question in the video format. You have message board threads based on people sharing the same blackboard and answering each other's questions. You could have like that trading game I talked about. We could implement the software so that any classroom can create decision markets. We did another game in that summer camp where the kids had to guess how many popsicle sticks where in a pile. And then they took pictures of the popsicle sticks and put them up on Mechanical Turk, and we paid people a penny to vote on how many popsicle sticks there were to see if the wisdom of the crowd really works. And we didn't know what would happen. And so these are the type of things that at minimum we can document and share with people. And even better, maybe we can put it on the side in terms of games and simulations and manipulatives and whatever else so we can go further and further up that chain. And I want to be clear. I don't think we'll ever be able to get the ideal experience purely through software. But it allows a human to take the experience that much further. Yup, right here. Hi. So I was wondering. I'm a really big fan, and I'm seeing like the future would be integrating this system into school systems as it has already been in California schools. But one concern I would think of is a school is not just an environment for intellectual growth. It's also for emotional and social growth. But Khan Academy is vary based on individual-level learning. So I was wondering what your thoughts were. Yeah, no, that's a good question. And I think this is one thing we hear a lot of. But there's one thing I want to-- when I described that classroom-- so I agree. Education is actually three things. It's learning, it's credentialing, and socialization. And people say that a lot. In fact, a lot of traditional educators, oh, it's about socialization. Don't want to involve computers. But how much socialization do you get in a traditional classroom? I'm not saying all classrooms are like this, but a lot of classrooms I sat in, 30 kids, completely quiet, listening to a lecture, taking notes. Absolute no social. In fact, it's anti-- its dehumanizing to be in a room with people and not being able to talk to them, not be allowed to talk to them, not to be able to express yourself. And so what we're advocating, even if you're talk about the core skills, we're advocating, no, we want kids to get up and go help their peers. We want them to mentor each other. In some of these classrooms, when a kid is about to achieve something epic, the rest of the kids gather around them and start cheering them on and then all the rest. And so even that is far more social and interactive. And we actually want the best achievements not to be that you mastered 100 modules and you know calculus now. That's good. That's a good achievement. But it's even a better achievement if your peers think you're the best tutor. Your peers have that respect for you. You're the best communicator. You empathize with your peers. And once again, the spectrum of activities that are on the learning side, there are the core skills, understanding, one, learning how to do it, but then understanding what it is, then applying it, all of these things. If we could take this off of the plate of class time, then class time can be more for the games, the simulations, building robots, whatever else it might be. So I think we can actually be a catalyst for better socialization. I mean, my middle school was Lord of the Flies. I mean, it was not-- [LAUGHTER] So I think there's a lot of improvement, actually, we can do on socialization. Actually I think, frankly, socialization right now is more broken in schools than the actual academic part. Yeah? Oh, well, she's got one, too. OK, well, we'll go here next. So yeah, I actually didn't know what Khan Academy was before I came here. You have like a halo. I feel like I'm speaking to a prophet or something. [LAUGHTER] So yeah, I mean, I think this is really cool-- I'm taking this question very seriously. I'm sitting down here, and I'm thinking, I want to go back home, and I want to use this in public schools. Because if you go to a public school back home in Puerto Rico, you're probably not going to go to college. It's that bad. And I think this will help my little brother who's having trouble in math, too. Something that I think is there are going to be a lot of kids, actually, that don't like math, don't like science. How do you get them to finish the program? Where is the motivation? So there's a couple of things. And for a place like Puerto Rico, we're actually translating a lot of the content into Spanish. That will be the first language that we expose and hopefully port, eventually, the software. Although that's not something we're able to do tomorrow. But the broader question is how you get kids engaged. I mean, that's the fun thing about the internet and this kind of engineering mentality and iterative mentality is that Amazon.com asks itself that same question. Well, not everyone is going to buy a book. How do we get more people to buy a book? Well, we can apply that same methodology. OK, let's try this. Maybe if some people watch the video of Mark, that will motivate them. Maybe if someone sees a video from someone else or you give a talk or you change the color to something, maybe that's what does the trick. So I don't know if we'll ever be able to get everyone into that motivated bucket, but I suspect as we keep testing and iterating and looking at the data and looking at the data, we'll get a much larger spectrum of people. And we're already seeing that. I mean, even in the classrooms. That seventh grade pilot, even day one what blew the teacher's mind is this was a class where every student was disengaged. This is why they were in that class. And it was a video game for them. And they got engaged. There was a healthy level of competition and fun and camaraderie around things. And so I think the fun thing is it seems like it's already moving in that direction. And then we can keep iterating it and improving it so it gets even better. And I encourage some of you guys to join us so that you can help us do that. And if you like [? cited ?] like numbers, I would go play the lottery right now. [LAUGHTER] Next? Oh yeah. right here. So traditionally, we all learn from somebody who's older than us, like even on MIT seal. MIT seal shows an older figure and a younger student, a mentor-student relationship. So if your ideal world plays out where the age won't matter anymore, do you think there will be any problem, like a social problem, with people accepting younger students teaching them or younger people teaching them? And that's an interesting point. And I don't know 100% if I know the answer, but my gut feeling right now is right now we have that problem. Right now, because we associate mathematical concepts or scientific concepts with ages, there's huge stigmas, right? A logarithm is a more complex thing than most things that people encounter in their everyday life. But still, 40-year-olds are embarrassed to admit that they don't understand what a logarithm is. And that's because it's associated with a seventh-grade math concept. But they're not embarrassed to go to karate class and be a green belt, and there's a little nine-year-old who is a black belt. And they're not opposed to saying, hey, well, how do you do that? And so it's really about removing the stigmas, complete decoupling the concept with these arbitrary age ideas. And I think when you do that, I mean, frankly, I think one of the things that's a lot and I think we're helping a little bit here, too, is parents are afraid to admit what they don't know to their kids. They think it will somehow undermine their authority. And so one, I mean, Khan Academy can help them stay ahead a little bit. [LAUGHTER] Which we've learned is happening. But even better, it can decouple. We've had so many requests, well, can you tell us on that whole [INAUDIBLE], what's a seven-year-old supposed to do? What's a 13-- we're like, no, we're not going to do that. Because you're supposed to do whatever you're ready for. You could be 50, but if you've never seen math in your life, start right up there and just keep working. And I think that will be-- I don't mind learning. I mean, it's weird. Academics sometimes makes me feel weird learning from someone younger, but anything else, I feel completely fine. And that's because of these stigmas. Right up there. With so many K through 12 students, specifically middle and high school, invested in social networks, what are your opinions on using social networks in education? Yeah, I joke the Facebook implies that it's a Facebook for a school. So we should use Khan Academy. But I think there's a lot of things that we observe. The same way we can look at Amazon and see, OK, Amazon uses the techniques to-- look at Zynga. We could be a productive Farmville in terms of-- [LAUGHTER] But it's true. They've perfected some very-- people are paying them to water fictional crops. I mean, if that works, imagine-- but at least they're blazing new territory. And these are directly applicable to the type of stuff we're doing. So I think there's a lot to be said. I think we're going to explore it. And we'll just see. We do very minor Facebook integration right now, but we do imagine a world where you achieve things. You can share it with your friends. You can do friendly games. You can do multiple people together can achieve something with your social network. We're not doing it yet, but it's definitely stuff that we would love to explore. Yup, right over here? Considering that students learn so well from all your videos and that you've made 2,800 of them, are you just a ninja on like 2,800 different K through 12-- Or a Jedi? Are you a Jedi? My wife will tell you, and maybe I learned this in business school, the ability to talk with authority about things that I really don't know much about. [LAUGHTER] [APPLAUSE] It's a skill. But I think I'm not too different than many of you guys, is that I love learning. And my life is now-- I get to learn things and be motivated and teach it, and a lot of people can experience it because of that. But the simple answer is, I mean, 2,800 sounds like a lot, but you do four or five videos a day, it does add up very, very quickly. And yeah, I suspect many of the people in the room could do what I'm doing. And I think it's just about mindset and willing to just go put yourself out there and just do them and put them out there and see what people say and keep iterating and keep doing it. I mean, a lot of people wanted me to do organic chemistry videos. And that was the first-- I was like, I've got to do this, but I took 512. And I did all right, but I didn't feel like I truly understood organic chemistry the way I might have physics or math. But I was like, no, if I'm going to do this, I have to understand it at that level. So I immersed myself in chemistry and organic chemistry for a month, read everything I could find, went to the used bookstore, old Russian books I was trying to decipher. And I kind of started to get it. Oh, there is a kind of a theme here. And there is an intuition to this. And then I started making the videos. But so yeah, I think what I bring to the table is that I love to jump into something and immerse my brain in it, and eventually it kind of clicks. And frankly, that's why I liked the hedge fund world. I talked to a trucking company-- y'all should work at Khan Academy, not a hedge fund. I don't want to make this a-- but you work at a trucking company, you context switch, and you learn about all these different industries, and you learn about how the world works. And so it's kind of the same type of mental fun, so to speak. Yup, other question? Eventually we'll get the microphone to this gentleman here. This kind of goes back to the issue you had with Nadia where she was good at solving puzzles but kind of got stuck in a particular concept. One of the biggest problems in current math education tends to be people learn the concepts of math very well and learn how to apply it, but they don't really learn the beauty of it. And once they get to a certain stage, they can't really think outside the box or learn proofs and do [? original ?] research. And what do you think about that? And how do you think Khan Academy can adjust that? No, I think that's the problem with some of the top-down curricular development, is that at no point on the Common Core standards that students should be in awe. At no point does it say, blow students minds with Euler identity. It's not there. Even though that is what it's all about. I mean, that's the stuff that gives you-- and it's funny, because so many people are fixated in like, oh, well, no one is going to like math unless you show applications. And look, if you can show applications, show applications. There is something valuable about that. But what I always point out is in math class when people say, when am I going to use this, they're saying that out of frustration. And the reason why I say that, no one ever says that in a philosophy class. When am I going to use this? When are we going to have to care whether there's life after death or whether there's some platonic cave or whatever? No one says in PE, when am I going to have to put an orange ball in a net? What is that good for? No one says that. [LAUGHTER] [APPLAUSE] Not one says that. And that's because they're stimulated. They're motivated. They see the fun. There's something visceral. There's something human about, in their minds, those experiences that they're not getting in math class, even though math class is the purest philosophy. It's not just word games. It's actually going to get you to something about the universe that's being told, something deep. And it's being lost right now. I talked to a couple of students who made some of the videos, and one of the students brought up, we have to give the students the why of doing this. And the superficial interpretation of that is, oh, we have to show that it's useful in banking or accounting or if you have to build a building. But the why is actually, I think, an implicit message that's given in the awe of the giver. And if you give a lesson like this, even if you give a million applications, by the tone of your voice, you're telling the student there's no reason to learn this. You shouldn't care. But if you really are in awe of the subject material, if there really is something mystical and powerful about it to you, the student will get the why. They'll say, wow, this is the truth about the universe. This is telling me something about how everything all fits together. And I think yes, if any of y'all make the videos or if y'all want to volunteer making exercise modules, those are the winning videos. Those are the ones that will-- they all don't have to be there. Not all of my videos are these epic, mind-blowing experiences. But if you can, I mean, that changes everything. Yeah? Do you think that a textbook could be made to blow students' minds? How do I feel about textbooks? Yes. And what was the second part? Do you feel like a textbook could be made to do all the Khan Academy things, blow students' minds in this way. Or is there something in the interactivity that's necessary? I think good books can. I mean, I've read books that blew my mind, that are saying something, the idea there is profound. Actually, science fiction books, many times I'm, wow, that is a thought-provoking idea, or not even just science fiction, any type of book. Textbooks don't do that. I mean, sometimes they have a little orange box, like, oh, so-and-so works as a contractor. And it's just like, it's not mind blowing. And I think textbooks have value. I have a bunch of them. They are good references. But I think they have to introspect on where that industry is going. Because I think a textbook for most people does two things or is supposed to do two things. It's supposed to teach with some text. And I think, frankly, what differentiates people who can go to MIT versus people-- are people capable of reading that text? I think most of us are actually decent book readers, but we're actually a small minority. Most students cannot. They've never had a good experience being able to learn from that. And then the practice is just a couple problems at the back with every other question in the back. And the publisher doesn't know who's reading what, what's adding value. They can't iterate on it. And so it is, I think, an interesting question for a large industry. Let me make that the last question. Oh, yes. [INAUDIBLE] Sal's been going at this turtle's pace all day. [LAUGHS] So let me first give you a last couple words to the group. Yeah, thank you for having me, the dean and everybody. For me, it's so exciting just to-- I don't know. When I come to MIT, I really feel like I'm with family on some level. And I get teary-eyed and [INAUDIBLE]. So I'm really honored to be here. Thank you. [APPLAUSE] In this epic room, you are definitely the Education Jedi. So it's been great to have you here. It has been great. Oh, thank you. [APPLAUSE]
Info
Channel: MITK12Videos
Views: 451,377
Rating: undefined out of 5
Keywords: Education
Id: z9JCpMCQ5qM
Channel Id: undefined
Length: 90min 9sec (5409 seconds)
Published: Fri Mar 09 2012
Related Videos
Note
Please note that this website is currently a work in progress! Lots of interesting data and statistics to come.