Sal Khan: Beyond Khan Academy | 3b1b Podcast #2

welcome to the 3b1b podcast i'm grant sanderson today my conversation is with sal khan a man who hardly needs any introduction he's probably best known as the founder and voice behind khan academy which has got to be one of the most successful online education platforms ever i mean he has put out literally thousands of videos on just about any topic that anyone could want to learn in school not only was khan academy a huge inspiration to me in terms of setting this precedent for the role that online explanations could serve some listeners might know that i actually used to work for khan academy so honestly i owe a lot of my career to some of the people that i met there and just being in an environment of so many like-minded folks to include sal khan himself but as influential as khan academy is for this conversation i wanted to focus on a couple different projects that sal has worked on that not as many people might know about including schoolhouse.world which is a platform for matching together tutors with students in a sort of massive decentralized way and the khan lab school which is this brick and mortar institution it's an actual k-12 school that implements a lot of the philosophies that sal was putting out in the early 2000s but before we get into all that a brief message from today's sponsor this episode was supported in part by brilliant and as a personal side note i actually think brilliant is an especially good partner for this podcast because the reason that i decided to start it was to try to do something that encouraged people who are interested in getting started with online explanation and brilliant as an organization has actually done way more than most to help support up-and-coming creators i mean just as one small example when i announced the summer of math exposition competition brilliant reached out to me and said that they would happily offer five thousand dollars in prizes to the top entries in that contest which at the moment i'm thinking i'll split evenly between the top five contestants um so brilliant is a platform where you can learn all sorts of math and science in a problem-driven way so you come to understand topics like foundational math relativity data science and many more through a well-crafted set of puzzles and exercises rather than through passive lectures there are many lessons that are available for free and listeners to this podcast who visit brilliant.org 3b1b can get 20 off their annual subscription to the full catalog of over 60 courses so that's brilliant.org 3b1b and without further ado my conversation with sal khan it's good to see you it's actually been i think close to five years i can't believe that you're aging better than i am um well since we last talked you i mean you've kicked off a number of things but among them uh schoolhouse.world is a new project to me at least uh can you talk a little bit about why you started that what it's all about yeah you know from the early days of khan academy you know i started this whole project started in 2004 in some ways with me tutoring my family members and in 2005 i started making software for them and that was the first khan academy and even back then i always had this dream that the the the website the platform wouldn't just be a place to get practice and eventually we added videos but also a place for learners to connect with each other and when i used to tutor my cousins and we're only talking about i started with one cousin and then as you know word spreading my family free tutoring was going on it became many cousins i had a little link called classrooms and you you there were four or five virtual classrooms you click on it we would have a shared blackboard that if one person writes the other person could see it and vice versa and we were using some primitive voice over ip technology uh to talk to hear each other that's actually how i was tutoring my cousins back in the day and so it's always been in the back of my mind if there could be a way that we could figure out ways for people to not just learn from a site but also to learn from each other when i wrote one world schoolhouse i wrote a lot about the power of peer-to-peer learning i i've always advocated that in a classroom setting the more that we can release the students to help each other the better obviously not only the student that's learning benefits but the student teaching benefits a ton i think both you and i have we've almost been indulgent in how much fun it is to teach and how much more you learn when you have to learn to teach other folks and so when the pandemic hit last year and khan academy usage was was going through the roof but it was also clear that there's a big gap in what has now been called synchronous learning and people were more socially isolated than ever and so my thinking was now or never let's at least try to create a platform where people can actually help each other and i did it outside of khan academy because khan academy team was so focused on on so many things i didn't want to distract it but we built a prototype last summer by the end of the summer we had already had a lot of great successes and it was already starting to work got our first philanthropic funding last fall and ever since then some actually several states i think we're at eight or nine states now have signed on saying yeah we want to use this as our tutoring platform there's been interesting aspects of it that where not only can you certify your knowledge to become a tutor but that certification of your knowledge and your reputation as a tutor is universities like university chicago have been using it for college admissions you've talked about like different things the credentialing could be in a world where we're a little bit more enlightened about how we teach and that like tutoring can be a part of that like being able to teach is a better demonstration of knowledge than anything was that in the back of your mind thinking that schoolhouse star world could be just a credentialing outlet that's a little bit better than standardized tests or is that more of a happy ancillary accident that it was not the goal nor is it the focus of schoolhouse.world the real focus of schoolhouse.world is to get as many people access to high quality human to human experiences as possible and and we're continuing to launch things like what we're calling series which are really multi-session cohorts where you can really form a bonds with folks now you know that i i've always also i also wrote in one world schoolhouse about the future of credentialing and i've always thought that well the ideal would be some list of the things that you have truly mastered a portfolio of your work your creative work and then some type of reputation some type of what other human beings think of you and so there's always been a view that khan academy mastery could maybe one day be part of a signal a new type of standardized signal i think the traditional standardized signals will always have a place but there could be a new way where on a platform like khan academy just by practicing and getting feedback you actually are getting assessment and you're getting standardized assessment and so if there's ways that you can you can signal that in a way that's hard to game or cheat uh it could be valuable for other folks and so when the pandemic hit we also know that a lot of students were having difficulty acting accessing traditional tests we know that even grading became weird or inconsistent in a lot of schools and it was actually university of chicago that said hey couldn't we use khan academy mastery somehow as a signal for what students know and don't know i've always wanted to do that but the real question is how do you validate that how do you authenticate that it's them and not their their older sister doing doing the work for them and that's where we realize well we were already thinking about using khan academy mastery as a way to certify tutors on schoolhouse.world and the way we were doing it was students take a assessment on khan academy which is generated from a very deep item bank so it's very hard to see many repeat questions they have to record themselves and their screen while they take the assessment they have to explain their reasoning out loud orally while they do it and if they hit the 90 threshold then they submit that video to schoolhouse.world it gets peer reviewed by people they don't know and if it looks like it's really their work they got to 90 percent they were able to explain their reasoning they we say yeah you know that unit you can go on your journey of potentially tutoring that unit but it's also an artifact that says you generally know that unit and university of chicago found it really valuable because more than just a test score you can click on the link and actually see the student doing that unit and i think anyone who watches one of those videos of a student performing that unit test has no question about whether they know that material or not that's a super good point but it seems like a um kind of like a high human hour cost to review that are the peer reviewers actually looking through every minute of the video and like what's the typical amount of time that it requires to credential one person this way for the tutoring yeah there's a process so people don't have to watch the the video in its entirety it really they just need to scrub to some key moments sample it two or three times the beginning and the end tend to be pretty important but then sampling in between checking for any weird edits things like that but we found it to be a pretty robust process and and i remind folks traditional assessment is actually far less authenticatable in a lot of ways right you in a large university class they don't check ids uh there's obviously even cases in traditional standardized assessment where which are administered locally where where there's been more cheating than we would like so there's never going to be a perfect system but i think the fact that it is peer-reviewed it's recorded that artifact is always going to be there i think are very strong incentives i don't think anyone would want a video of them cheating out on the internet forever that's a very good point uh aside from the fact that it's a good credentialing tool or that it's good for the students um who are learning from it definitely uh it seems like there's a lot of other benefits to just tutoring in terms of strengthening your own knowledge or in the case of like work like yours where you're actively trying to explain things to others online where it's not a tutoring session you're just sitting there as if there's a 2d in front of you how important do you think that is like do you still actively tutor the same way that you did with your cousins back in 2004 is that more a distant memory but you remember the the skills necessary to do that when you're there in your office recording a new video yeah when i record videos i'm curious what you know how you think about it when you do yours but i definitely think about i think about the same way that i was tutoring my cousins back 14 15 years ago i just try to model what's going on in their mind i try to model how i sound to the other person make sure that i'm not talking down to them making sure that i'm not condescending at the same time making sure that i'm not using a bunch of shorthand and jargon and skipping steps i try to be very transparent with my my thought processes um i try to as much as possible let my my true self out for better for worse uh and you know one thing you do brilliantly uh and and i i aspire to do as well is really try to draw connections uh things that little aha moments things that uh like wait oh wow these are really the same phenomenon just expressed in in in different ways uh so yeah when i make videos i met people who have trouble teaching to a a computer but i definitely imagine someone listening uh when i'm doing it i i you know i have young kids now every now and then i still am tutoring folks i've run a few sessions on schoolhouse.world and to your point there's no better way of learning something deeply than tutoring it yourself i mean i've certainly found this and um both when i was at khan academy and doing the trying to mimic your style and you know actively tutoring someone ahead of time would be beneficial if there was the time at least pretending that's beneficial but even for the kind of things that i'll do now which is you know it's scripted i write a script and it's it's like i try to produce it and everything but if i teach that lesson to someone ahead of time preferably multiple people invariably it will be more approachable or it will be somehow more engaging but i actually kind of find it hard to keep up active tutoring in my life especially during the pandemic and such would you like recommend to someone who's they want to make educational stuff online they may be writing blog posts maybe they're making videos would you recommend like making a schoolhouse.world account or actively trying to tutor in some way would that be a a strong requirement like you just can't make a good video unless you've done that or is it kind of a gets you 50 of the way there i'm clearly biased but i think the more that you're able to directly interact with students the better i probably don't do enough of it i'm still kind of you know coasting on on experiences that i've had in the past obviously i also i'm the chair and the founder of a school so i do get a lot of interaction with students there and at various moments i've had i've stepped in and done some of the tutoring and some of the teaching at the school so that's that's helped me connect be connected i don't think it's a a must-have i think there's people who are probably creating great content without having done that tutoring but to your point when you do the tutoring you just get a better intuition for where people get tripped up i've been surprised while tutoring you know things that i don't think are going to be the aha moment sometimes are the aha moment i was like oh let me mention that more you know so even even khan academy videos you know i don't i don't uh script them but i've usually tutored or explained that concept to people sometimes even at a dinner party and when i see their eyes light up and that when i see them say oh wait i never realized that i'm like okay i'm definitely going to highlight that i'm definitely not going to forget uh to say that so i think it helps to actually tutor pulling specifics out of thin air is sometimes hard but does anything come into your mind when you're thinking of these uh aha moments that someone came to that you didn't appreciate but you emphasized more or struggling points that you found when you were there with a kls student that changed the way that you made a video there's one that immediately came to my mind as an aha moment although this was probably a self-aha moment but then i've tested it with people at dinner parties and when they were also similarly ahad i'm like i'm definitely going to include this in a video i remember when i was doing history videos on ancient india and i i learned just through the research that the and this was when i was looking at the origins of sanskrit and how early philologists realized the connections between sanskrit latin and german and realized actually sanskrit was the reason that they even realized how connected latin and german were and um in the vedas four thousand plus year old indian texts kind of the foundation of hinduism the most mentioned deity is indra and in the vedas and other sources indra has a different father but in in the vedas his his father in sanskrit is sky father and in sanskrit that is dio spatar jo spatar jupiter zeus so there you go it's mind-blowing it's that is earth shattering it's earth shattering zeus and i never even made the connection between zeus and jupiter like you're always taught that they're the same god but you're like no but it's zeus potter jupiter joe sparta they're all the exact same entity and so there's obviously the linguistic connections that made people realize that there might have been this indo-european group that spread from central asia some people think they spread from india some people think they spread from the caucuses but there was actually a religious one and the religion is alive today in hinduism uh which which was was mind blowing to me and one of my fun things you know my family is bengali and bengali is pretty close to sanskrit and there's all these words that i'm just used to using and then i i've started you know look at it and i was like wait that's the same word as the latin word or uh the the english word uh you know like in in in urdu or in hindi the word for uh inside is under under um you know if you say on top of it's upper upper right like i'm like wait they're like they're so connected but you don't realize it when you're immersed kind of a non-sequitur but kind of related my favorite one of these is the etymology for the word education and how it comes from idus like to bring out as opposed to yeah so it shares a latin root like educare with the word deduce and usually we think of education as like the teacher is pouring knowledge into the student's head but as you well know something a lot more socratic is just more effective where you're trying to pull it out and the fact that it's already baked into the word that it should be pulling out no there's wisdom in language that i never appreciated on the on the topic of uh kls and engagement with them is there anything about actually running that school and realizing how khan academy or some of the tools that you've built works kind of on the ground inside brick and mortar that's changed how you either run the organization or changed how you start to make lessons and the platform surrounding it i think the big and i i knew this going into some degree in in school and the one world school house was published in 2012 the last third of the book was what could education look like and i threw out ideas like more peer-to-peer learning mixed-age classrooms more student independence and agency less lecturing and more educare more more allowing students to learn how to learn and pulling it out of them uh even challenging traditional calendars why do we have summer vacation and and some people when they cringe when i say that they say no i'm talking about all year round should be fun like a good academic summer camp uh why do why do school end at three o'clock when most families that are two income families parents don't come home until five or six pm uh why can't homework happen during the school day if it goes to six instead of getting in the way of family connection or sleep which are very very important so there are all these ideas and it's easy relatively easy to write down ideas and say yeah this is the way it should be but i knew that look it's one thing to write it's not a whole other thing to try to implement it and so that was the view of kls it started about seven or eight years ago we actually had just now had our first graduates but the um the the i think the the the journey uh even though i knew it was going to be tough at times i've learned a ton to your question i learned about just how much and i i knew this to some degree intellectually but the more that you work with school administrators and the faculty and to realize how complex a teacher's job is how many tools it's easy for someone like me to say more personalized learning hey here use khan academy because i'm just thinking about that one that one lane that one part of the education experience but there's so many other factors that i intellectually know about but when you live it day to day it becomes much more complex were there any specific moments where you really kind of found yourself stepping back and you're like wow i might have bitten off a little bit more than i was comfortable chewing here would you where you realize like oh this is a hard problem that maybe you intellectually knew beforehand but it like really caused you to take pause honestly yes there were many many many moments like that you know i think there's a reality of a school where these are real children's lives as their whole experience uh that you need to make sure to get right you can imagine the the families that are drawn to a lab school in the lab school that seven years ago was nothing but a powerpoint presentation they're a little bit more adventurous they're willing to take a little bit more risk but the same time as a parent you're like this is my child's future that i'm i got to make sure it's going well um it's a service it's a service a job or it's a service industry so to speak you can't just not do it you got to figure out a way to deliver the service you can't have a gap in what's doing and you got to make sure it's high quality and at the same time you have all of these various actors you have the parents you have the teachers you have the students the administrators and uh you got to make sure that they're all that they're all in a good place uh and especially if you're doing a lab school where you're trying to do change you're trying to do things that might be a little bit avant-garde you're trying for everyone to be a little bit out of their comfort zone it's it's definitely not easy if i think of like the early days of khan academy and like the ted talks that you gave or the book that you wrote there's a kind of um there's an optimism around it and also an ambition right there's like this is this is what the world could look like or this is what education could be and aside from that i was like and let's start to build it let's actually start to make it uh like where where is your current mind when you're thinking about the next decade or the next two decades of education i continue to be optimistic although i have i think a better appreciation for the complexity not you know including just the complexity of of of running an organization or multiple organizations but also how that interfaces with the broader with the broader world when i first wrote khan academy's mission statement it was really i was just trying to fill out the paperwork with the irs as quickly as possible so i could get the not-for-profit status you know it was delusional when a one guy in a walk-in closet is writing free world-class education for anyone anywhere and even then i recognize it's a mission it's not something you're just going to be able to like solve in the next two or three years but if you fast forward to now i think 2008 sal who was or seven sal who was filling out that paperwork would have been blown away by how far khan academy has gotten and to some degree how legitimate it's viewed and and how we we work with systems and how many people are using it but 2021 sal myself knows that that's nice 2007 sal i know this is getting a little weird but but as many people are using it and as much as we've done we're still making a relatively small dent relative to the overall issue of we generally want billions of people to become actualized to become actualized in their lives and i do think that khan academy can play a role catalyzing this in terms of the the underlying philosophy around mastery based learning personalization i keep coming back to it and it's be it you know every now and then there's this temptation to say well that's not where other people are let's tweak it a little bit to be a little bit more mainstream and then you just but then you realize the truth of it over and over and over again so yes we will we are doing things at khan academy that help work with a traditional workflow or a traditional classroom that might not be mastery based because there's still value in using khan academy as a supplement using it as the go-to place for practice getting immediate feedback getting micro lessons so we want to make sure it's used in that way but we want to make sure also that we never lose our core principle that the ideal is mastery based learning differentiation personalization i think we have helped put it into the zeitgeist you hear a lot more people talking about mastery learning and personalization i think the pandemic has even more people talking about that because they realize that so many kids with unfi finished learning or for you know atrophy learning that they might have had during the pandemic it's not going to be okay and you know the statistics 70 of all kids in america go to community college have to take remedial math which is not even algebra it is usually pre-algebra so even though they take you know seventh grade eighth grade algebra one geometry algebra two sometimes they take pre-calculus or calculus they go to college and the four-year numbers aren't much better they go to college and the colleges say wait you have so many gaps you're not even ready to learn algebra yet so mastery is hey if you if you're at 80 keep working on it so that you can get to a better level or maybe you move on to the next concept but at some point come back and review this 80 so you can get it to a 90 or 95 or 100 percent uh that's matchy learning traditional learning is you got an 80 too bad you're a c student let's move on to the next concept somehow expecting you to master it and we know where that's leading that's leading to the 70 of kids having to take six sixth or seventh grade math even though they've they've spent six years trying to learn things beyond that so i'm 100 sold on like the benefits of mastery-based learning and any kind of vision of the future where that's dominant is an incredibly inspiring one it also seems inextricably linked with a self-paced schedule right because if it's going to be mastery based then some times you do that faster sometimes you do that slower and it seems like that's really the sticking point where just the logistics around actually having a self-paced system and then doing that at scale um it's hard for me to actually be genuinely optimistic thinking that like the broader school system you know let's just say like the public school system in the united states will ever be at a point where it's each student is genuinely moving at their own pace um but you have a good proof of concept that this can work with the con lab school do you think there's any chance that like within our lifetimes we could see a major school system across an entire country work in less of a regimented get everyone through in the same season style and actually allow for individual pacing you're right right now i can't point to an entire i can point to entire systems that are using khan academy heavily but not in that in that use case that we just said where that is the core you know we have a partnership with the nwea that administers the map growth assessment and we've created this thing called map accelerator and so these are large school districts places like you know clark county which is las vegas with all the third through eighth graders roughly one day a week they are using that for personalized practice but then the other four days the other 80 percent is more more more traditional we definitely have teachers who are all in there's a teacher in i believe hisperian california tim vandenberg and people can do a google search to find an interview i did with him but he teaches kids uh in the central valley of california a lot of them are children of migrant workers or definitely first generation in their family to go to first generation you know esl speakers and the the the kids coming into his sixth grade class have historically been two three grade levels behind and his story when he did it he's a great teacher he i think he's like second in the country in monopoly so you know you can imagine he's he's an interesting guy but historically he he showed us the data he was getting about one year of gain for his students in the one year that he was teaching them so they it's good and that they didn't fall further behind but if they started the year two grade levels behind they still were two grade levels behind even though they gained a grade level over the course of the year he decided about three or four years ago to go all in on personalization and mastery learning what he did is he simultaneously had all of his students all of his sixth grade students start at at early learning on khan academy essentially kindergarten you know one plus one equals two and simultaneously also start on the sixth grade course on khan academy and doing both at their own time and pace now he had the luxury of he teaches all the classes to the students so he was able to squeeze out some of the other class time so that he could expand the math a little bit so that they would have the time and space to do it but what he has seen consistently for the last two or three years is his kids are gaining about three grade levels in a year that the kids on average are starting two three grade levels behind and then by the end of the year ninety percent are a grade level ahead just over the course of one year doing mastery learning allowing them to fill in their gap so when i see things like that i know it is doable now i can't you know i know i know what the top of the mountain looks like i can see it there's a little bit of fog in between my job khan academy's job the ecosystem's job is to just constantly try to you know climb that mountain and you don't know exactly the right path you might have to take some twists and turns realize that there's there's a crevice someplace uh but but i'm i'm i'm confident in our lifetime that we're going to see this become more and more mainstream i think this is closely tied to notions of competency-based learning um credentials are based on seat time and university it's literally three credit hours right it's related to how much time it would spend i think we're going to go to a world and this goes back to the transcript of the future where what matters is do you know the material or not um and i don't care how you got there and so if you have that if that becomes what everyone cares about then that actually facilitates mastery mastery learning the technology is there all of the evidence is there i mean when you hear statistics like this or a story like this where someone goes from one year of improvement to three years of improvement just based on switching the method that he's using do you feel frustrated like do you want to grab someone and shake them by the lapels or like go under congress and like ring a bell and just say like do you understand this is a literal 3x improvement if we like can figure out how to actually make this change yeah and i mean the really crazy thing is if you took that 3x improvement for all 12 years of your life like you know oh god yeah then everyone would be like you know fluent in quantum physics before leaving high school right like yeah this is where we bring in that meme where you have the city of the future and it's like this is what the present would look like if only we had listened to bloom in 1984 yeah and and and listened to them and we invested in building systems that can support it and not just software systems or content systems but even administrative systems that that support it you know i i i'm happy to do the advocacy work like to your question yes i i do feel and i i try as much as possible to shout it from the rooftops um but i know that if i just go and you know shake people like look at this let's do it most people when i show them when i give a talk they agree with it intellectually but then they go back and then they all the different systems which have been in place for hundreds of years it's very hard to you can't just move one of them you have to move a lot of them uh at the same time but but i'm confident if you get the right pressure points the right points of leverage and i have some theories where they might be we we might be able to crack this in a world where university chicago is using mastery on khan academy in order to think about which students are ready uh to go to a highly selective university expect in the next few months we might announce a few other universities like university of chicago uh maybe even a few that you and i are affiliated with um that is going to send a signal to folks hopefully that hey this is an interesting way of of thinking about things so one big part of um like the mastery based system is the notion of flipping the classroom that you have the means of going online and learning it at your own pace when you need to um which is kind of where the online education component comes in this is why you were making videos and it feels like in the last 10 years there's just been kind of a huge influx of people who want to make um educational material online and it runs the spectrum between whether it's uh just some way of being a youtuber because all kids want to be youtubers these days or if it's like teachers that just want to start to publish what their classes are when you look at this broader space of just like many many more people putting out educational videos online or blog posts or things like that is there any way that you think people tend to miss the mark or anything that um like if you could kind of coach them all or just wave a little bit of a magic wand and have people change what they're doing about it slightly where is it that online education as it stands now or online explanation i say which is like a different thing where could that improve the most yeah you know i don't i don't pass judgment on on anyone on any and any part of that spectrum i think hopefully most of them are adding value i mean the type of content you're creating for the most part didn't really exist in any uh in that form factor and so like you are inspiring and making connections in people's minds i wouldn't be surprised if at some point in the future someone who wins a field medal or a nobel prize says yeah i never had that connection until i watched a three blue one brown video and they're like oh yeah and then i could apply that to this field and it's gonna happen i mean like secretly that's one of my dreams that you know khan academy someone says yeah i was struggling with that and khan academy unlocked me and then i went off and made this discovery and therefore cancer is cured you know like so so i think there's a lot of of power and value on that explanation side and you know a lot of the work that khan academy does is in the real you know working with districts running efficacy studies etc etc but i can't tell you how many people i get you know when we do surveys at universities and 65 70 percent of kids say hey khan academy played a meaningful impact on my education they're usually citing that night where they couldn't get the krebs cycle or uh you know taylor series felt impenetrable to them and all of a sudden they're like oh i watched khan academy i did a little practice and it unlocked me and then i was off to the races if i didn't get that i might have flunked so when it comes to like leveraging what people who are making like explanations online um are doing into a kind of actual learning did you ever feel any temptation or pressure to make khan academy more of a platform um where as opposed to it being um kind of like the cultivated really high quality lessons uh that are provided by like you and some of the other staff um did you feel any push to letting it be a bedrock layer for a lot of other uh people openly uploading that was actually my initial thought uh when i was making the software and um and then as you know the story a friend suggested that i make the videos and upload them onto youtube and i thought it was a horrible idea youtube's for cats playing piano dogs on skateboards etc youtube back in 2006 felt a lot like tik tok to us today although i'm now discovering tick tock is actually a great place to educate ed educate as well um and and i made those first few videos just pretty much assuming that the sheer amount of content to be created would need to be crowdsourced in some way wikipedia was on everyone's mind back then as like wow this worked crowdsourcing works and it can result in high quality things and so i was making the videos really as a as a i thought to myself as a proof of concept i was trying to wrangle other friends into it to start to think about it as maybe maybe we make a bit of a of a platform here i think between not being so successful at wrangling other folks in in those at least in those early years uh and realizing that the the the amount of content in these academic areas is actually quite tractable it's not it's not as large as as it might feel you can do a hundred 200 five to ten minute videos and you kind of cover algebra uh comprehensively and in the early days the early days of khan academy i i wasn't trying to cover every single granular standard now we do cover every single granular standard but i saw in the early days even with 30 or 40 videos i could give for sure the essence of a lot of mathematics a lot of science and so as we went down that journey and obviously we our our journeys uh were were connected uh uh uh for for several years the i think the realization was that if you get a a small number of really high quality content creators that that actually builds trust it builds a connection between the learner and and the teacher and i realize in silicon valley everyone's all about platform platform is everything and i realize that this platform matters but also brand and trust and ethos matters a lot as well and so there might be a future and we've definitely theorized if i had infinite product resources i would think about having an aspect of khan academy that allows anyone to upload or upvote other resources because there are really good things out on the internet i i could definitely imagine that but it will always be i think nice to have that that that core narrative i compare it to imagine being in a classroom and every 10 minutes a different teacher walked in no matter how good that teacher is for that next 10 minutes if you don't have a connection with them or if every third teacher is kind of disappointing you might give up on that class and to be clear i asked the question not implying that the answer should be yes but uh it's actually interesting to just hear your thoughts on justifying what i would kind of agree with which is the sense that like people know your voice they know the way that you're teaching and they have this expectation coming in even when i was making videos on your platform the very common initial comment would be like we miss sal right or things like that because you have built that trust um so i'm just gonna say like set aside any modesty and like take as a premise the fact that the lessons you make are just really good they're just better than what most people would do if they were uploading to the site and maybe one of the reasons to have this um this sense of brand protection around making sure that it's a smaller group of core people and especially led by you is simply that you're doing the lessons a little bit better than the vast majority of people would what do you think it is that makes them different i mean you talked about this a little bit earlier in terms of how you think while you're making a video but what about the way that you're explaining things do you think has ended up resonating with students in a way that a lot of other people uploading things don't necessarily resonate with the same kind of retention yes it's an interesting question uh because as you scale you you know you always want to be skeptical of you know gifts that you might have or you know special secret sauce but the same time as you scale you don't want to lose it if you had it and we are and as you know we've been trying to scale our content creators and right now for example we're doing a big science push and we're trying to make sure we have a much more diverse group of voices there and so we are going through this process right now where we're looking for people who might have potential they're creating content we're giving feedback and it is putting it into sharper focus where i think the khan academy ethos maybe some things that i brought somewhat organically in the early days where they where they lie i think the big one is a sense of comfort and relaxation and transparency of thought processes you know so many people when they especially if they try to make a video they they're like oh all these people are going to watch it i can't be i can't let every one of my thoughts out i have to have to filter them it has to be like super tight super professional but when you do that it could look professional and one of my biggest points of feedback sometimes through the editorial process that we're working on a video makes it through and when you look at it it looks professional it's tight the person never says um the the penmanship is perfect they're using good visuals but i watch it i'm like there's something i'm not with you or you're not with me um we're in different places you're not thinking alongside me and so i think that's one that when people and it was you know because i literally most kind of gave me videos i am thinking in real time and so people i think feel that that's not the only way to do it i think you can make compelling scripts and and and do it that way but i think the way that i've definitely come to it is get the ideas clear in my mind and then and then try to paraphrase it so i'm thinking alongside the student if i'm doing a worked example be very transparent with my thought processes do it real time i i i tell anyone who listen if you know no one if you're not excited genuinely excited about what you're about to explain there's no way that the person who's listening it listening to it is going to be excited i think the more that you can you know just have a a little monitor in your head it's like okay your tone are you sounding condescending are you skipping steps you know every now and then i'm recording a video and i i say something like oh that could be taken the wrong way so that that could make the student think that they're not smart if they don't get this fact so i'll just stop and i'll i'll i'll start over again to just make sure it's coming coming from the right place i think i think little little connections little ahas little and i don't want to claim that every khan academy video has a big aha in it but if you can connect it if you say hey look this is just like what we saw before you can derive this formula you know it's always i know it's probably gotten to you it's always gotten to me i saw this with my cousins the other days how many how many people think of math as just these disparate formulas that they just have to apply and memorize and when really it's just a way of thinking and maybe some symbols to help that that thinking be a little bit clearer or some ways of visualizing it with you know analytical geometry or something like that but um you know the teacher might introduce a new notation or a new idea but you're like oh wait this is just like the other one but now we're you know it's just like a a sum but now we're taking infinitesimal sections and so the okay okay i get what an integral is okay well maybe this is true as well i wonder and you can and if you could do that in life you're going to be unstoppable so i try as much as possible to convey that i mean the other benefit of recurringly making those connections aside from it just being satisfying in the moment uh like we have research about how you remember things better if you recurringly revisit that fact and you've got this kind of exponential decay curve where people get excited about space repetition memories so that you can memorize anything you want but to do it in a less systematized way where you're not like using an app for it just if the lessons themselves naturally refer back to other things such that they're not disparate you're sort of baking in the notion of what we know to be the best way to remember things i mean so something that like sort of popped into my mind while you were talking about that and like thinking of training new content creators and things is i remember in the cohort that i was there we were all just terrified to make videos it was like partly there's a lot to live up to and i had this moment when i was just i was thinking i'm like okay just gotta actually make a video and the thing that was liberating was to say in principle i could edit it like if i make a mistake i could edit it out and i'm like okay i'm just gonna make the thing i'm just gonna talk through my thoughts and like it's much more comfortable knowing that that could happen but then upon looking back at it there's the realization that it's actually a much better lesson if you don't edit any of that out um and somehow this this conflict between wanting something to be pristine and like protecting your own i don't know sense of authority uh and like being able to relax from that actually just ends up protecting that authority much better than anything else because of the transparency you're describing um so uh as just like a very last uh question before i kind of wrap things up when you are coaching new creators or when you're in this kind of like feedback cycle what are the common things that end up coming up that you find yourself um either praising that you didn't expect to like kind of comes naturally to people or where you very often kind of have to course correct to say okay if we this is a common mistake that a lot of people when they're making their first video do but like you'll get past this and you're able to kind of push them in the right direction what are those um what are those commonly missed points yeah i think on both sides it goes back to your and you know you should have told me back then i would have given you i just like grant just just do it just press record and i tell that to myself all the time even now you know i i i have one or two videos that i'd like to do today and i've already done a little bit of the prep work for one of them and um there's always this temptation oh wait am i ready yet am i ready yet and i just say sal press record and start see what happens you don't have to use this video and i find when i when i when i destress myself like that i oftentimes force myself to smile or laugh before video i feel like people are going to sense that i definitely feel that the energy changes when i do that um most of the time yeah it's kind of good uh you know maybe i mess up a little bit i could i could edit out that 10 seconds yeah as you know back in the day i used to edit out nothing i used to just do it or redo it now i might edit out 10 seconds here there if i said something that maybe wasn't precise or something like that but i try to keep as much of the organic nature of it intact uh as possible and so the biggest pitfall i see people is falling into is exactly what we're describing they they feel that especially when something is recorded it's got to be kind of perfect and the perfect becomes the enemy of the good actually the perfect becomes the enemy of the perfect they either over script themselves they take on a tone that is different than the tone they would use when they're talking to a friend uh or someone that they are just being collegial with they they optimize for looking professional but not really being there with the student and i you know just yesterday or day before yesterday i gave feedback on a video and and you know the person who's making she's incredible she knows the material back and forth but i just felt that she edited out a lot of her thought process and it went fast i knew the material that she was teaching and i was just like it went so fast i had trouble keeping up it looked great but i had trouble keeping up with the thought process slow down be yourself you know be quirky let yourself go have fun with it if you do that the student's going to have fun with it um and you know like i think there's a far no larger number of people who could do who can who can make great videos but they just don't they don't don't give them permission to be themselves and to be relaxed uh when they're recording or they don't give them themselves permission to even just press record and start well with that cell i just want to say thank you for joining today and uh it's very interesting to hear all the projects you're working on so best of luck with all of them thanks for having me grant and as i you know i always look at three blue one brown and say well you know grant he was part of khan academy but now he has done great things so hopefully he see yourself as part of this family you're you're really one of one of the folks i feel like an old person but yeah i probably could be your father um but many a youtube commenter thought that you were i would have had to have a more exciting life in my uh my late teens i believe teenage pregnancies you

Channel: Grant Sanderson

Views: 69,551

Rating: 4.9759693 out of 5

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Id: SAhKohb5e_w

Length: 44min 43sec (2683 seconds)

Published: Thu Jul 22 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/WristbandYang]

Interesting idea on the differences between a refined and sleek presentation compared to transparency of thought processes.

To me this is also visible in professional textbooks and papers. The highly edited works typically lack the motivation, the WHY, but others are less dense/ more individualized and their thought process comes through clearer in the writing.