Sal Khan on the future of education

we've always modeled ourselves is what if we could give every student on the planet something that approximates a tutor and what if we could give every teacher a teaching assistant so Khan Academy our mission free world class education for anyone anywhere before generative AI we were doing this in different ways with videos and exercises and giving teachers dashboards and lesson plans and things like that but then about a little a little under a year ago the open AI team reached out to us this was end of summer of 2022 and I had been following gpt2 gpt3 and it was interesting but I didn't think it had Direct relevance yet to what we were doing but then Sam Altman and Greg Brockman gave me and a few of our team members access to gpt4 and so this was well before chat GPT even but we saw the original gpt4 said okay this is a game changer because you can actually prompt it to be like a tutor to be like a teaching assistant help a teacher create a lesson plan a few months ago when gpt4 was announced we were under a non-disclosure agreement for for six seven months we launched with it as a pilot conmigo and the you know we have about three four thousand people using it today I'm hoping within a month or two we're going to be able to release it to everyone but what we're seeing is it's doing what we always hoped that you get to do everything you traditionally did on Khan Academy but if you have a question answers right then if a teacher wants a lesson plan does it right then if a teacher wants to talk about how they can help their students better based on their work on Khan Academy it can present that it can help a student decide what to work on next and I think you know we're at the cusp of doing things that you know would have looked seemed like science fiction even the conmigo that we already released students can talk to fictional characters they can talk to historical characters the AI will help them write it won't do the writing for them everything is monitored by the parents and by the teachers so we try to make it as safe of an environment as possible so I think a year from now you're going to see a dramatic change today if you talk to a student they take it for granted that anything that they need to learn they can learn online it's just assumed but when I was in school I couldn't assume that I had to go to a class I had to get a textbook and they'll assume that it'll be on demand that they can get videos they can get articles they can get practice and now with AI they can even have follow-on questions so I think that's a dramatic change I think 10 15 years ago the the status quo was the teacher would be at the front of the room and giving a lecture and kids would be sitting there taking notes that's still happening a lot of places but I think the best practice people realize isn't that the best practice is if human beings are getting together don't just give a lecture that can happen on a video that can happen on a mooc that could happen someplace else if you're in a room together interact with each other have a conversation work on a project do peer-to-peer learning so I think even though that isn't mainstream yet I think the idea that that's the aspiration that has become mainstream when I was in college I found that I learned much better outside of a lecture hall in a lecture hall I would usually fall asleep uh and so I would either go to the computer lab and program or I would just go to the library and I would study or I would just hang out and chat with people and and learn from from their experiences and I found in in college by skipping classes in a productive way I was able to learn more I was able to take more classes and what other kids the kids who sat in the lecture hall they sat the whole term and then right before the exam they knew almost nothing and then they crammed the night before so that they I was like what are you doing the last three months while me and some of my friends who for the most part didn't go to class but we were reading we were doing the problem sets we were working with each other we didn't have to study for the test because we've already been learning it and because we didn't cram we retained the knowledge and so this really informs what I think college of the future should be like that my best memories of college are these having a debate with your friends or working on a project or a philosophical conversation that should be all of college and the you know learning to learning your accounting or learning calculus or learning whatever it might be getting your writing to a certain level you can now do that at your own time at your own pace with Khan Academy especially now that you have artificial intelligence if you need some extra support you have your peers more support than that maybe the university can provide but once again it's more Hands-On it's more personalized but the most of the University experience in my mind should be interacting with other human beings I actually would probably get rid of the whole credit system altogether and I I would think about what are the competencies that people care about people care that you you need to be able to write at a certain level so okay let's create assessments so someone can write at that level and and it's usually like a if you can truly write it a college freshman level you're actually employable by Mo you know most people in the world write it seventh or eighth grade level they don't write at a college level if you go at a college level you're employable if you understand statistics at a college freshman level you're ahead of 99 of people and then I would make the actual college campus kind of like a y combinator uh you know a place where people could come but it's not just starting tech companies it could be I want to start a non-profit it could be I want to go into the local community and tutor students it could be I want to do research real research uh so you know when we say it's all Hands-On it's not made up projects that you do a Hands-On project and the professor grades it and then everyone throws it away it's like no go go find a business that needs your help and see if you can help them and I'm not going to grade you I mean I'll advise you I'll think about how you can do it better if I'm your professor but you're going to be graded by Society I mean you're going to put on your resume I went and worked with this firm and I was able to do this or I wasn't able to do that Etc if I were to be a university president tomorrow I would do two things I would do one thing for all of society and then I would do one thing for my campus for all of society I would take my ability to give credits and I would either construct or partner with Khan Academy and I would say if you learn calculus on Khan Academy and we prove it's you we will give you the credit for that if you do that for psychology we will give you the credit you do that for finance accounting we'll give you the credit and then we're going to make a diploma for that anyone can get it and maybe it costs you know it costs ten dollars per credit the whole diploma could cost a hundred dollars and if you're poor we'll we'll give it to you for free so that's the university will do that for the world and then for our students what I would say is look whatever you want to do you want to become a banker you want to become an engineer get the credits they're available for anyone you should do it too but we're going to optimize our campus for to to essentially nurture you to connect with other amazing people do research start businesses get real world experience our graduation requirement is going to be by the time you graduate you have to have four failed businesses if you if you succeed in one of them okay we still might graduate you too and you should have four experiences working for other people's whether it's a research lab or or a project writing a novel whatever it might be or you know an internship but having this real world experience having a base of operation a beautiful campus where you can interact trade ideas meet the best friends of your life maybe your partner one day but then you have the online component to learn at your own time and pace and it's always there later on I mean there's so many students that graduate in one major then 10 years later they say I wish I learned a crowning hey we're always there for you we have the online thing you can still go come back and learn the accounting on our online platform because of the internet because of artificial intelligence it's I think we're living in a science fiction book now and we have the opportunity to Define what that science fiction book becomes and I think so I think it's a very exciting time but it's a time where we can't sit passively if we just sit passively and sit cynically I think some of the dystopian science fiction books can easily become the reality uh while if you take all of the positive energy and 99 of people have positive intent they have positive energy they want to do something good in the world if we can harness that energy let people stay positive and but leverage some of this technology that we're starting that's accelerating uh it's going to be a very exciting next couple of decades

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Length: 8min 59sec (539 seconds)

Published: Fri May 05 2023