Education Reimagined | Sal Khan | Talks at Google

Thank you very much and I'm going to introduce our next speaker, which is Sal Khan. We are very happy to have you with us today. He is the founder and CEO of Khan Academy, a nonprofit organization delivering a free world. class

education

, you might have heard about it a little bit, right? I mean, he should have told her that he was actually encouraging my daughter, that she's getting ready to take the SAT, and like you have to go ahead and read the constant, we'll talk about it later. On some of the comments he might have for you, he is the founder of Khan Lab School, which some of you will be able to visit on Friday.

Khan Academy began as a passion project in 2004. Sal began tutoring his cousin in math, communicating by phone and using an interactive notepad. Word spread and he soon saw that he was tutoring several cousins ​​and friends. of the family as a hobby to climb better. He began writing software to assign math practices, provide feedback, and track each student's progress. He also began posting videos of his hand-scribbled tutorials on YouTube, where he reached thousands of students. In 2009, he quit his day job and launched Khan Academy. Today, more than 62 million registered users access Khan Academy in dozens of languages ​​in 190 countries today.

We are honored to have Sal Khan join us to talk about his personal journey and how I founded Khan Academy and built it into the organization it is today. We also look forward to his thoughts on how

education

is being reinvented and what's next for the future of the field. Without further ado, let's welcome Sal Khan. Wow, that's the most generous introduction. I have ever received thanks. I like to start these types of presentations and know that it will really be a conversation. We will have time, but really only to get to know them. How many of you are our primary school teachers?

Okay, high school, high school, and then how many of you are our humanities teachers? Do you have an idea of ​​science and mathematics? Okay, did I miss anyone socially? Manatees. Okay, okay and it seems like most of you are familiar with Konica. How many of you use Khan Academy and it's okay and how many of you don't do it well well well and how many of you haven't heard of it before today you're really not very familiar with it oh okay okay. I'm simply doing some market research, well for those of you, it seems like most of you are familiar with this, we are often associated with this collection of videos that as presented I started making for family members , but as we will see.

It's a lot more than just videos, but to get everyone on the same page, I'll start with a montage of what some of these videos look like. Well, these interactions are only through gravity. This is a post-Isaac Newton era, I'm told. humidity makes it feel hotter, why is this a great question, LeBron? And you can see the pleasure he had. The right to privacy as such is not written in the Constitution of course, the word Freedom is that things can actually intersect, although for these two in particular. It seems like the mechanics would get a little difficult, keep playing with these numbers and see what kind of colors I can come up with.

If this doesn't blow your mind, then you have no excitement. I don't appreciate the Oilers identity, but as I mentioned, it's much more than just videos and you know some of you may already be using it in your classrooms where your students can do exercises it's no longer just math, it's subjects and cross grades, you get feedback, there are dashboards for teachers and I let's talk more about you know how we envision it and in fact, we'd love to learn from you about how you envision tools like this could help power a classroom as presented. , you know we are reaching a lot of people these days. but before we talk more about this and where we're going, I'll tell you how this all started and you know, even just listening to the intro I get the feeling that the journey you're about to take parallels what I've been going through. for the last seven or eight years in 2004 when it was introduced I was a year away from finishing business school, my original background was in technology, but I had attended business school the year I was working as an analyst. in a mutual fund and I had just gotten married my family was visiting me in Boston right after my wedding and it just came out that they were visiting from Louisiana where is Lucy?

She is very good. Oh, we have two teachers of the year and Lou himself, uh. and it just came out of a conversation that one of my relatives, my 12 year old cousin Nadia, was having trouble in math. Her mother told me when Nadia came into the room. I asked him about that. She says well, there was a placement exam. She had a lot of unit conversion. I just don't understand unit conversion and I immediately told him that I was one hundred percent sure that you are capable of understanding unit conversion. How about when you get back to New Orleans we go Talk on the phone and work together and Navi agreed, so you know, for the next few weeks, every day after work, I was on the phone with Nadia at first, she was completely convinced that her brain was working.

He wasn't able to do it, he wasn't even able to engage in the material, but after about two weeks he started engaging, learned unit conversion, caught up with his class, and frankly, got a little ahead of his class. at that moment. I became what I call a tiger cousin. I called her school. I'm sure you all appreciate calls like this and I said, you know. I really think Nadi Ehrmann should retake last year's placement exam and they said who are you? I said. I'm her cousin and surprisingly she was allowed to retake the placement test and that same Navia who was being placed in a remedial math class was then put in the advanced math class so you know, that was pretty awesome for me in general.

Lots of levels. One was a way to connect with my young cousin who was fifteen hundred miles away. This was a topic that, frankly, I always loved participating in, even when he was a student and I was able to share it with a family. member and it was a relatively small intervention on my part and maybe I know how to help her change her future, so I immediately started working with her younger brother, zalien Armand, and some things happened in the company I was working for was quite small . It was just me and my boss with all the capital, his wife becomes a professor at Stanford Law School, so we moved here down the street, but the most important thing is that word spreads in his family. that free tutoring is going on and that's why I meet up every day after work with about 10 or 15 cousins' family friends across the country on conference lines, you know, trying to help them with their math or science or whatever they needed and with a software background, I said, oh you know, I see some patterns here, a lot of my cousins ​​are even A or B students and they may be in high school, they're a little fuzzy on their division decimals. or negative numbers or if they're in algebra, there's still a little bit confusing on exponents or anything else.

I started writing this workout platform that was the first Khan Academy, it had nothing to do with videos and I was showing it at a dinner party not far from here, all my friends knew I had this kind of crazy side project and the host from dinner he said well, this is all good, Sal, but how are you scaling your real lessons? And I said his name is Uli. I said, hey, well, you know you're right, it's hard to make 15 cousins ​​what I was originally. doing with one or two and he said well, I have an idea, why don't you record your lessons, their videos and upload them to YouTube for your family?

I immediately said no, that's a horrible idea. YouTube is for cats that play the piano. Not for serious math, but I went home that weekend. I got over the idea that it wasn't my idea and decided to try it and you know, those first lessons and they're still there if you do a search on our YouTube channel at least by upload date: November 2006. You know, these were the things about which I thought my cousin asked a lot. I mean, there are very simple things: adding fractions with unlike denominators, negative numbers, dividing decimals. very, very basic things and I started saying to my family hey, why don't you look at this ahead of time?

You know, send me an email with any requests you have and that way when we talk on the phone we can go a little deeper into things and then One month I asked them for feedback and somehow they told me that they liked it better on YouTube than in person and that it's worth introspecting on that because I think there are some things that they were saying and there are some things that they were saying. I don't say what they said and when you really put yourself in the situation you don't learn and we've all been there, it makes sense the first time you try to understand something that you know we've all been through.

I've been there where you ask a friend or a family member, hey, how does this work and you say, oh, it's so easy? You know, a guide so that we at least see and can comment on what makes a lot of sense and you feel pressure. they're like oh yeah, yeah, that makes sense, you don't want to waste their time, you don't want to, even if they don't judge you, you're afraid they'll judge you, so you know an hour or more goes by that night, when you're actually trying to do it. again and you say: oh, what did they say?

I don't remember it entirely, but now my family was able to do it at their own pace, at their own pace, if they were an algebra student or a calculus student, but they didn't know how to divide decimals, they didn't have to be embarrassed, they could access it at their own rhythm and time, but what they didn't say was that they didn't appreciate me in their life, if anything. This freed up for more human interactions when we talked on the phone we could focus more on higher level problems or deeper engagement or, frankly, what was it, math or science was just an excuse to get on the phone and talk about what was going on in their lives, so I took that as a positive comment and I kept uploading to YouTube and you know, it turned out that it was public and it soon became clear that there were people who were not my cousins ​​who were watching and at first You know, I see grow the view count and it's growing pretty fast and then the comments start coming in, a lot of those first comments were just thanks, even that I thought was a big deal, I don't know how long.

What do you spend on YouTube, most of the comments are not a little bit of thanks and then they got intense, you know, I started getting comments like, you know? I thought I hated math, but now I was able to fill this gap or you know, this is the reason why I was able to get an A on my physics exam or you know, I never thought I was a scientific person, but now I want to become an engineer and you know which was very important in those early days, this was probably spring of 2007, this really amazing letter from a mother came through YouTube messages and I brought horses to my wife.

This is incredible. She wrote that both of her children had learning disabilities and that these videos were the only way they could do it. keep up with her class and that's why she and her whole family were praying for me and my whole family every night and you can imagine how powerful and strange that was for me on some level. You must remember that I was an analyst. at a hedge fund I wasn't used to people praying by now, at least that way, and on and on I kept going, yeah, yeah, fast forward to the fall of 2009, there were about 50/50 cabins or around out of a hundred thousand people who are using the software and the videos every month, frankly, you know, I wasn't even concentrating on my day job every day, I was concentrating more on the requests that I was getting from all over the world, do you know what it is?

What was the next content or exercise? I'm going to ride on the software platform and I felt like there was something real here. Hey, if it's getting to a hundred thousand, maybe we can get to a million one day, maybe when they can get to 10 million. You know, I wouldn't even imagine numbers like this. So my wife and I sat down, our first child had just been born, but we had some savings essentially for a down payment on a house, but we said, hey, you know, it looks like there's something real here, why don't I give it a try? ?

I shoot, so I quit my day job and set up Khan Academy Zenon as a non-profit and any time you do something entrepreneurial, whether it's for-profit or non-profit, you almost have to have delusional optimism when you start, you know, you say surely in this case. the social return on an investment is off the charts, you could reach so many people around the planet and I started talking to some philanthropists from some foundations, but very quickly you come to terms with reality,you get a lot out of this. it's really interesting, but it's not exactly what we funded or we've already allocated our budget for this year, talk to us next year, so you can imagine, seven months later, I had a pretty good job before we were now looking for $5,000. a month after saving with a small child in the house our expenses had increased it was it was stressful it was probably the most stressful time of my life I woke up in the middle of the night you know what?

I've done to my family, what have I done to my career? And I was receiving PayPal donations amounting to a few hundred dollars a month. It was any of you, thank you, but you can imagine it, you know it was difficult, but of course. Suddenly, in May 2010, I suddenly receive a donation of $10,000 and I see who it is. Her name is Ann Doerr.she was local I was in Mountain View she's in Palo Alto right down the street so I immediately emailed her and said, you know, thank you so much for this incredibly generous donation, this is the largest donation that Kahn Academy has ever received if we were a brick-and-mortar school, you would now have a building named after you and Ann immediately responded and said, well, you know, I use it myself, I use it with my daughter's.

I see you're close. I would love to meet with you and learn more. about what you're doing and about three or four days later we're at an Indian buffet restaurant and in Palo Alto and we asked him what your goal is here and I told him that when you fill out the paperwork with the IRS you would be a nonprofit, there's a part of the form that says mission: and they give you about a line and a half and I completed a free world-class education for anyone anywhere and ants, you know, that's ambitious, how do you see yourself doing that? and I said, you know, this would be very clear, this is a mission.

I don't plan on being able to just check it off this weekend and then move on to medical care or anything like that. I have some ideas, but I showed it to him. You know, I used to walk around with a big stack of these testimonials that I was getting. I showed him the graph of how people used it. I showed him the software that I had originally written for my cousin and said, you know, this is just At first, what I envisioned doing was translating this into the languages ​​of the world. I had some very basic teaching tools that, frankly, I was using, and in fact, there are some teachers that I knew we were starting to use and I said, "Hey, look." In this world, a teacher could know where every student is in the classroom, it could happen anywhere and the planet should be free to access, etc., etc., and Ann said, well, you know you're surprisingly making a lot of progress.

I just have one question, how are you? keeping to yourself and then as proud as possible I told her I'm not and then she processes that we know we paid the bill and we part ways ten minutes later. I drive into my driveway in Mountain View and I get a text from Ann and she says you really need to support yourself. I just sent you a transfer of $100,000, so it was a good day for a while and then, frankly, that was the beginning of a whole series of you know, a whole cascade of events. Actually, at that early stage, some people at Google started reaching out and saying, "We're curious about what you're doing." It turns out that many of our executives or I have been using a kind of relationship with their children.

There might be something interesting here, you know, I remember Alfred Spector, who is the head of research, who was also able to donate to on a reasonable scale, so I thought, ah, at least I could do this for at least one more year. and a half and then this is June 2010, about six weeks after Ann's donation, I was running a summer camp not far from here and the reason I was running a summer camp is because I never imagined that this was already you know the virtual one. things somehow compete with the physical, it's not like the calm of Amazon versus you know, Barnes and Nobles.

I always see this as this could liberate the physical if you can get explanations in your own time and pace if you can practice as much as you can. feedback tools are needed for teachers, so what can they do when people come into the room can they interact, can they have dialogues, can they do pretend games, whatever it may be. That's why I was running this summer camp to experiment with that and that's why I was in In the middle of one of these simulations I had six seventh graders playing a game of Risk while the other twenty traded securities based on the outcome of the game of Risk.

Risk. It's a good game and while that was going on I started getting text messages from Ann that you I guess I take it very seriously now and there were five or six, it wasn't clear what order they came in but they read online with Suzanne writing I'm at the Aspen ideas festival I'm at. the main pavilion and Walter Isaacson interviewing Bill Gates. Bill Gates talked for the last five minutes about Khan Academy, so he didn't know what to do with this, so I immediately pulled the nearest seventh grader off a computer and I'm and I'm looking.

Looking for some evidence of this I seem to be writing about and about ten minutes later I was able to find the live stream and this is what I saw. There is a new website that I just used with my kids recently called Khan Academy. ka Chan, just a guy who makes awesome 15 minute tutorials. My favorite cartoon is that guy, Sallman Khan, he was a hedge fund guy who was making a lot of money and he quit to make these little web videos, so we moved. I would say about 160 IQ points from the main fund category to teaching a lot of people about leverage through a category, so you know it was a good day the day his wife let him quit his job, you can imagine what was going on in my head, I mean, I was literally shaking.

I thought: Is this really happening? And I was nervous. Know? Those videos were for Nadia, not Bill Gates, and you know, anything he knew clearly means he's talking about my wife. What I remember I remember having dinner that night with my wife and and I and I showed her this video and and and I was like you, what do I do now? I call him assuming he's not on the list and they left me in that state of limbo. for about two weeks, two weeks later I'm in my locker room about to record a video and I see my cell phone ring, it's a number in Seattle.

I answer hi, I'm Larry Cohen, I'm Bill Gates' chief of staff. You may have heard that Bill is a fan, yes I heard that and if you are free in the next few weeks we would love to take you to Seattle and learn more about what you are doing, maybe ways to work together and I. I was looking at my calendar for the month completely blank, so yeah, maybe next Wednesday I have to cut my nails, do laundry, but I think I might meet Bill Gates, so we had that meeting and it was eerily similar to the meeting with Ann. what you do with more resources I would build the software platform so that students can learn at their own time and pace, sort of like the dream of differentiated instruction.

I would do it because I had these nascent tools for teachers. He wanted to improve them a lot so that it would be accessible to every teacher on the planet, internationalize the content, etc., he said that our coverage went far beyond mathematics and they seemed to be sympathetic to the cause at exactly the same time in those first conversations with Google in which I They brought in and said Hey, there's this 10 to 100 project where we want to fund 10 praat, we're going to donate ten million dollars to projects that could change the world and we're interested in Khan Academy potentially being one of those projects, so all of us and What would you do with more resources?

Tell them the same. I would go international if we could reach millions one day, and suddenly in October 2010, the Gates Foundation and Google donated two million dollars each to allow Khan Academy to become a real organization. Get out of the space, start hiring a team, etc., etc., and since then we've been able to grow the organization as an organization and what we immediately started working on with those resources was the software platform. and what you see here and it looks like some of you use it in your classroom, these are just examples of what at least some of the math exercises look like in Khan Academy, but I use it as a framework to think about this.

The idea of ​​mastery learning that you know people talk about in schools of education, but it's really hard to implement in a traditional academic structure that most of us grew up in and maybe still operate in: you group students by age and then you move on. all together at a set pace and what will normally happen, let's say you know this is a unit. I guess it's, you know this is a one line equation, so let's say we're in a super unique class and the first lesson. Know? This is how the slope is calculated. The teacher will give some lectures about it.

There will be homework every night. 70% you get 80% you get 95% even though we identified gaps in that exam, I didn't know 30% of the material that was on that exam, even as a student, it could have been a careless mistake or maybe it was something really important, you know what the slope of a vertical line or a horizontal line is, even though there was that gap, the whole class needs to move on to the next concept, it's not the teacher's fault, every teacher I spoke to recognizes this. They say, I wish I could sit with those students and fill those gaps, but I have to cover, you know, these 60 standards in these 180 days, so I have to move on, but when you move on, move on to the next concept, now.

You know how to graph a line where you assume students know what a slope is and how would I learn that if I didn't know 30 percent of the prerequisite material and to understand or appreciate how absurd that world is that we are forced to be in, You know, imagine if we did other things in our life that way, say, home building, then we bring in the contractor. He said they told us we have two weeks to build the foundation, do what you can so the contractor does what he can maybe it will rain maybe some of the supplies won't show up two weeks later bring the inspector, the inspector looks he turns He turns around and says, okay, you know, maybe the concrete is wet there, that part is not up to code.

I'll give it an 80%, I say great, that's a C, let's build the first floor, same thing we have three weeks, he told us say you have three weeks, do what you can, so do what you can, it's a gap 80 percent, 20 percent is fine, let's build the second floor and suddenly, as you're doing that, the whole structure collapses and if the reaction to that is what we normally have in public discourse in education is like, Well, maybe you needed a better contractor or maybe you needed more inspection, but that wasn't the problem at all. You could have had the best contractor on the planet and you could have had the best inspection on the planet, but it was the process that was flawed; you're artificially limiting the amount of time this amazing contractor had to work on something; you went to the trouble of measuring it, but then when you identified the gaps, you did nothing about it and then you forced the contractor to build on top of it and if I was giving this talk 30 or 40 years ago it would have been like, but there's no another practical or economical way to have 30 students teaching, but what's exciting now Do you know this?

The dream of personalized learning and mastery learning. It's like you know we can start to have tools that can empower teachers so they don't have to make compromises so they can address student gaps. as they emerge and allow students, you know some students are ready to move on, let them move on if some students need more preparation, let them work on that preparation to get a sense of how it can impact a classroom. This is one of our partner teachers at Phillips Andover Academy, who teaches calculus, we have this great moment where in the fourth thirty-fifth year of my teaching career I walked into the classroom with no idea if the kids had done the assignment or what their commitment was to this subject and Then, suddenly, this training platform in Connick emerged from me that was a total game-changer for me.

Little did I know that at Khan Academy calculus content would become a big part of our curriculum. I frankly and wrongly imagined that we would have use these exercises suggest that kids use them to review and when we discovered the training platform and how powerful it was, a group of us said, let's try it, let's try using Khan Academy as a major part of our training plan. studies and, my God, the shape changed. For example, I teach five minutes before entering class. I can go to the platform and I can check my list of students to discover that all but two had done thehomework and watching the videos they had approved, you know, they had approved the homework. obstacle, so to speak, of the exercises that I had given them, so when I walked into the room I no longer had to go over the homework and it was liberating, so if there were two students who didn't do the homework, that gave me the opportunity to pull them aside and say hey, I see you didn't make it or I see you struggled with it.

Is there any way you and I can meet later today? It's because I don't want you to be left behind. In this and in the first 15 minutes of class now, all of a sudden, we were breaking new ground, we were doing more difficult problems and the kids responded very well because I think they had years and years and years of mathematical features going over the homework. the first 15 minutes of class and the poor kids were ever bored to death or why bother doing homework because he'll do it on the board anyway, that was totally liberating and gave me a chance to really think hard about teaching As we start using Khan Academy, the one thing we can't help but notice is that more and more children are reaching the end of the BC calculation and it is clear to me that there are more and more girls and more underrepresented boys finishing their BC. calculus class when we did it before and I have to believe that it is our new way of thinking about teaching by using Khan Academy in the classroom and for homework it has to be a big part of that and one and billde fact, it helps you enter to the team at the time of the handover, they have been important contributions to the calculus work at Khan Academy and you know, one of the reasons I am here is that we are always looking for people to collaborate with to help work and create content together, You know?

The interesting thing that some of you know is that you know the College Board and the people who do the AP and also the SE T. They contacted us a couple of years ago and said, "Look, we're revamping the SAT." so it's actually aligned with the Common Core and what students are actually going to learn in school, but as part of that we want to address the decades-old perception, at least around this inequity in test prep, and we want work with you to make the world the best. The best test prep is free, so this is a little video that some of you might let you know was on The Today Show about Khan Academy working with the College Board around the SAT.

Today is the last day for students. the country will take the SAT in its current form because starting in March there will be a new test with many changes for high school students here is NBC's Anne Thompson I wanted to start my own business specializing in robotics I think I would like to be a comment the first hurdle to achieve those dreams be the SAT today is the last day that students will be offered the exam in its current form the new SAT promises to be quite different for all high school students like Amelia 10 AIO and min ki Lucca new ta now you have too access to free online tutoring from Khan Academy the software itself acts as a tutor shows you hey you should probably work on this complete with points and badges sounds like a video game was this question students have been practicing for months with sample tests intended to reflect the new SAT exam that started in March and how did you do on the mock SAT? in the future for today Ann Thompson NBC News the Bronx so one of the things that's been really exciting about this is that when we started making the association, the opposite is you know there's this PSAT and when we all took the PSAT it was It's kind of a random test that you take in 10th or 11th grade, and if you do well, you might get some letters from colleges and things like that, but they said well, what if the PSAT could act as a diagnostic for practice?

And now when students get their score for the PSAT, which is 80 percent of American students who take it, they can lower their bills and again, this is all nonprofit, it's all free, you know. , none of this is even the slightest bit commercial, the PSAT acts. as the world's largest learning diagnostic for the coming years for the SAT and there was an effectiveness study that was published last summer where students who work 20 hours double their gains on the PSAT and the SAT have at least 100 points of revenue. and it actually goes on, we know students who know we don't publish it, but we spend 30, 40, 50 hours and they can actually make more profit than people expect, so everything I've talked about so far, and this.

This was the effectiveness there in Idaho and I see there are connections here. We did a large study in Idaho with the Albertson Foundation where we saw students who completed 60% of their coursework or mastery on Khan Academy and saw 1.8 times the growth seen. Otherwise, we expected that in Brazil we would see a situation where if students did about 60 minutes of Khan Academy as part of their classroom, they would see 30% more growth than expected and at that last point you know everything , most of what I've talked about is the world we live in, but what about the rest of the planet?

These are all our Khan Academy photographs that are used throughout the plan and they are all really interesting stories and, you know, the credit really goes to the organizations. that they are taking it to the villages, but probably the most interesting story is the one on the top right. I used to give

talks

like this and say who knows, maybe one day it will be used in Mongolia just imagining the farthest place on the planet and then a few months later I got a letter from Mongolia and it's from that young lady on the top right , her name is aya and at first she had a YouTube testimonial, so I watched her testimonial, she talked about using Khan Academy, how she likes math, etc. and I immediately assumed he must be middle or upper class his English was pretty good clearly he had access to the internet but then I read the text of his email more carefully and it turns out there was a group of engineers from Silicon Valley who were using their vacation time to go to Mongolia and set up computer labs with Internet in orphanages and what you see and what you see on the top right, those are the orphan girls using Khan Academy and Ziya was one of those orphans and What's especially amazing about This is because it shows how much potential there is on the planet if you allow people to take advantage of it.

Since then, Ziya has become one of the biggest contributors to Mongolian-language Khan Academy, so she is now helping to teach people about it and A similar story appeared in the New York Times about a year ago. It turns out that another 12-year-old girl lives in Afghanistan. The Taliban take over the city of Ella. They prohibit girls from going to school. I mean, horrible things threaten them with acid attacks. and things like that so Sultana no longer goes to school but she is lucky to have a family that wanted to support her she had a computer I think one of her brothers got her a computer with an internet connection and so she uses that first to learn English on her own over the Internet, which sounds a little scary, but it seemed to work for her and she started saying to family members, "Hey, can you get me some reading material?" family was going to Pakistan.

I retrieved an English Time magazine and it turned out there was an article cut out about Khan Academy, so she said, "Oh, this is what I need," and she started learning, and over the next four or five six years, she went from one late primary school. level up to high school, she realizes that she wants to be a physicist and come to the US to study physics, so she smuggles herself into Pakistan, because the SAT is not available in Afghanistan. For taking the SAT, she does surprisingly well and that's when we heard about her, someone she met on the Internet contacts us, it's like there's a young girl we could cut out and then we get in touch and think how do we handle her? to the country to come here.

I mean, brilliantly, fortunately, Nicholas Kristof of the New York Times finds out about her and writes this op-ed about her. The Taliban's worst fear. which allowed her to obtain political asylum and at this moment Sultana is in the United States doing research with one of the best physicists at MIT and, as you can imagine, you know that collectively we want to reach the entire planet, these are screenshots of how it is watch Khan Academy. Like in multiple languages ​​to think about how videos feel in other languages. I'll show you this Mikami two quarters, the pizza. Yippity News, come in. -orbital artery of Venegas Kiku - about Jacques Chirac was that in the connection in Altobelli or not beer because the moon to the moon - so Tresckow is important.

I saw that I get lazy and here they are just these are more photos of Khan Academy in use. all over the world and every time I see this and we get these letters, you know what I say to everyone involved and you know, just to be clear, Khan Academy is much more than me, we now have a hundred and fifty full-time employees, I think than the numbers. out of fourteen thousand people who have helped translate subtitle videos, obviously, there are all the people who work in the NGOs and the teachers, you know, they really work with the students and what I say to all the stakeholders of Khan Academy and You know, I hope I'm not.

The presumptuous thing I'm part of this mission more than, frankly, most audiences I might ever talk to is that if you know a free world-class education for anyone anywhere, you never imagined that it would somehow be I would do with, you know, for a person or even an organization it's really going to be a collaborative effort, we're going to work on some content, some tools, hopefully, in collaboration with all of you, but then it's how you work in the classroom, how is it done? create access so that students even have access to the computers in the unit.

There are a million questions we need to address together, but I'll leave you with a little thought experiment so we can appreciate what is possible as a group if you did. go back in time 400 years to Western Europe, which even then was one of the most literate parts of the planet, you would have seen about 15% of the population being literate, about 20% of men and 10% of women , and I suspect that if you ask someone who could read and write, for example a member of the clergy, what percentage of the population do you think is able to read?

They could have said well, with a great education system, maybe 40%, maybe 50%. Well, fast forward 400 years, we know. It would have been a tremendously pessimistic prediction that almost 100% of the population is able to read, but if I asked all of you today what percentage of the population is capable of writing the next great novel or starting the next Google or deeply understanding the physics or contributing to cancer research or becoming teacher of the year, you might say, "Well, you know, today that's a 1% increase, maybe with a great education system, maybe it could be 10%." , maybe it could be 20%, but what if We are doing the same thing to estimate with the same blinders that that member of the clergy might have done 400 years ago, the blinders of what we have observed in a world where you know we were all pushed forward, we built up a gap here there here there we saw many of our peers, everyone sees students every day where at some point the gaps become so big that they hit a wall and that wall is often in an algebra class or in a physics class, but it could be in any class it could be in your English class in your history class and it's not that they hit that wall, not because algebra is difficult or because they're not bright, it's because they really aren't They dominated decimals, fractions and negatives, something that can be completely remedied.

And so, if we had a world where they could fill those gaps, those Swiss cheese gaps, maybe the real number could be quite a bit higher, maybe it could be 30 percent, 40 percent, 50 percent and with each passing day I I'm coming back more and more. more convinced that that number could actually be much closer to the literacy number which could be 80 90 even one hundred percent and if we achieve that and you know free world class education for anyone anywhere, that's what the massive public education. everything about that is what has made you know if you look at the richest countries in the world, you know, the United States, Western Europe, Japan, these were the first countries that had public education, so it's not a coincidence that they were the first to industrialize. the first to have a high standard of living, but I think the opportunity that we can do together is to take everything to the next level and if we can get that level of free world-class education so that it becomes clean or basic drinking water. shelter and just a fundamental human right, thank you, I'll let you take the poor, remember we'll do a little Q&A now, so I'll prepare your questions, we'll have somemicrophones moving, but Sal, thank you so much for sharing that moving, fascinating, fun talk with us, it was yeah, it was really inspiring and thank you for everything you're doing with Khan Academy.

I want to address, though first of all, that's the first question and I'm going to approve it. I address the question to the audience that I'm sure you get asked a lot and I just want to address it head on and get it out of the way and you addressed a lot of them in the presentation, but people who say I don't just want my son to be in front of a computer all day, computers cannot replace teachers. I don't want them to just be an automated robot that just checks things out online, how do you respond when people tell you that?

Yeah, I mean, this is what I remember in the early days, when you knew Khan Academy was the first time it got on people's radar and you know I'd look at some of the reviews that would be exactly like, hey, you know this. . Don't you know that the important part of teaching happens when there's a human being in the room and when you're interacting and it's not just a screen? It was funny because I couldn't have agreed more without myself and some of our loudest critics. Sometimes I think what happens is you know the press or whatever, they like to take a narrative like, hey, this could be like Amazon for education or something, but it's one of those things that we constantly say, no. , this is not what we believe and you know, as I mentioned, I have been running summer camps forever.

I've always dreamed of starting a school and I'll talk about that a little bit, but I think you know what I write about. my book is about what technology can do to allow humans to be human and you know, the first TED talk I gave, you know sometimes there's a lot of debate about student to teacher ratios and you know, obviously, the lower the better. , but what? Ironically, what I think technology can optimize is valuable student-to-teacher time or student-to-human time with teacher ratio, so you already know the situations if you are sultana or your Ziya or you know a school with few resources somewhere and you know that yes, some of them could depend heavily on that, but that's not ideal.

Ideally you have a real classroom with real resources with an amazing teacher and that this you know, education is a full spectrum of things that you know on this end it's just the basics, you know almost a memory of things, so You can imagine that you know Bloom's taxonomy, here is your understanding, your synthesis. your value and then here you have your creation and because there is a lot to cover in a traditional model, even though teachers want to focus here, they have to spend a lot of time here and I think the opportunity is if technology can do some of this and even help with some of the things up here, it's not like what's there has an end, so you can do a lot more interesting things when you're in a classroom and the teachers that I talked to, that's why they became teachers, they They want those personal connections with the students, they want to be able to meet each of the students where they are, and one way to know that is to really demonstrate that this is what we believe, this is why we started the Laboratory School.

Do you know how many people say hello? Would you be something virtual? Why would you start a physical school? This doesn't scale, then Sharra said and it's like no, we're doing this to show how important the physical experience is. And what might the physical experience be like in a world where some of these types of tools exist? I think so and I was happy to know that you all will be able to tour, but I think you know we've actually done a little bit. Some of you know audit students on how much time they're with another human being, how much time they're interacting, how much time they're outside, how much time they're creating versus passively, and those are the benchmarks where we say this. are successes and so everything we look at knows that we have a whole and we have several members of our Khan Academy team here who are all people who work with teachers and try to understand what teachers need, how Do we improve the tools? that we can have more classrooms freed up this way, yes, I have been lucky enough to visit the Khan Lab school as some people here will do tomorrow and it is clear that the screen is not the main element of those schools, okay, let's get to the audience who has who has a question for Sal yes ma'am thank you first of all that was amazing and inspiring I really appreciate what you're doing I'm not Teacher of the Year McCord inator my teacher is Sicily, right there Sicily Raise your hand so what I The question is, since your background was in business and software, how did you learn all the things about what makes a great teacher?

No, and I look, you know, this is what they were talking about, you know, they talk about having an imposter complex, especially in this room here, you know, I think the valuable thing for me was, you know, this is something that was always interesting to me, you know, sometimes, but even the story just told it and the press narrative sometimes is like, this guy was working in finance and he just thought on a whim he decided to become, you know, that's not exactly what you know and I think It started in high school, where you know it might not surprise you. people that I was the president of the math club and, but, but, a big part of it was actually that we used to run these tutoring programs and with our peers and volunteers, and I remember thinking this in high school because it was I was on the wrestling team and I wasn't a strong member of that team, but I was on the wrestling team and I was always intrigued by the difference I sometimes saw between what happened in wrestling practice and what sometimes happened in the classroom where at wrestling practice the coach would say hey I want you to run ten miles like sir you know you're fine I want to make 50 points I'm going to do it I mean these painful things but and but Most of it of practice was also interacting, you know, we had a kid on our team who was the state champion and then he was our captain and he would go around and do a tour and then I would think about the difference of what if I had a void in my wrestling skills.

There was always someone there who could help me fill that void, but that's what happened and I had an amazing math teacher, Mr. Hernandez, who you know I'm still very close to and I credit him for a lot of my success. You know, I used to talk to him because he was the math club advisor and he used to say yeah, he's so cool. I wish I could run his class that way like the wrestling team does, where most of the class time the students work on what they need to work on, but he has to show me what he had to cover in a year and he has to show me this. he's a man and then I used to see in tutoring that when we had the opportunity to address some of these gaps, some of these kids who were failing classes were able to run ahead, so that was the first time I started thinking about it.

I think we've all had the experience of many friends who, and even ourselves, know that they can beat you at chess, but suddenly they failed algebra class and you wonder why that happened or suddenly. You get to a point where we're like, I don't understand this class anymore, but it's probably because I didn't pay attention to the last one or whatever, so there was all this stuff and me and me and even in college. I tried, I had to get a scholarship to try to work in software for education. I was rejected twice for the travel scholarship because I wanted to study and get a PhD in education, so they kept pushing me away from that, but yeah, it ended up at the end of the day struggling to fall into that.

I will say that even the hedge fund definitely helped, that it was a renewal of Murrah's television career in things like, but the reason I was really intrigued by it is It was an opportunity to learn about the world, at one point you would have to think about how you know that tanker truck prices are affecting Japan's economy and the next thing you're talking about a biotech, so I've always told you. I know that the greatest joy and in life what makes us most human is learning, so I think it was always a great pleasure for me to be able to initially work with my cousins ​​to participate in some of this beautiful material and I think Now one of my indulgences is that you know that I have gone further.

I've even done a few things and I'm not the only person creating content on Khan Academy, but I've definitely gone above and beyond. You know my original experience, where you know that recently. I've made videos about the Constitution, but what I see is so exciting is that I can delve into it in a way that you can't delve into it when you're in college or because I'm like me. I'll do it out of passion and interest and all of this is incredibly interesting and I'm lucky enough to know that if I have a question I can call some people and say, "Hey, you know, yeah." You're a famous judge, how does this work?

But I think it's like a student's dream and the least I can do is help, share some of it and help, and you all are doing it every day. I still miss that time I used to have with my cousins ​​and in fact that's another selfish reason why I personally lead some of the seminars at the lab school because I just need that energy with the students to keep doing what we're trying to do. . This is a question that doesn't necessarily have to do with Khan Academy, but I'm interested in you. Your thoughts are through a lens that is remarkable and you are a very interesting person and your favorite teacher of all time.

If you look back on your life, you are an influential teacher who had an impact on me. Would you describe that teacher to me? I would say there are three that immediately come to mind, although if I can before, if I dig into a record, I mean it's probably twenty years old. you know mr. Hernandez was one of them. I think what really stood out why he was so important to me was that he was my algebra 2 teacher and late you know who the advisor of the math club and the math team is, but he treated me like an equal and in many ways, I mean, he was my mentor in many things, but he, he, he was the first teacher that I didn't see as a teacher, like it showed that he was a little vulnerable, he was like, hey, this.

It's what I have to do and this and that and it was the first time I felt this deep empathy and he believed in me too. I mean, he wrote my recommendations for MIT. You know, there aren't many kids who go to MIT. who sees Anna from anyone and he's the guy who said no to me, you know, I think you should apply, I think you should and I thought no one from our school had done anything like that so I think for him for sure. Miss Kennedy, who is actually our journalism teacher, was in the school newspaper and it was a high school class that I went to at Grace King High School and she ran that class like it was a newspaper, like a real newspaper, so I think.

It was really powerful once again, she treated me like a member of the team, there was no separation between teacher and student if you go before. I remember I was in second grade and this is one of my first formative experiences, you know, my My sister was always like the high achiever and she was in all the gifted classes and everything that I thought was gifted until I I realized it was speech therapy, but because of my sister, because of my sister, they kept testing me and they're like, oh, surely that last test because Farah is very strong, surely they stayed with her brother.

I'm serious and I don't think most kids have this opportunity to continue getting tested, but I ended up in the program and on the first day. I showed up and I remember I was in second grade and it was this weird thing where every day they pulled you out of a different class period to go to this program. I walked into this room and it was Miss Kraus and Miss Roussel and I was 7 years old. years, but as the memory stuck in my head and it was like a classroom like I had never seen before, you know, it wasn't all the tables in one direction, but there was a group of children and mixed ages, all doing things different.

They were playing chess some kids were drawing and I was like what's the secret world I fall into and then they said oh you're new come here and there are two masters and I said so what are you interested in? and I was are you asking me? Know? Question and I like to draw them like then we will draw I like puzzles we will do puzzles and I thought I was running away I thought I can't tell anyone about this this is some kind of scam that is going on inside the school but when I really think in some of my loves, I mean, I don't remember much else about you, you know, second grade, but I remember those moments, so I think the thing is that when I was able to have human interactions and have that individual time, you know, even a thing What we try to do in lab school is that each student has at least 15 individual minutes with the teacher each week and could not seema lot, but if we all introspect on how much you know those one-on-one moments with loving adults are the things that stuck in your head, then I think those are the teachers that have had Really big, you know, there was also a Professor at the University of New Orleans, Dr.

Harris Antonia who took me under his wing when I was in high school because I took some courses there and he's also the one who should do this, you should think about this, you know, I didn't have access to a computer at home and that's why he lent me a computer so I could learn to program, so there are some amazing teachers. I mean, I could go on, yes, when I returned to teaching three years ago, I was asked to be a long-term substitute as an AP Algebra teacher. I am NOT a mathematician. I'm a social studies teacher and I survived three weeks teaching advanced algebra and moving kids forward because I could go home at night and I can work at Khan Academy if you're willing. be a great testimony we have free free I'm free it's so when you deal with math and science you're in a kind of black and white world as you move into the humanities and as you move into social studies you now get into more topics. partisans, so how are you dealing with that in your content?

Yes, it's fascinating and yes, and I'm learning everything. I remember doing this on a whim, it was about six, seven years ago. It reads like a news report that says you know the CIA had declassified some of their interventions that they had done in other countries during the Cold War and there was something about how they were overthrown and this is incredible. I'm going to make a video about this and I actually know which CIA government I took the primary documents from, as you know, so this isn't like you know the conspiracy theory that Sal made up, it's like if the CIA had published these documents. but this is a really valuable part of history and as you know, I said this happened and it was fast as soon as I uploaded it, the comics started coming out, a lot of American kids were like, well no, I appreciate you doing this, but I Don't think you are fair to the CIA because you have to understand that at that time we were afraid that communism would take this good point, but then it might start to seem like you are an imperialist pig, you have whitewashed the history of my country, my uncle died. in that intervention assassinated by his CIA and I thought this didn't happen in the wellFirst of all, this doesn't happen in the algebra videos and second of all, this didn't happen in the world history or current events classes that I remember and then I said well, why didn't it happen?

You know why? If a Chilean kid walks into the room, you imperialist pig, this is our view of history, so I think there are two conclusions here: you know, obviously, at Khan Academy we want to be, you know, it's impossible to be biased. List we all grew up on. a certain context and a certain but to the extent possible, you know, I think when people watch something from Khan Academy they feel like, wow, it's hard to tell if Sal is a Democrat or a Republican, it's hard to know what the leanings are. his policies. Is it difficult to say whether it's religious or not, it's difficult and I and I think that everything about Khan Academy has to be like that, but at the same time, because it's out there, because it's visible, it's transparent, it's there to let the world say no, we leave that as long as people are respectful in the comments, we leave them out there, people can say oh, I don't agree, this is wrong and I think that's how you know, that's how it is how to do it these things should work, it's actually already starting to be a little more challenging in other countries that are a little more sensitive about some of these things, so it's not, it's still an open question about, you know, in an Iran, I don't know if this is made public, but I edited this part, but you know, that's what art is, you know?

Should we go with math and science first because some of the other things might be very controversial or in China or whatever, that's a question we're trying to think about right now. I teach immigrant and refugee students in Spokane and my question is always about access because we take for granted that all of our students have access because most of them have smartphones, but We, they don't have data plants, they just use them as phone to take pictures, listen to music or play games and they have to have access to Wi-Fi to be able to access this type of content and I think we as educators.

We often do that too, we assign, you know, go to Khan Academy, do this and then we don't realize that to do that they have to go to the library, check in for 30 minutes and then we also have Wi-Fi, you know? you can get Wi-Fi for ninety-nine a month and then you find out it's slow as molasses and you can watch videos, maybe you can read some text sometimes, so how did you mention that you're talking about access and we're trying to figure out how we do it, so how do we do it with things like net neutrality and things like that?

How are we going to ensure that it's literally a world-class education for anyone, anywhere? Yeah, that's another core question for us, you know, you know we're not a big telco and we know we're still relatively small in the whole scheme of things, so there's two ways we think about it, one okay, we look at the trends and you know, we wish we could reach all the students who had access today, but we know that's not the reality, but hey, in five years, in seven years and ten years, it will be much more of a reality, so let's build so that's not the best answer, but that's one of the things that we can only do, the other thing is that we can use even though we are small, we have a voice now, you know, we work very closely with Google, we work very closely close with Comcast in other countries tells the cell phone and Tel Telmex in Mexico we are working with all these people so that an advocate says that the $5.99 of the 1099 is actually real Internet, you know what is on a cell phone in Mexico.

I actually have a rating of 0 so you know that in Mexico most people have a prepaid data plan, but if you access Khan Academy, it doesn't affect your data plan, so I think things like that are our solutions that we want to explore in In other countries, and you know, the argument that I make there is that you know that there is a reason why public education is free and there is a reason why an ambulance, everyone pulls off the road when a ambulance drives down the road and me and I argue. which you know, education is not just kind of a cut, but anything that's going to be really useful to students should get that kind of education, you know they shouldn't have to pay and by the way, from the point of View of the state, it is.

It's a value that no one wants to learn and the only reason they don't is because that seems really silly even if you're thinking about it in the future here, your nation or your state, so yeah. We encourage you to know that Google does a lot and they have helped us even in the Bay Area. Here they distributed Chromebooks to four classrooms that have done some really amazing things, so yeah, we're just trying to use our voice to help influence you. Bigger players, simple answer, Sal, thank you very much for coming. I'll talk to us this morning and it will please everyone.