- Hi everyone.
Welcome to our daily live stream.
This is why we've almost,
we've been doing this for a little bit over two weeks.
For those of you all who are new to this,
the whole point of this is Khan Academy
is a not-for-profit, with a mission of providing
a free world-class education for anyone anywhere.
And over the last many years,
we've been building resources that start in pre-K
with Khan Academy kids through elementary,
middle, high school and the core of college, not just math,
not just videos, but deep interactive exercises,
dashboards for teachers, English and language arts,
history, sciences, SAT preparation.
And, that has made us very well-suited
to really step up for the country and the world
as we go through these school closures.
But we realize we need to do
as much as possible on top of that.
And so the whole point of this live stream
is for all of you who are using Khan Academy
or thinking about using Khan Academy
or just trying to navigate the school closures generally.
We wanted a place for folks to connect, and feel connected,
especially in this time of social distancing.
And so, every day it's very informal.
Myself and I gonna bring some team members on,
we sometimes have special guests,
we try to answer your questions
and I make any announcements that are relevant.
I do wanna start off with reminding everyone
we are not-for-profit,
we are funded by philanthropic support
from folks like yourself.
We were running at a deficit that even before this crisis
and with this crisis our server load is up,
is roughly 250% of what it normally is,
our registrations are six x from teachers
and parents of what it normally is.
Parent registrations are 20x.
So if any of you find yourself in a position
that you can donate, please think about doing so.
I wanna give a special shout out
to several corporations who've stepped up
in the last few weeks with very short notice to help us,
although we need more help.
Bank of America was the first followed by 18T,
google.org and Novartis but we need more help
from individuals and corporations.
We are literally going to go millions,
few weeks and months.
But with that said, I would love to,
I'll bring my colleague Dan on who helps me
answer all of the questions that we get on the live stream,
and I encourage all of you all to start asking questions
on whatever you're using, YouTube,
Facebook, whatever channel.
And, let's see,
it seems like there's already a couple of questions,
but then you can always jump in, but this question,
it's from YouTube, this is Crazy Cookie 3,908.
It's pretty impressive
that there were probably 3,973 before you.
Hey Sal, will there be summer classes?
Will this be all-year round?
That's actually a super powerful question,
Crazy Cookie 3,908.
You know, I think about two weeks ago,
the school closures were announced in this country
and really through the world,
there's 50 million students out of school in just the US
pretty much close to a billion globally,
and it happened so fast
because of just the health emergency.
And I don't think a lot of thought was no one had time
to think about what the implications
but now it's becoming clear that in most of the world,
the school closures actually might happen
through the summer.
And so, the way we've been thinking about this,
we wanna be able to support teachers,
parents, students over the next two months
so that we can keep the learning happening,
keep everyone learning, but we also see summer
as a really powerful opportunity to keep going.
There's no reason that once you've built the practices
and the habits to keep learning
over what would be the traditional school year,
that whether you're a student, parent or teacher,
that you can't go over those three months as well.
And that might be the silver lining of,
historically summer has been, you know,
there's the term summer slide,
it's been a time for a lost learning
and now we have an opportunity to do,
now we have an opportunity to make it a valuable
for learning purposes.
And so, yes, simple answer what we're trying to do
in response to the school closures and COVID,
we expect to be able to do through the summer.
And I think next school year is going to be interesting.
We all hope that the social distancing,
the school closures are not in place as of back to school.
Hopefully the summer temperatures
will help kill some of that virus, reduce the spread
but there is a possibility
that in October, November, December,
what's traditionally flu season
could actually make COVID go up again.
And so we also wanna think about if that happens,
how we can continue to support folks.
But, the big takeaway is summer is an opportunity
that we all have to keep everyone learning.
Excellent question.
All right.
So there's a another question.
This is from Facebook.
Dina Everett Nevos says, hi, I'm apparent and new to Khan,
I saw the sample daily agendas.
How do I link the daily schedule to my children's accounts?
Thanks.
Well, Dina, the schedules are very simple documents
and you can actually adapt them, you can copy and paste them
into your own docs and adapt them as necessary.
And those just have links
to the relevant part of Khan Academy.
And what if the student, if your child clicks on the link,
it will go to their Khan Academy and if they are logged in,
they will show up as a logged in users.
So, if they click from their computers
or whatever they're using, if they click on that, you know,
let's call it fifth grade English and language arts
on that document, they'll go to Khan Academy
and see fifth grade language arts,
and if they're not logged in, they can log in
and there'll be logged into fifth grade language arts.
And if they're already logged in on that computer,
they will be on their accounts.
So I think that's what you might be asking.
And that brings up another interesting thing is, you know,
we've made those schedules,
we made four different versions of them.
One for kind of the pre-K kindergarten first grade crowd,
one for the elementary crowd,
and then one for the middle school
and one for the late high school crowd.
And what you could do is then make them
even more fine tuned for your children's needs.
Because for example, for the late elementary crowd, we said,
okay, you might wanna use third grade
or fourth grade or fifth grade or sixth grade
or seventh grade math on Khan Academy
and depending on the strength of the student,
you might wanna remediate it or not
but you know all your children better than anyone
and they know themselves hopefully.
And so you can narrow that down, you know,
work on sixth grade or if you had some weak foundations,
work on fourth and fifth grade
while you work on sixth grade as well.
So I completely encourage you to fine tune
those schedules for your children's needs.
- So Sal, I would add next week
we are hosting some parent webinars for different age groups
specifically and we'll be going through both your,
the schedule that you created and kind of helping parents
find the right content for their kids
and dive in a little bit deeper on how to use Khan Academy
specifically matching to those schedules.
- Awesome.
- So Sal we have a question here.
Yeah, we have a great question on YouTube from our Arov Jane
who says, I'm in fourth grade,
I want to learn more about scientists,
can you post something on Khan Academy about that?
- So Arov, we want to help you.
We currently do not have what you could call
fourth-grade science on Khan Academy,
but we, and I hope over time we are able to add that
and I'll remind everyone we're not-for-profit.
The more support we get,
the more we can think about adding more subjects.
But, if you are genuinely interested in science,
I think there are places you can start.
I actually think that you could,
we have several, for example, even our high school biology,
I know you're only, I'm guessing nine years old,
and high school biology could seem daunting,
but I actually think some of the intro levels
of high school biology you could start to engage
in my oldest son is about,
is actually a little bit older than you,
my daughter is about your age.
And actually I've been doing stuff
even in some of the early chemistry,
high school chemistry units on, what's an element,
what's an atom, what's an atomic number?
I think these are types of things
you could completely understand
and it'll be really interesting,
especially some of the stuff in biology to understand,
you know, I was talking to my daughter
who's about your age this morning about what's a virus,
how the virus different than bacteria, are viruses living?
You know, what's the definition of life, what's RNA and DNA,
how do viruses replicate?
So this is obviously very, very important things
to think about that's very relevant to the world right now
and I encourage you to, depending on your interest
to start digging in and see what works for you.
See, other questions.
So this is from Facebook, Scott Yang asks,
I enjoyed the daily live streams,
will you do it again next week?
Yeah.
We are set to keep doing this
until no one wants us to do it anymore.
(laughs)
So no, no, we think this is super important
and I say it at the end of every live stream.
I myself in this time of social distancing
feel more connected by being able to do this
and I know a lot of our team here at Khan Academy does.
So, we wanna do it for sure, keep that connection going
and make sure that all of you feel supported.
So, from YouTube, Steven Amenzo says,
when was Khan Academy founded?
And Steven, if you do a web search, you'll find a lot of,
you know, talks on YouTube and other places
for me talking about that.
So if you want it in depth,
I recommend you you're doing that
but long story short, about 14, 50, actually 16 years ago.
I'm getting old.
My cousin Nadia, who was 12 at the time
needed help with math and I started tutoring her remotely.
Worked around my family that free tutoring was going on,
and so people, and so I started making resources
to scale it up.
At first it had nothing to do with videos.
I was creating the software part,
the early version of what you can now the practice software
in Khan Academy and then a friend suggested
that I make videos to supplement it
and that kind of took on a life of its own in 2009.
2008 I set it up as a not-for-profit,
which just means no one owns Khan Academy.
I don't own Khan Academy, I'm an employee of Khan Academy,
I own as much as you own of Khan Academy,
and then 2009 was when I quit my day job
to try to work on this full-time.
It was a tough year.
(laughs)
I was living off of savings,
but then in 2010 we got some of our first support
from some foundations and corporations.
And so we've been able to grow all the way till today
where we're over 200 folks, we have thousands of volunteers,
there's 40 translation efforts
around the world of Khan Academy,
we're trying to add subjects and grades
and we were already reaching 17, 18, 19 million students
a month before the crisis and it looks
like our daily users is up roughly 50% now
and our actual total traffic is up 2.5.
And so it's been a bit of a wild ride
but we feel privileged to be able to support you
and so many other folks.
Dan, you got more questions?
- Yeah, so I just wanted to share.
Here's our 10 year tee shirt from last year so...
- Dan is showing off his clothing.
(laughs)
- I'm worrying about getting this Khan Academy's.
(laughs)
- So we have a question on YouTube from Carmen Nita.
Hey Sal I have a question.
Will the schedule you made for all of us,
will you switch it up or will it stay the same?
- That is a great question and that was at Carmen Nita.
So, that's the schedules you see where the first pass
that we put out a little over a week ago.
And, I hope that as we kind of get our legs under us
that we can provide more and more supports for y'all.
One thing we are very seriously talking about are yes,
can we extend that schedule to maybe think about
what goals could be week by week
as we go through this crisis,
not just over the course of the next couple of months
during the traditional school year,
but to previous question asker go through the summer,
so that, you know, hey, given your grade level,
given what you're trying to achieve,
what are reasonable goals for you to achieve?
And it would be cool to even switch it up like,
hey, here's the PE of the day.
So what we're trying to do,
we have a small but mighty team,
and we're gonna try to put as much together as possible,
but that's a really cool idea to think about.
How could we switch it up day by day a bit?
Maybe we give a weekly schedule or something like that.
So, we're gonna work on that.
Let's see.
There's other questions.
Some Facebook Tamra Adams says,
is this the new normal of distance learning?
How do you believe is the best platform for assessments?
So Tamra, you know,
what you're asking is a really intriguing question.
I've been writing actually just there was an op ed
that came out today that I wrote about,
you know, are a lot of people asking me,
what's the new normal, what's structurally,
how is this crisis going to fundamentally alter
what we do going forward and schooling
and obviously in a bunch of other ways?
The way I've been thinking about it is,
given that this is, you know,
we're likely to go through the end of the school year
and then summer, and then as we go into next school year,
hopefully schools are open,
but then they might have to close with fairly short notice
if the virus picks up again in November, December.
I think this is where the hybrid of in-person learning
and having a great online tools that are accessible
and free it's starting to become even more important.
Even before the crisis we've talked a lot about
that everyone learns at different paces
and has gaps in their knowledge if they're pushed together
at a fixed pace.
Teachers have always known this.
They have students who come into a class on day one.
There's some kids who are ready to move ahead.
There's some kids who have gaps from two,
three grade levels behind.
Teachers try to kinda teach to the middle
but that leaves some kids a little bored,
some kids a little lost, and there was no way for them,
you know, they're taught in ed schools
to try to differentiate but it's really hard
if you're one teacher in a classroom of 25, 30
or in some cases, 35 or 40 students.
And so even before the crisis,
all of us at Khan Academy have been working with teachers
and districts to say,
okay, how can we support teachers in that way
so they have the tools?
How can we be the teaching assistant for that teacher?
So they have the tools to give that personalization
for every student so they can fill their gaps
and if necessary, learn along the class if necessary
and even accelerate as necessary.
And then how do we do it with districts?
So the districts can have a read on
where their kids need help or not.
And now all of a sudden when you have these school closures,
the districts that have adopted that,
those types of models where they are using tools
like Khan Academy for even 20% of their class time
really is a strategic supplement.
It's been much easier for them to transition
to the school closure world because they can now lead,
you know, they've already rostered their kids, set them up,
the students are used to using these tools,
the teachers are used to reading the dashboards
and so they've been able to lean quite heavily on these,
say the teacher or the district version of Khan Academy
and have a seamless transition.
And so I think, one of the new normals is the emphasis
on being able to blend is going to be really important,
blend so that you can accelerate outcomes
during a normal school year,
but also blend so that if for whatever reason
there's a school stoppage that kids can keep learning
and then the district and the teachers can keep monitoring.
I think there's a whole other layer
that's going to be really interesting around,
you know, I've been talking to some school districts lately,
they're doing all sorts of training
to help teachers start teaching on Google Me or on Zoom.
So I think that's gonna be a new muscle
that even when schools are in session,
I think might actually be an added muscle
that'll be really powerful for a lot of types of schooling.
So, we will see, but a lot of things going on.
I think one of the biggest question questions
that everyone's thinking about is access.
Obviously if you're watching this,
you have internet access at home,
but there's still a large fraction of kids in the US
and even a larger fraction globally who don't.
And I think this crisis shows us
that at home internet access is not just a nice to have,
it's a must have, not just to access things
like Khan Academy and Keep Learning,
but also to just be socially connected
and for your mental health when all of us
are having to be socially distanced.
Great question though,
and something we're thinking about it, a lot.
- So Sal we have a question on Facebook
from Elizabeth Warner, and this is for a lot of folks.
So where can a parent find out more
about the upcoming parent webinars next week?
Where's the best place to find these opportunities
to send parents to?
And really what's the best place to find
all of our resources that we're developing right now?
- I could answer it, but I don't wanna steal Dan's thunder
'cause he's actually the guy (laughs ) coordinating.
(speaks indistinctly) why don't you tell us?
- Yeah, sure Sal.
If you just go to khanacademy.org right now,
we have a blue ribbon at the top
and it contains links to all of our resources.
Our parent webinars, the ones that are upcoming
are listed there as well as webinars
that we've already performed
where you create links there and it's available
for you to view so in case you can't make any of them live,
they are available to you after the fact as well.
- Yeah, exactly.
You just go to our homepage or actually any page
on Khan Academy, that banner at the top
there's three or four links.
One of them is kind of, you know,
we've been posting stuff on the daily schedules
'cause a lot of people have been looking at that
and also that a remote learning resources link
that you can see right now, and we are,
and Dan is one of the many people
who is constantly updating that to keep you informed
and also stay tuned on social media, our Facebook page,
our Twitter, et cetera,
that's also where we're going to be making announcements
on new resources that we are adding.
All right.
So there's other questions.
So Facebook, from Facebook,
Mary Miller's asking any thoughts
on adding more arts courses to the curriculum?
So, we don't have any major plans
to add significantly new ones.
And then I don't think if there's a little hum from yours
or maybe lower the microphone down.
I'm getting a hum.
It's not horrible.
Oh yes but (speaks indistinctly).
(laughs)
No, but on the art courses,
we aren't going to add any new significant ones,
but we have a partnership with Beth and Steven
who do smart history, who've been adding art history content
on Khan Academy for many, many years now.
And so, if you haven't seen it already,
I do encourage you to explore art history on Khan Academy.
It's really, really interesting stuff
where they're having these cool conversations
about some of the most important pieces of art in the world
or actually almost all of the important pieces of art
in the world.
So encourage you to check that out.
All right.
So there's other questions here from Facebook.
Actually, let's see, there's other questions below the.
So from YouTube, Kimberly Klein asks,
what advice do you have for GED students using the website?
So Kimberly, my recommendation to you as a GED student,
I think there's two things you could do actually,
even though it's not built for GED,
I think our SAT practice could be great for the GED.
It's covers roughly the same,
you know, math reading and writing,
and so if you get good at that,
I'm confident that you will do just fine on the GED.
If you feel like you have some more foundational gaps,
especially in math or reading,
then I encourage you to try to find your learning edge
on Khan Academy math and the Khan Academy English
and language arts.
And you could do that by just sampling and say,
okay, the algebra stuff seems a little hard.
Okay, the seventh grade stuff feels a little bit easy,
eighth grade feels right for me,
and then you could take the course challenge
and use that to assess what you know and don't know
and then focus on the units
where you might have larger gaps.
There's another way where you can actually start
at the earliest possible stage at second grade
in English and language arts and a second grade in math
or even earlier in math you could start.
And just go from there
and if you feel like it's ridiculously easy,
you obviously can skip to the next grade.
But that actually might be,
and you could take the course challenges in math.
That might be one of the most robust ways
of making sure that you don't have any debilitating gaps.
What we've seen even a strong students, A, B student,
from middle school, high school,
even in third or fourth grade, you know,
they might have a mastery of 99% of it
but there's always that one like, oh,
that's why the distributive property works this way.
Or things like that, things that they've just, you know,
taken for granted but even that helps fill in the gap.
So, I think that's something that you can do.
So, from Facebook Myuran Alara asks,
how can we make sure that we maintain a good mental health
during these uncertain times?
You are my hero.
Well, thank you Myuran.
You're being very generous.
On the mental health side of things, you know,
and this is something I think a lot about
'cause even before this crisis, you know,
sometimes life can get stressful, jobs can get stressful,
school can get stressful, what I have found invaluable
and y'all have seen me talk about this before
has been meditation.
And you know, meditation isn't some fancy new age thing.
I mean it is a fancy new age thing as well.
(laughs)
But it doesn't have to be a fancy new age thing.
You know, meditation, it literally can be,
you know, you can start five minutes in the morning
and I've personally found the morning
or right before I go to bed,
but especially the morning it's about,
is the best meetup when the house is quiet,
is the best time to meditate
and it's literally just finding a quiet space,
sitting, you know, posture matters a lot.
Sit up right, close your eyes, be attentive
and just try to observe your thoughts,
and you'll realize that you are not your thoughts.
That there's all this stuff that's going on your thoughts.
I've got to get that thing done.
Why did that person say that?
And how am I going to do this?
And, you know, what's going on on that TV show
that I'm watching and, you know, any,
I know like what's gonna happen with COVID rise?
You know, all of these thoughts are going in our head
right now, and what you need to do is just learn
to observe those thoughts,
and separate it yourself from those thoughts.
And, you know, the a metaphor,
we've done some guided meditations on kind of going.
There you have it fully fans a put the screen.
So you can go use these guided meditations
if you want a little bit of health,
but over time you'll be able to do it on your own
and you're gonna realize
that as you rise above the thoughts, you know,
if you do the thoughts as cars on a highway,
you just kind of get out of the highway
and just watch the cars go by,
that the car starts slowing down.
And you're gonna have these moments where you're like,
well, you're not even thinking about it,
you're just not thinking.
And when you have even five minutes of that a day,
and your mind will wander and don't beat up yourself,
just say, okay mind, that's funny, you wandering,
come on back in.
You're kind of like a sheep herding dog for your mind
and your mind are the sheeps (laughs)
or you're just kind of, that's a little sheep
that's going astray and you gotta bring it back.
But I found if even five minutes a day,
but over time you're going to like it,
you're gonna wanna do 10 minutes, 15 minutes.
I do half an hour every morning.
You're gonna have moments in that half an hour
where your mind is wandering but moments
in that half an hour where you're just completely still
and you'll feel really happy and really, really calm.
And I found that it's not just for that 30 minutes
or that 10 minutes that you're meditating,
it just maybe makes you more mentally resilient
through the day.
It's harder for people to trigger you, so to speak,
you get less worked up about things
and you get less stressed about things
and so that's my best advice and you know,
just don't beat up on yourself,
take everything one day at a time, you know,
to quote a frozen one and frozen two, frozen one, you know,
let it go and frozen two do the next right thing
which is a awfully deep philosophy
which is actually consistent
with most of the mystical traditions of most religions.
(laughs)
- So Sal unfortunately with the crisis
affecting everyone around the world,
this question is particularly important.
So from YouTube online education, Nepal says,
hello Sal, I'm Pushpa from Nepal.
How can you move this into different languages?
- Great question Pashpa.
So there are 40 translation projects
of Khan Academy around the world,
and there are different degrees of fidelity.
We have the richest versions in Spanish-speaking
Latin America, Brazilian, Portuguese,
and we have actually a team in India
that is trying to work on the various languages in India
and aligned to the standards in all of these places.
And then of course you have
this other 30 something projects going on.
So that's what's going on right now.
I'm actually not expert on the state of Nepalis,
if that's of a particular interest,
but if we don't already have a translation project there,
obviously we would love people to start one.
So that's one layer that we think we can help with.
And then the other layer is in many parts of the world,
things like internet access, et cetera.
And, you know, there where we are try,
we do try to work with philanthropists, corporations,
telecom carriers to make it more accessible.
But that's our best answer right now.
All right, YouTube, Samayam Hyundai
is asking a really simple question.
What do you think is the purpose of life?
That's a good question.
(laughs)
Samayam, yeah, no I mean, you know,
I think not to get to a metaphysical or too deep,
we find ourselves in this big mystery and I think,
you know, current world events, you know,
which feel almost surreal, dystopian,
whatever you want to call it,
I think really emphasize 'cause we're finding ourselves
in this big mystery.
And I think one of the purposes is to reflect on the mystery
and to experience this mystery that we call life
in the universe and everything
and obviously I'm making a few references to Douglas Adams.
But yeah, you know, I can't claim
that I know the purpose of life.
I will say that sometimes in your moments
when you can actually steal your thoughts
and bring your mind away from,
I guess you could call it material reality
and all of the distractions and material reality,
sometimes you can feel a deep peace and connectedness
to the universe and whatever you might want to call that.
And I think that actually can sometimes make you feel
a very grounded and very happy.
And so, you know, I can't necessarily describe
that as a purpose of life
but I can give you maybe a lens on life.
But it's a really, really good question.
One met a one framework, you know,
who knows if this is true is, you know,
this is something of a learning experience for you
and obviously we talk about learning at the academic level,
but life itself is a mega learning experience.
And, you know, there's frameworks of imagining
that every person on the planet is another version
of yourself and so you are, you know,
we're all connected in some way.
Who knows?
I don't wanna get to a metaphysical
'cause I don't know the answers, but it's a deep question
that I'm sure we will (laughing) keep struggling with.
Okay, so YouTube Gurpreet is asking, how to deal
with demotivation and how to approach a new topic.
I think number one thing with demotivation
or procrastination is to just get started
and I've talked about it in other sessions.
There's something called the Pomodoro technique,
where you can kind of set a timer and say,
I'm gonna do 20 minutes and I'm gonna focus
and I'm gonna get something done
and then give yourself a break after that,
force a break after that, and then jump back in.
And, you know, one thing that I've always reminded myself
is to just keep on moving.
I actually am a big believer in starting the day
with making your bed and I have a little bit of a ritual
which includes meditation.
I go do some pull-ups in my garage,
I do some pushups, and the reason why I do those things,
it's not so much even for my health
or to make my bed look nice,
it gives me some wins early in the day.
And I find that on days
that I'm able to have some accomplishments
within 20, 30 minutes of waking up,
that my brain just loves that feeling
and wants to then have more accomplishments
and check more things off.
So that's my best advice, and when I approach a new topic,
I view it as an adventure, you know.
And so it's just, you could have approach life and this,
this is like a mystery. it's like a game.
And it's a puzzle and so even if something looks dry
or you're not sure how it applies to your life at first,
if you look at it with that lens,
and if you look at it through the lens
that you're able to look at human knowledge
that has been accumulated over thousands of years
and you are the beneficiary of being able to consume that,
you know, Isaac Newton would have done anything
to have access to the textbooks,
the resources that we have today.
Pythagoras would have done anything,
Marie Curie would have done anything
to have access to a modern chemistry or biology book.
We get that, and we get the a lifetime's work
of so many people who've dedicated their lives to it.
So if you view it that way, it's quite exciting,
I think to learn and it's fun to meditate in a different way
or it's fun to sit and think about the learning
in a way that forms those neural connections in your brain
and it becomes intuitive,
and when you do that in one subject,
all of a sudden a lot of other things
start to make a lot of sense.
So it looks like we're out of time.
You guys got me talking about topics
that (laughing) I have limited knowledge about,
but I enjoy pondering.
But I just wanna remind everyone or tell everyone,
thank you for joining, we do this every weekday
at noon Pacific, 3:00 p.m. Eastern.
It's a fun way for all of us to connect
at this time of social distancing,
and we wanna do everything in our power to keep students,
teachers, parents learning, keep them supported,
and I'll also put another plug in.
We are not-for-profits,
please donate if you're in the position to do so.
Thank you so much.