(previous show ending)
We hope that you guys will join us a little bit later this afternoon
for more of our Innovation Challenge.
We'll see you then, thanks very much. (Applause)
Tom Brokay: Who says that CBS has got a corner on the Amazing Race?
We've got our own going on here on Education Nation.
I'm joined now by Sal Khan, who, in a fact,
is one of the leading innovators of the country,
but kind of stumbled into it,
You were a computer science enthusiast.
Sal: Yes.
Tom: You got into the venture capital business.
But you had a niece across the country
who was having some difficulties doing her math.
What happened then?
Sal: Yes, it was 2004,
they were visiting me right after my wedding.
It just turned out.. it came out while we were just talking about it
that she was getting tracked into a slower math class
when she was going into 7th grade right after the summer.
And I talked to her.
I said "Nadia, you are clearly a bright girl --
And we share a certain amount of DNA --
There is no way that you should be tracked into a slower math class."
And so, she agreed that we would tutor each other,
or I would tutor her when she went back.
Tom: Now where was she living and where were you living at the time?
Sal: She was based in New Orleans,which is where I grew up.
But I was in Boston at the time.
And we agreed that she would go home,
and we would get on a conference cal,l and we'd figure out something.
I used Yahoo Doodle to tutor her.
And a couple months later, that worked out.
Then I started tutoring her brothers, a couple other cousins.
The whole time, I still had a day job.
And about a year later,
it just became hard for me to scale myself:
I had trouble scheduling with all my different cousins
and family friends and all the rest
And I had a buddy who I was talking to over dinner.
And I said: "You know, I'm really enjoying this tutoring thing that I'm doing after work.
But it is getting difficult."
And he said ,"Why don't you just record your lectures and put them on YouTube?"
And I said; "No, YouTube is for dogs on skateboards.
It's not for serious mathematics, "
But I tried it out, and, long story short:
My cousins said that they liked me better on YouTube than in person.
And other people did too, and they just kept watching it.
So, it's about 2.5 million people a month are watching the videos.
Tom: And you've got about 2200 videos.
Sal: It is now pushing 2800 videos,
on everything from basic addition to vector calculus,
and biology, and chemistry, and whatever else.
Tom: Is this a commercial enterprise?
Are you doing this just to keep the country better informed?
Sal: No.. a lot of my buddies from the very for-profit
investment world are wondering what happened to Sal.
But I decided to make it a not-for-profit.
And the real idea is that the fun of this
is that it reaches as many students as possible.
So, when I'm on my deathbed, it would be nice...
you know in the for-profit realm a big success
would have been IPO or you get acquired.
But here the big success is you can reach millions and millions of kids.
It's pretty exciting.
Tom: What's the appetite for learning that you're finding from this generation?
Especially in the difficult sciences like Math,
because we know that we're behind in this country.
Sal: You know, the really surprising thing is...
is my cousins were fairly motivated students,
they were having trouble but I was helping them.
And when I made the videos, I assumed that they would be..
that the appeal would be for people like my cousins
or maybe people like myself..
I was a pretty good student when I was in middle school,
and all the rest.
But the really big surprise: the letters I get are from students
who a lot of us would have traditionally labeled as the disengaged students.
The students who said: "I was about to fail out of Algebra...
I was about to drop out of High School...
until I found this type of a resource".
And the big message to me is that it's actually a much larger group of students
who really, really want to learn
and you just have to give them an outlet,
so they're not frustrated, so they don't feel that they're being talked down to.
And if you give them that, it's not just the 5-10% students that want to learn,
it's the 90-95%.
Tom: Sal, in proceeding panels, as you know,
we talked a lot about poverty, socio-economic depravation,
people not having access to the internet.
So are you talking affectively to those who are privileged
or, if not elite class, than certainly in the middle to upper middle class?
Sal: You know, across the board, we've seen...
Clearly I think the main barrier here is that there is some type of internet connectivity
that someone needs to do,
but people are already taking our videos,
they are being translated into 11 languages,
they're putting them onto DVDs.
I've gotten pictures of people using them in rural Africa and rural India.
So even now, it can be accessed by people anywhere.
And as we go forward, the cost of technology is just getting cheaper and cheaper
and I think that there is some healthy skepticism around technology
in the classroom or technology for learning.
And I think the reason that I solved these is
because it was nothing to do with technology.
And we're hoping that between our videos -
we then we have a huge software platform -
to give exercises and feedback to students -
that that will be a catalyst to really use technology.
Tom: What's the difference between teaching online and teaching in the classroom?
Sal: The classroom management is a little bit easier. (laughter)
No, I say that jokingly, but its true.
I get a huge luxury that when I make my videos
I pretend that the students are so enthralled by what I have to say
that I can just imagine it.
And what's good about that is that it gives me energy...
It's much harder to sit in front of a room full of 30 kids
and you're not sure whether some are getting it,
some are there, some are here.
What happens is that.. that energy gets conveyed in the videos
and when the students watch it, they can pause
and repeat as many times as they want.
I just got a letter from a kid who watched one video 30 times
and it took him 30 times to get the idea.
And what he said was that there no one on the planet that he could have paid
to tutor him that constant 30 times without judging him.
And I think that's what students really like.
Tom: You do have a non-profit, you're out there in the universe of cyberspace
but are any of the educational systems in this country
- the districts - either at the local or state level - coming to you
and saying 'how can we strengthen the relationship between what we need and what you do?'
Sal: Yes, we started some pilots last year, just almost on a whim
and its gotten pretty exciting.
Some of the local schools in the Bay Area,
they said: 'what would you do if you could do anything you wanted with a 5th grade classroom?"
We said that we'd have every student working at their own pace:
watching videos, doing the self-paced exercises.
Only moving forward once they'd mastered concepts.
Right now you get a 'B' or a 'C' on a topic.
That's fine, you passed,
even though you don't know 10 or 20% of the material.
And then you move on to more difficult topics.
So we are saying everyone at their on pace, master concepts first
and then what happens to the teachers is that they get all of this data:
who is working on what, what videos are they watching.
What exercises are they doing.
So the teacher no longer has to give these 'one size fits all' lectures.
The teacher can actually get the data and say:
"Hey look, Tom's having trouble with negative numbers,
and everyone else is working at their own pace,
let me sit down next to Tom and actually have a 1-1 intervention with Tom."
What we've found in the classrooms has been pretty crazy
before maybe 10% of the teacher's time was spent on that really deep 1-1 mentorship.
Now it is 90% of their time.
So what we consider to be the relevant metric
which is the student-to-time-with-the-teacher ratio.
That's gone through the roof.
Tom: Do people in their 40s and 50s, or my age,
and I'm a grandparent at this age,
do we tend to underestimate the passions
and the almost affinity that young people, now coming of age
with all this technology around them,
have for using that technology and the expectation that they have for it?
Sal: Yeah, it surprised me. I wouldn't have thought,
when I started this up, I wouldn't have thought,
that when I made videos on sine and cosine and l'Hopital's rule
that they would become this 'main stream' thing
but clearly there's this hunger for it.
And the surprising thing is that it isn't just the younger generation
we have 30 year olds, 40 year olds, 50 year olds...
I got a letter from a grandmother that said it was her life dream to learn calculus -
who knew?
And she started working on it, so it is really across generations.
Tom: Do you compliment what you do online with conventional text books
or math books or offer references?
Sal: Well, it is an interesting...
I think that there will always be a role for books.
But textbooks right now do two things:
the text tries to teach you something, it is sometimes hard to read.
And then the exercise try to give you practice.
We think that on-demand video is often better than the text
that you see in a lot of text books and that immediate feedback,
self-paced learning with data and analytics
and you get the steps of every problem,
and it is kind of like a video game.
That that's better than every other answer in the back of the book.
So it will be interesting to see what happens to the textbook world.
Tom: What did you learn, if anything, at this point?
And I know it is empirical of it probably..
about whether some of us are hard-wired to do math
and others of us, like me, are hard-wired to do other things.
I mean people ask me how I got to be a journalist and I say:
"Algebra 2". (laughter)
Sal: That's pretty good.
No, the amazing thing that we've started seeing in these pilots
in these classrooms is when you let every kid work at their own pace,
right when you start off, you do see what we traditionally see:
some of the kids race ahead
and those are the kids that we all think will be nuclear physicists and whatever else.
And some of the kids take a little bit longer on one concept to another
and in a traditional model, you'd say: those kids are meant to be scientists or engineers.
These kids .. maybe they'll become journalists - which isn't so bad.
But what we've seen is that if you let them work at their own pace,
some of those kids who are spending a little extra time on negative numbers
or exponents. You give them that extra time
and as soon at they get that some of them just race ahead.
And so what we're seeing in our data in the classrooms
is when we are not grouping kids based on early assessment,
that every week there is a new leader.
And some of the kids that two or three weeks ago you'd have said were slow or below average
a week or two or a month later,
they're the best kid in the class.
So what we are seeing is that maybe we're just discounting kids
too early and we are assessing them at the wrong times.
And it is kind of a predetermined future if you do it that way.
Tom: How did we loose our way in this country when it came to science education?
Tom: How did we loose our way when comes to science education in this country?
When I was a younger guy, the Russians were beating us into Space
so a lot of people went into Engineering, went into Sciences.
The Space Race helped accelerate all of that.
But then we lost our way, it seems to me, in the last part of the 20th century.
Sal: You know, I think that it has just been bad branding.
I think, you know its funny, because Science and Engineering
are fundamentally creative professions.
I mean 'engineering', the word 'engineering' is to build things
that have never been built before.
And the way it's shown and the way, and all of the hoops
that you have to jump through in your education,
make it look like its a non-creative field,
but when you look at it in the real world,
it is a very creative field.
So I think the real thing is to get more kids engaged,
to show them that 1) the math and science itself is beautiful
and it tells us more about the universe,
or as much about the universe, as philosophy or anything else.
It really is a form of philosophy and not only that,
but the end point you're going to isn't a boring job.
It is a creative job, it is redefining what people's experiences are.
I think that if you do it that way,
I think that a lot of more people will want to get into it.
Tom: I take of Cyber Space is the new second 'Big Bang',
we're creating this new universe our there,
just like we did with the physical first bang.
And one of the things that's happening is
that we're watching all these planets
which one is going to drift too close to the sun,
which ones are going to form together and form new lifeforms.
As you look at your model which has been successful,
have you already began to think:
how can we expand that model to other areas?
Sal: Yeah, we've already thought about it.
So you know that we have the videos I do right now
and we have this whole software platform
and I think the interesting thing is
we are going to start branching off from mathematics,
our videos already cover the things in biology and economics and all the rest.
But our exercise platform:
try to do economics, physics, chemistry,
and then start to think about how can we do the humanities?
How can we give people the basic scaffold of say American History?
And then I think it would be really interesting to see
how we can do things like creative writing,
where people are doing projects
and maybe they can peer review each others essays and things like that.
I think that there is a whole universe
that we are just beginning to explore.
Tom: Well we look forward to your exploration.
Sal thank you very much from the Khan Academy.
Sal: Thank you.
Tom: And you and I will get together later
and see if we can improve my math skills. Thank you.