(applauding)
Salman: As I just introduced what Khan Academy is most known for
is this library of videos that I started producing
almost five, six years ago now.
Before I go any further, let me just show you all a little bit of a mix
of what the videos actually look like
and then we can go a little deeper from there.
So the hypotenuse is now going to be five.
These animals fossils are only found in this area of South America
a nice, clean band here and this part of Africa.
We can integrate over the surface in the notation usually is a capital sigma.
National Assembly they create the committee of public safety
which sounds like a very nice committee.
Notice this is an aldehyde and it's an alcohol
start differentiating it to affect or, and memory cells.
A galaxy, hey there's another galaxy.
Oh look there's another galaxy.
For dollars is there 30 million
plus the 20 million dollars from the American manufacturer
if this does not blow your mind then you have no emotion.
(audience laughing)
You know the videos there's now 2,200 of them.
That's kind of what I want to do until I get a hit by a bus
or hopefully it won't be for a while.
We're doing a lot more than that,I mean the videos are reaching ...
Actually now, on the order of about two million unique users a month.
We've had almost 45 million video views
they are being watched 2 to 300,000 times a day.
Before I go any deeper, I actually just gave a talk at TED down in Long Beach
a couple weeks ago, I don't want this to be a repetition of that talk.
I want this to kind of be a part two.
But before I go any further, I want to get a sense
just so I know how much background and depth I need to give.
How many of you all seen that talk?
Okay, good.
How many of you all have been to the site?
Because I want to know how much background, okay very good, very good.
What I want to focus on today is kind of going a little bit deeper.
I will give a background about what we're doing beyond the video portion.
Now that it isn't just me.
We are actually kind of a team now, we're at six people.
(audience laughing)
Some of the questions that I think have surfaced
is we've gotten a little bit more popular and we started to enter into domains,
but frankly I never thought we would enter.
Especially into the classroom itself.
Before I do that,I want to give you all a little bit of a thought experiment.
Imagine if we're in a juggling class and I'm your juggling instructor.
This week we are going to learn to juggle oranges.
I give you all your orange juggling kits, I give you all each four oranges
and I give you all a lecture on juggling oranges.
I say practice and in a week I will assess your orange juggling ability.
You practice and a week later I come back with my clipboard and I say juggle.
You try the best you can to juggle and different three oranges,
four oranges, all the rest and I say, "You can't juggle four oranges at all."
"Three oranges, barely can keep the oranges in the air"
"for more than a few seconds."
You are a 70% orange juggler, you are a D orange juggler.
I place that label on your forehead.
I put it in your permanent record making it all
but impossible for you to go in an elite juggling school.
(audience laughing)
Despite those deficiencies that you clearly have in your abilities,
there's the state mandated a juggling curriculum that we have to follow
and there's a calendar that specifies how we have to move forward.
We have this kind of assembly line and so I say,
"Well give me back the oranges. The next lesson here are some knives."
(audience laughing)
As crazy as that might appear to be
that's exactly what's happening in our classrooms right now.
It might not be as physically dangerous but it is just as mentally dangerous.
We have students they take an exam, they get 10% wrong,
20% wrong, 30% wrong, you can even fail an exam.
Regardless of the fact that we've identified those deficiencies,
we know that the student doesn't know those concepts,
we have to move on to the next concept, we have this assembly line.
That the only thing were using the test for is to put labels
on peoples foreheads to separate them, to track them.
Though we know there's weaknesses we push them forward
and we're pretty much ensuring that at some future point they'r going to fail.
We're pretty much ensuring that motivated kids,
even if they have awesome teachers at some point
those gaps are going to come back and they're not going to be able to perform
once they get to some more advanced mathematics.
Now that we've gotten a funding ...
just so you know a little bit of the story how all of this happened.
I was literally making videos in my closet for about five years.
Then about a year ago Google brought me over to their campus
and I thought it was just like a lot of the Google engineers,
as parents they were using these videos for their children and all of that.
But they brought me in to a conference room and they said,
"Sal, what would you do with two million dollars?"
(audience laughing)
I said, "Is this an education context? Or is just a broader question?"
(audience laughing)
There are very different answers.
That happened and a little bit later, I mean this is like last year,
I was still in the closet.
(audience laughing)
I get a call from Larry Cohen, who's Bill Gates chief of staff,
and says, "I don't know if you realize this but Bill Gates likes your videos."
"He watches them, he uses it with his kids, and he would like to support you."
"Do you have some time to meet him in the near future?"
I said, "I think I can move around my calendar a little bit."
(audience laughing)
I think I can push back a few of the video recordings here or there.
But you fast forward to October of this year,
we got funding from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
We got the funding from Google.
In a sense it allowed me to come out of the closet.
What we're now trying to do there is take these videos
to their natural conclusion, and address that juggling mastery problem.
What we're doing, if you go to the site it's all free,
it's a not for profit, not trying to sell anything.
You can start at 1 + 1 = 2 and we'll give you as many problems as you need.
As you get 10 in a row,
you can keep advancing to more and more advanced concepts.
The paradigm here is don't move on to a next concept
until you master the one you already know.
As an organization what we're trying to do
and it seems like there's already a little bit, we're getting the traction here
and we'll talk later and to talk about why we think we're getting that traction.
What we're trying to do is enable anyone, anywhere in the world for free
to get one an education but when we say an education,
to get an education that really is a mastery based education.
One that really ensures that someone understands the basics
before they move forward and they can do it all at their own pace.
I want to be clear, this is actually ...
We'll talk more about this in the second half of the talk.
This isn't a new idea,
it's actually nothing that Khan Academy doing is fundamentally new.
Doing videos either online or even on TV or whatever,
it's not a new idea when the radio was first invented,
when TV was first invented,
people thought it was going to revolutionize education.
Put the best teachers, broadcast them, it never happened.
Even when the internet kind of came out,
they thought that was going to be the killer [happen] for the internet.
When the PC was first invented,
they thought this was the first time we can give people self-pace learning
but it never got traction.
In the second half of my talk
I'd like to think a little bit about maybe why we're getting a traction.
It's a super important question for us as an organization
because we don't want to lose whatever that secret sauce might be.
The other interesting thing that's happened
and I talk a lot more about this in the other TED talk,
and is actually a big surprise to me,
is that our software and video start to get adapted in the classroom.
I mentioned the previous talk that it happened early on
even before we got funding or anything.
I started getting letters from teachers who's saying
that they were using just the videos to flip the education model.
They were now assigning the videos for a lecture,
they were assigning the videos for homework
and instead of doing a lecture in the classroom,
they were actually allowing their students to interact with each other
in doing problems.
Just with that simple technology, just the on demand video
they were actually able to kind of personalize
and make the actual classroom experience interactive.
Now with this kind of self-paced mastery base learning software,
we were approached by the Los Altos School District not to far from here,
"What would you do with a classroom?"
We said, "Well we would let every student work at their own pace."
The teachers role would be, they have a dashboard,
they would have all of the data
and only intervene on the students that are stuck.
So you could do a very focused intervention
and be armed with the right data to do it.
Or even better get a student who's already proficient in that
to intervene on that student
and then you get all the benefits of learning something even deeper
when you yourself are the teacher.
They decided to do it.
In Los Altos we have two fifth grade classes and two seventh grade classes
and they're using this as their core curriculum.
What I want to emphasize here and it's not always made clear
is when I talk about this to people, a lot of people will say,
"Oh this awesome."
Self-pace learning, mastery based, differentiate in instruction
but there is a crowd that starts to get a little suspicious.
They start saying well, "This sounds like you're automating things"
"but it sounds like it's very robotic."
"It sounds like kids in front of a computer just doing exercises all day,"
"listening to videos, not interacting with each other."
"It sounds like you're marginalizing the teacher."
"It sounds your deskilling the teacher,"
"that you're making them just do what the computers can't."
What I want to emphasize here is the exact opposite.
What we're seeing in those classrooms in Los Altos,
is we're seeing every moment of that teachers time
is spent interacting with her students, being a mentor.
These students are getting one on one with the teacher multiple times a week.
When I was in school I was lucky to get that even a few times,
and even in your whole career.
Multiple times a week.
They aren't doing this at the expense of project based learning
or investigations.
What this is allowing the teacher to do, it liberates the classroom.
So now that they can do more of the project based learning,
they can do more of the investigations.
These classrooms in Los Altos, there is more of that creative activity,
more of this interaction, more of this experimenting with the world
than you would see in any other classroom.
So for the first time because we have this technology
it's not an either or proposition.
You have this kind of camps of mathematical instruction.
Do you do kind of the traditional,
do a lot of problems, lecture and see a lot of traditional problems?
Or do you do the project based learning where you investigate things?
Our answer is now we can do both.
Even better, even on the instruction itself there's these debates
between old Math and new Math, how you to it?
The value when you have on demand video, you can do both.
You can actually expose the students to every possible way
that there is to learn Mathematics.
In the same classroom, you have one kid doing third grade Math
and you have one kid doing Algebra, and that's great.
The student doing the third grade Math needs to be doing the third grade Math.
Here she needs to fill out those gaps,
and the student who's doing the Algebra should be able to run forward
and do the Algebra.
Then some people say, "Oh this is bad."
"Already the smart kids have the advantage"
"and the slow kids they already have every disadvantage."
"Now you're making the spread even wider."
But what they don't realize is in these same classes
it's becoming impossible to figure out over a longer term
who those smart kids are and who the slower kids are.
Because even though one kid is working on third grade Math for a little while,
once he or she has getting those [cuts] and we see it over and over again,
they're able to race ahead.
Then three weeks later they passed up the kid who is in Algebra.
All of this kind of labels start to disappear.
The other thing that we're kind of thinking about as we grow our organization
and we really want to make sure we have a good hold on it is why is it working,
why is it resonating?
These ideas heave existed forever on demand videos, self-paced learning.
The real data points we've been getting obviously we've had the user growth,
we've had the traction, Bill Gates uses it.
(audience laughing)
For me personally the real data points has just been the user testimonies,
the letters that we get
and actually the first feedback just turned into a little bit of a one liner
was for my cousins ...
Their very first feedback when I put 20 or 30 videos up for them,
they said that they preferred me on YouTube than in person.
(audience laughing)
We just keep getting them and I think there's a common theme here
and I'll just read a couple real quick.
There's one, "My eldest kid is dancing around in my room here"
"because she is so excited that she finally found someone"
"that teaches like this."
I feel uncomfortable, I don't like doing the self praise, I mean I don't ...
But what's cool here is that this girl she wasn't just happy.
When she learned something,
when she was actually able to connect with the material
it wasn't like "Oh I'm going to nail the exam."
She felt the visceral desire to dance.
(audience laughing)
(applauding)
There's all sorts of ... this is a letter
and this takes me back to my college days when I didn't have a girlfriend.
I don't know if these boys at Bellarmine can relate to this comment.
(audience laughing)
This is a comment from a college student,
"There's always so much else that a student has on their mind."
"What is a pretty girl looking like today?"
"What was the professor like when they were a student?"
"Should I talk to the pretty girl after class?"
"Will I include last weekends event in a book about my life?"
"That the slightest drifting of focus"
"quickly turns into a fruitless two hours spent daydreaming or unconscious."
"Please continue what you are doing."
(audience laughing)
(applauding)
It was actually a much longer letter that I had to reduct,
it wasn't appropriate for this audience.
(audience laughing)
This is what I got two days ago, "I've taken Calculus 1 three times."
"The first time I didn't pass the class,"
"the second time I had to drop the class."
"My girlfriend's mom told me about the site,"
"she heard about it in a conference, I checked it out."
"I began supplementing, proceeding and sometimes even replacing my lectures"
"with your videos and I received an 84% on my first midterm."
This is the third time he's taking it.
"I almost cried, I was so happy."
When I first try, it's 84 that's a good score, why's he crying?
"Especially because the class average was a 47%."
(applauding)
"Now the second midterm is coming up,"
"I feel confident enough to say that I will most likely get an A in the class."
"Since my major depends on me passing the class,"
"I want to thank you for helping me save my college career."
It's pretty a mind blowing stuff
and I think you can imagine why I quit my day job as a hedge fund manager.
Wasn't quite as much psychic reward.
(applauding)
I think the take away here is that ...
and this is the learning that we never want to forget as an organization
is that, people come to the Khan Academy wanting to just fill in the gap.
They have an exam, they want to pass an exam,
but once they actually experience what it's like to learn,
it doesn't matter who they are.
It could be the student who's about to drop out.
Once they actually experience it for the first time in life
they get addicted.
It's a natural high, it's something that we innately, all humans want to have.
That's something as an organization, we don't want to ever forget.
That if we can form these human bonds using technology,
that's what's actually going to allow us to succeed.
I want to leave you with one quick little story
from one of the Los Altos classrooms last week that kind of hits the point home.
There was a reporter from NBC doing a story
on what we're doing in that classroom.
And there's a little fifth grader and she's doing trigonometry
and actually all of the boys are very envious of her
because she has the most badges and points and all of that other things.
The reporter sits down next to her and says,
"Do you think this is fifth grade Math?"
Then the little girl has a mischievous smile and she looks at the reporter
and she goes, "No, I think it's sixth grade."
(audience laughing)
Thank you.
(applauding)