(music)
Jeff: I want to start by introducing Sal.
He really needs no introduction,
particularly for a group that's this passionate
about education, but as you all know,
In day is about transformation
and we love to be able to welcome folks
who I think are illustrative of true transformation
and Sal is absolutely an example of that
within the realm of education,
which is something all of us here are so passionate about.
So, for those that don't know,
I've been interested in education reform
and I may have to amend that.
I love the title of your TED talk, which is Reinvention,
Reinventing education because I think at this point we need reinvention.
I don't think reform is going to get it done.
I may have borrowed that line from Sal,
but I've been interested in education reform and reinvention
really since back graduating high school and at the time
was thinking about the best way to make a difference
and thought about going into teaching,
thought about administration,
thought about getting involved in public education
in some regard and the other alternative was going into business.
And people oftentimes say,
"Well, how can you go into business
and make a difference in terms of education?"
And the belief, the thesis was, amass enough influence and resource
where I'd ultimately have the chance to do that.
And long story short, being in business
led to meeting and extraordinary guy named Charles Best,
who's the founder and CEO of donorschoose.org,
which is a philanthropic marketplace for teachers
very close to my heart and being in business
brought me to TED this year and I had
the extraordinary privilege to see Sal Khan,
the founder of The Khan Academy, give a TED Talk
that literally brought the house down.
So, for all the talks that I was in attendance for
and there was some wonderful talks,
this talk that Sal gave literally lit the place up.
People were vibrating with energy on what was possible
because I think there was a lot of people
in the audience that day who know how challenging
it's going to be to make a difference
in terms of education.
For those of you in the audience who have
committed some of your time and energy,
you know that's the case and the reason
I wanted Sal to be here today was because,
to a large extent, and this may be a big statement,
I think he may have cracked the code.
I think he may have secretly cracked the code
on how we can improve education.
So, long story short, I think you all know by now,
but Sal was in the hedge fund business
and was asked to help out, it was your cousins?
Sal: Cousins.
Jeff: Your cousins with some math questions
they had, so did a YouTube video
and they raved about it and he'll tell you
a little bit more about the feedback he got
that was the impetus to do more and, of course,
fast forward today, he's got over 2,200 12 minute videos
from everything, algebra to American history
and it's helping people learn in ways
that were really unimaginable before the web came along.
And it's gone way beyond that, so there's a back-end system
that he and his team have put together
that, for lack of a better term, I'd say
has created a true adaptive learning platform
that's going to scale and we're going to talk
a little bit about that and if he doesn't mention it
one of my favorite Q and A parts of the entire TED conference
was an exchange between Bill Gates and Sal.
So, with that, how about a huge round of applause for Sal Khan.
(applause)
Welcoming him to LinkedIn and Sal,
I'm going to ask him a few questions to get started
and he'll talk a little bit, but we'd really love
for this to be a brainstorming session.
I think we've got a lot of incredible talent in the audience
We're going to be recording this so potentially
we can inspire some folks who are going
to see this remotely at some point
and maybe they can get involved too.
So, let's start with the beginning.
I know most people here saw the video,
but just talk a little bit about Khan Academy came to be.
Sal: Yeah, it was literally, as you mentioned
and I'm sure some of you all know,
I was an analyst at a hedge fund in Boston in 2000-
this is 2004, fall 2004 and my cousin and her family,
her two younger brothers, my aunt and uncle came
and visited me in Boston right after our wedding.
Our wedding was in New Jersey and they came up
to just kind of tour the sights and actually,
while we were touring Boston, it was the fourth of July weekend
and I remember while we were waiting for the fireworks
to start over the Charles, I would kind of give them my battery
of brain teasers that I use just as a time killer.
I'm sure you probably all use them as interview questions and what not.
(laughter)
They're very good, interview-
And I remember, Nadia, who was 12 at the time was super engaged.
Most people when you give them brain teasers like this,
my aunt and uncle, everyone else were like,
"What's the answer?"
But Nadia was like, "No, don't tell me the answer!"
And she would like walk out and these were hard,
CSE logic problems, 100 people who can't see -
There's all sorts of crazy things and I was really impressed.
The next day we were touring MIT and in front of the whole family,
I said, "Nadia, you should think about MIT.
"I saw you've got some skills," and she didn't pay -
My aunt, her mother, gave my uncle this weird look when I said that.
I didn't make much of it and then the next morning
(unintelligible) who is Nadia's mom told me,
"That's really nice what you said about Nadia yesterday,
"but she's actually being tracked into a slower,
"not even the regular algebra track."
I was like, "That's impossible."
One, I saw what she did two nights ago
and we share a certain amount of DNA. (laughter)
When Nadia woke up, I said,
"Hey, Nadia, I don't believe this placement exam.
"What was the problem?"
She said it was units.
I was like, "Two nights ago you were tackling stuff
"that's a million times harder than units.
"What do you say when you go back to New Orleans
"we get on Yahoo Doodle and speaker phone
"and if you're willing to do a little bit of extra work,
"I'm willing to spend half an hour an evening with you,"
and she was up for it, so that was the genesis.
Jeff: You referred during your TED talk to what made it so effective.
Half-jokingly that they liked you better in video
than they did in real life.
Sal: Non-jokingly, actually.
Jeff: In all seriousness.
Talk a little bit about the magic of what you did
and the efficacy and how you built on it from there.
Sal: It all started where I left off.
I started tutoring Nadia kind of live, but remotely.
Then I started tutoring her brothers and the whole time
I just had a doodle note board and speaker phone.
She only heard me, she didn't see me,
and we just saw the same thing that each of us were writing.
Fast forward about two years, so now we're going
into November of 2006, I was having trouble scaling.
The first time you give a lecture on the greatest common divisor
it's kind of fun, the 20th time it kind of sucks.
How do I do this?
It was actually a buddy that recommended
that I put it up on YouTube, which I was very dismissive of at first.
That's for dogs on skateboards, that's not for serious mathematics.
When I got over the idea that it wasn't my idea,
I decided to give it a shot and it was interesting,
because I was like, "Okay, how do I do this?"
"I don't have a video camera, should I go get one?"
I was like, "No, because that would cost money."
With Nadia, we just had this screen going,
so there must be some type of software that captures a screen.
I didn't even know there were screen capture software existed.
I did a web search, I found some freeware that did it,
and I needed an art program.
I only used Microsoft Paint for the first 500 videos
and just started doing it and when I put those first videos up,
the first collection of videos, 20 or 30 videos,
my cousins literally did tell me that they preferred me
on YouTube than in person.
I think there's a lot of things.
Since then, I've heard a lot of feedback.
One is just the form factor.
This is true of any on-demand video.
You can pause, you can repeat, you can review stuff
that you should've learned last week or last year
or a couple of years ago, you don't have to feel embarrassed.
You can do it when you're ready for it,
you can go ahead, it's not a one-size fits all,
but that's true of all on-demand video.
Khan Academy is not the first on-demand video.
MIT open courseware started doing this in 2001.
I'm sure there's people who did it before that.
I think the feedback I get over and over again from people
is that they appreciate how conversational it is.
To some degree, that wasn't by design.
It was literally like I didn't care, because it was for my cousins.
They're not paying me, so I said,
"Let me just make some videos for them."
There's literally an early video where I answered
a telemarketer call during the video and I don't edit it out.
It's just there, I'm like, "I'm not interested in Dish Network.
"Please stop bothering me," and I (laughter).
(unintelligible) Exactly, how to say no to obnoxious telemarketers.
People enjoy the conversational nature.
Early on, because these are for my cousins,
I didn't have a script, I didn't have a lesson plan even.
Some of those early videos, actually, I kind of cringe at them now,
because I'm like, "Hmm, what should I talk about now?"
and I just do, "Let's talk about this."
People really like the idea that I'm expressing exactly
what's going on in my brain right now.
It's not some thing that's made by some bureaucracy
to meet some state standard and one group of people write a script
with some computer graphics and then another group of people
just read the script while the computer graphics happen.
They like the organic nature.
A lot of people, once again, the form factor
that's kind of our brand now, I did it because I didn't want
to have a video camera, but people say it actually feels intimate,
it actually feels like you and I are sitting next to each other
and looking through the concept together.
This is kind of crazy.
I've gotten letters from people who've said,
"Not only does it feel like I'm next to you,
"it feels like you're in my brain."
When they go normally, on an everyday basis,
when they go and think they think in their own voice,
but as soon as they get to a math test, all of sudden they say,
"Well, let's see what the next -" and they hear me. (laughter)
The other thing is, it had to be limited to ten minutes.
I guess that was another Khan Academy innovation,
but once again, YouTube limited to ten minutes,
so I had to do it and that was really good discipline
and now I've gotten tons of feedback
and I've actually dug up research
that shows people actually can't pay attention
in any reasonable way for more than 10 to 18 minutes.
After they do, they zone our for five minutes.
After zoning out for five minutes, they realize they were zoning out.
They say, "Oh my God, let me pay attention,"
and then they can only zone in for nine minutes
and then they zone out for nine minutes.
The zoning out gets worse and the zoning in gets worse
as you go through a lecture.
The only reason why we have 60 minute lectures
is because of logistics.
All of these things have been an organic process
and I think our trick is to not lose any
of that very grounded approach that we started off with.
Jeff: One of the most revelatory things you mentioned in the TED talk,
I think, is directly akin to this notion of interactivity,
but you put some real data behind it, some anecdotes behind it.
That is kids who would otherwise be left behind in school
because they're not keeping pace with the class,
in terms of the fundamental building blocks.
When allowed to learn on their own through your tools,
once they got through that fundamental building block,
they then got ahead in the next block.
Sal: Yeah.
Jeff: So could you talk a little bit about that,
because that's a big deal.
Sal: There's a couple of trains of thought there.
We first saw it in a summer camp that we tried out
the primitive version of Khan Academy with
and literally, six weeks into the camp,
I was just curious, I literally just did a database query,
like who was more than one standard deviation behind
four days into the camp, and now is more
than one standard deviation above the class average
at the end of the camp and there was this one girl.
I won't mention the name for privacy,
but I talked to her later and literally, she just had to get
positive and negative numbers, adding and subtracting them
out of the way and after she did that, she just raced ahead
and we started looking for it more and more.
There's other things we found.
Not only that, which is a big deal, the kid that otherwise,
would have been tracked as a slow students is now showing
that if they just had the chance to really digest
the information properly, if you think about it,
that's actually a property of someone who is probably innately gifted,
is someone who really wants to digest something properly,
not just understand the mechanics and probably
some of those people are being left behind right now.
It allows them to race ahead, but the other interesting thing,
we've seen this in Los Altos, is there are some classically rock star students,
the ones that are always straight A, they're really competitive,
when you force them to start at the beginning,
from the most basic concepts, even some of them
start to stumble at things that they really should have learned
in third or fourth grade and what they've probably done since then
is just they've been very good at pretending around their deficiencies
or getting around them and so almost everyone has these gaps.
That same summer program where that first student was at,
one thing we saw over and over again,
there was actually two groups.
This was seventh graders.
In one group, the teacher said, "Oh no, this would be silly
"to make my seventh graders start at 1+1=2,"
so we started all of them at sixth grade math.
The other group, we're like, "Yeah, let's just start them off
"at 1+1=2," and we saw the group that didn't have the chance
to remediate, they just hit a wall at some point.
They just couldn't progress, or some subset of them
couldn't progress at some point, while the group that started
at 1+1=2, one, it was surprising how many really basic weaknesses
some of these seventh graders had.
Literally, adding two-digit numbers, knowing how to regroup
or carry or things like this, but once they got through that,
just as a group, they way outperformed the other group.
Even their worst performers were better
than the best performers in the other group,
which is a narrative that I think we've been observing.
No matter what you do, you get the best algebra teacher in the room,
you have an innately gifted kid, no matter how hard the kid works,
if that kid has trouble with third grade math,
there's really no way that you can do it in a standard education model.
Jeff: Speaking of standard education models,
talk a little bit about the software platform
you guys have been developing, the success you've had,
in terms of working with Los Altos as a school district,
and the impact that the videos plus the software
in the classroom is having on classroom dynamics.
Sal: Yeah, the software, I've hinted at it.
If you saw the TED talk you kind of know what it is,
but it's actually stuff that I started working on before the first video.
A few months into working with Nadia and her brothers,
I would point them to random websites.
I was like, "Hey, there's a site that has a couple of cool problems.
"Why don't you work on those," or, "Here's another site,"
and the next morning I'd have no information
of what they did, I didn't believe them that they said
they did the problem or how many they got right or wrong.
I started writing this little javascript problem generator
and I was really just trying to make sure that they had
the core skill down, that they really just understood the core skill
and I put a little database behind it so I could see
when did they do the problem, did they use the hints,
and whatever else.
Then over time I had a bunch of these modules
and I got tired of assigning, "Oh now you're ready for this module,"
So I said, "Hey, if you get ten in a row on this module
"it'll automatically assign you to the next,"
and that's where the whole knowledge tree,
if you saw the TED talk, came about.
It was originally something for me.
It was a tool for myself to understand all the modules I'd built
and the dependencies and then I said,
"Well, it'd be cool for a student to see it,"
and once I did my cousins loved that.
It was like Legend of Zelda all of a sudden.
They could see, "Hey, I could get over there," and all the rest.
Fast forward, the summer camp started using it.
Even there, we said, "Hey, every kid can now work at their own pace.
"The tools, the videos are there and now the teacher can just intervene
"when someone's stuck," and then you fast forward
to November of 2010, Los Altos school board literally just met
with myself and Shantanu, who's our president,
and said, "We've heard great things about what you're doing.
"We want to learn more about it and what would you do
"if you had just whatever you wanted to do with the math classroom?"
and we said we'd have every student work at their own pace,
the role of the teacher, they won't have to lecture,
they won't have to grade papers.
I don't want to say just, but they will walk into a room
and they'll get a dashboard and the dashboard will tell them
where every student is working, who's stuck on what.
If they want to dive deeper they can press a couple of clicks
and they can see exactly what a student's been working on
and really diagnose what's probably wrong with the student
and then use that information to either do
a very focused intervention themselves
or get some of the student's peers to do an intervention.
What it does is it does a couple things.
One, now everyone can work at their own pace,
the teacher's time is fully leveraged and it's focused,
and really just narrowing in on exactly what the weak points
for the students are, and the third thing is probably not obvious
from the TED talk and if we've had critics that's in this third area,
it's that, "Okay, yeah Khan Academy, the videos,
"that's probably really good for basic skills,
"and even the videos it's good for conceptual development,
"but what about project-based learning?"
There's this whole school of thought of constructivist learning
and it's always these math wars.
There's always been this argument
between the tiger mom school of learning
and the constructivist Seymour Papert play with Legos enough
and eventually you'll know calculus. (laughter)
It's been like a war, right?
People, the first time they see Khan Academy,
they think we are the tiger mom version,
because it's like core skills, it's lecture.
The other thing I think really differentiates our lectures over others
and this was actually a surprise for me,
is I made my lectures geared towards someone like myself
when I was 12 years old or 13.
I wanted the rationale, I wanted the conceptual development.
I wanted my cousins to have that.
I wanted them to really innately understand math.
I didn't think early on that that would be popular.
I thought that most students would want the formulas.
Most students wouldn't want to think about the intuition.
The surprising thing is over and over again we get feedback
from the students you wouldn't normally associate
with students liking math saying,
"I'm angry that my teacher did not introduce the intuition.
"Now it's easy."
Over and over again we get that, but what we're in this debate
between what's derisively called the drill and kill
and the constructivists, what we're saying is,
"No, it's not an either or proposition now."
What's happening in those Los Altos classrooms
are so much of the blocking and tackling is being taken off,
one, from the class time and from the teacher's shoulders,
that the teacher not only can dive in and do very focused
and meaningful interventions, but all of this class time
is freed up to do these investigations, to do these projects.
I'll challenge any classroom out there
to see if they can do more project-based learning and investigations
than these Los Altos classes are doing
and I would challenge any classroom out there
to see if they can do more core skills development
than these Los Altos classes are doing.
It's kind of the best of both worlds.
Jeff: One of my favorite parts of your talk that I alluded to earlier
was during Q and A with Bill Gates.
At one point, everything that Sal talks about sounds so extraordinary.
It sounds like vision.
How could it possibly be real, how could we get so much good
from one guy, a small team, a non-profit?
At one point, Bill said, "So, what would it take
"to scale this to every classroom in the country?
"How long would that take?"
Your response was -
Sal: Yeah, technically, I'm giving little asterisks now, by the way. (laughter)
It can be adopted tomorrow or now by every classroom.
It's self-service, the dashboard's everything, if a teacher goes.
The realistic answer is there has to be some type of deployment,
but there's no reason why it doesn't,
there's no fundamental barrier for it being used tomorrow
by every classroom in the world.
Jeff: I think that's a great jumping off point
to open it up to the group here.
We just want to do a little brainstorming today.
Sal's very interested in your thoughts and I'd love to know
how this group of people, how LinkedIn,
how some of the folks who, ultimately, may be viewing this
can get involved, what help do you need?
How can we start to dramatically increase the footprint?
Any questions or comments?
Yeah, please.
Audience Member: I didn't grow up here
and I just saw your TED talk a few days ago
and after that I also saw the TED talk that Ken Robinson gave
about schools killing creativity.
What are you thoughts about that
and how has it influenced what Khan Academy's doing
and what it's planning to do?
Sal: I think the Ken Robinson talk's awesome
and some people view our talks as very aligned
and some people have viewed it that somehow they're not aligned.
My point is going back to what's going on in Los Altos classrooms
is that right now, so much time is focused
on the mandated curriculum from the state
and so much time is focused on making sure
that the worst don't do bad.
There's no time for real creative work.
I'd say even 95% of people in classes right now
that claim to do project-based learning
or claim to do creative things in the classroom,
it's not creative, it's cookbook.
It looks good, "Oh, we're studying how we can send
"a satellite to the moon," or something, but they're not,
it's some type of cookbook thing with words in the right way.
What we think and what I hope Khan Academy enables
and we'd like to pilot this in more and more schools
and it can enable a whole set of really fundamentally creative things
and some of that will probably be on our platform.
Actually, Jonathan, who used to actually be a LinkedIn employee,
for two summers we did a summer camp.
We do this as R and D for what is the future of real learning.
You have this Khan Academy, the videos, you can get a lot there,
but if you really want people to learn stuff and we did stuff with kids
and this is stuff we might even internalize into the software.
It was pretty fun.
It was all the games I wanted to play with my friends
at my birthday party, but no one else wanted to.
We literally would have six kids playing Risk
and we would have the other 24 kids,
they would each get a colored piece of cardboard
that says, if you're holding red at three o'clock,
which is three hours from when we started,
that colored piece of cardboard would be worth
the number of armies that red army has at three o'clock
and the same thing for yellow and green and so on.
We gave them $500 in Monopoly money each.
They all started with one of these and then we started the Risk
and then we told the rest of the 24, "Trade the actual things."
It was fascinating.
We saw fifth graders start making models.
There was one fifth grader who started doing naked shorting
without knowing what naked short -
He would literally sell something to someone,
but say, "Wait, I'll give you the actual security later." (laughter)
Jeff: For those that don't know, the financial derivative world,
that had nothing to do with the clothing (crosstalk).
Sal: There was a little bit of that, too.
No, no. (laughter)
The summer camp would be shut down if that was happening.
It was fascinating.
One kid came up to me and he said how he figured out
that right after someone's turn in Risk,
their security went up, because we've all played Risk,
it looks like that person's about to take over the world,
but Risk has these huge swings, so he didn't even look at the board.
He just shorted whoever's turn it was
and he ended up winning the whole game, because he just -
Then we played another time where it was more of a determined,
where we played a variation called Paranoia Risk,
where there's only one winner.
Everyone's trying to eliminate one person from the board.
As soon as one person is eliminated from the board,
the person who was trying to eliminate them, wins.
Now, we said, "If you're holding the color of the winner,
"that's worth 100 and everyone else is worth 0."
Now it's pure probability.
That security should trade, if it's trading at $65,
you're saying there's a 65% chance -
I didn't tell them this ahead of time.
It was amazing how many times
the security started selling for like $150 or $200.
There was serious bubble mentality going on.
Anyway, I'm going on.
I could talk for hours about this, and we played Settlers of Catan,
one time with separate board games.
Then the second time around we let them trade across countries
and say, "Hey, how come we -
We actually had a pariah state that couldn't trade
and we compared the development to the ones that trade.
Anyway, you get the general idea.
There's a lot of stuff that can be done, if class time is freed up,
that's really deep, that gives people understanding.
In one round of the Risk, I was the market maker
and these students try to find out (unintelligible)
what a market maker is, what is a secondary market versus a primary.
All of this stuff.
It might be relevant to you guys very soon, I don't know. (laughter)
My vision, to answer your question, my vision is more of that
without giving up the stuff that kids need
to really prove to the world on the SATs, the AP tests
that they know those core skills, as well.
Jeff: Sometimes people ask the question,
What happens if some of our best and brightest,
rather than go into the financial world and hedge fund trading,
they were to go into areas like education?
That's part of what happens.
You get this brilliance supplied in the right ways.
Sal: There could be a good sequel to that,
where there's a guy who's -
I won't name any names, but he's a quant
at a very prominent hedge fund and he went -
Pretty much, he left that fund and I think he's being paid
not to work in the industry now, because he knows too much,
so he might be your analytics guy if things work out. (laughing)
Christina: One of my all time favorite books
is Neal Stephenson's The Diamond Age
and in it he's got the Young Lady's Illustrated Primer
and this rich guy builds this book so his granddaughter
can have this tremendous education and one of the aspects of it
is that all the content and the learning materials are in there,
but there are these ractors who are people who are tracking
and watching as they move through the book,
they actually have a dashboard with metrics in the book.
I'm thinking about our social network and your materials,
whether it's e-books or videos,
and wondering if we could create Khan ractors,
who would be indexed, either the videos or materials,
and they would be people who were certified and volunteered
so that the kid at any point where they're stumbling
could maybe hit a button, get an IM, start to engage
with that community to get that kind of personalized stuff worldwide.
Sal: Yeah, that's exactly -
We have to figure out the details of how we implement that,
but that's our next level, because the first level is videos,
the second level are these exercises and dashboard,
the next level's the community.
We're pushing two million unique users a month
and that's enough, that's critical mass, that's growing.
There's a couple things.
One is just the model of volunteerism, peer-to-peer,
"Hey, I'm at my desk, I have an hour free, I would like to tutor someone."
We could facilitate that and you'll have the same data as a teacher
and we could pair up people appropriately,
based on what they know and what they don't know.
And get the kids tutoring.
It's either that model or we're thinking of having
some kind of a perpetual office hours.
Volunteers could say, "Hey, I'll be free at this time.
"I'm in Malaysia and I'll be free from 2:00 to 3:00 PM
"and I know these set of topics."
If we get a critical mass, and you actually don't need
that many people, but if you get enough people,
you could have exactly what you said as soon as you're stuck.
It's not even something that has to be scheduled.
As soon as you're stuck, you say, "I need help,"
and it immediately points you.
I'm actually on page 85 of Diamond Age right now,
so I haven't gotten to the ractor part.
(unintelligible) Oh, is it?
Yeah, but we're clearly reading the same books,
but yes, that's where -
It's funny, each layer, we actually think that's going to be the big play,
not what we've already done.
Jeff: Would love to throw it out there as a Hackday challenge
for those of you in the room or watching.
It'd be pretty cool to do something very similar
and I had a similar idea based on originally hearing you speak.
With 100 million members, professionals
with the right kind of skills and backgrounds,
one of the things that was most exciting to me
was that anyone can come online to lend a hand
and help mentor and answer questions.
I think it would be a very cool hack to figure out a way
to do exactly what Christina was just suggesting.
Click a button and we could pair up the right kids
with the right mentors from among our professional membership.
The other idea that's probably a little more in depth
than a hack is to start to leverage everything you've done
for the kids for vocational training
because one of the things we all hear increasingly
is that it's not that there's not jobs available at times
or in certain geographies.
There are jobs available, it's just that people don't have
the skills to take advantage of them.
If we could somehow re-skin some of the backend
and add vocational training modules
and then again, partner up the people that need to learn
with the professional membership, we could really do some good.
Sal: Yeah, absolutely.
Especially with the ...
Yeah, that's a way to donate your time.
There could even be some badging that transcends
what you all are doing and what we're doing.
It becomes part of, "Hey, I'm a proud volunteer,"
or even your badges -
It's funny, because we thought about doing Facebook integration.
It's on our pipeline and before we've done it,
we have students who are copying and pasting
their badges they get on Khan Academy
and bootstrapping the iteration forth, they're so proud of it.
Something like that and the volunteer badge
could be a pretty powerful mark of whatever.
Jeff: Yeah, so call to action, for anyone interested
in the next -
Sal: And also developing modules.
Developing modules is actually a very easy thing to contribute,
if anyone's interested, like, "Hey, I have an expertise in probability
"and it doesn't look like there's a module
"that teaches and quizzes that aspect."
We actually do that as part of our interview process for our developers.
If it takes them more than a day, we're like, "Well, we're not hiring." (laughs)
Jeff: What's the best way for folks watching
who would like to contribute a module?
What's the best way for them to do that?
Sal: Right now, you can actually go, on our page is says "contribute".
There's a way you can go to our software wiki
and how do you check out the code, how do you see where all the ...
There's even specs out there for unbuilt modules
if you don't have an idea of what to build.
They're all in javascript.
They're pretty straightforward.
Thinking about the learning is probably harder than the programming.
Jeff: Okay, Nick.
Nick: Thanks for being here, first of all.
My question is I've got two kids and what I've learned
in my experience with them is they have
completely different ways of learning.
Specifically, my son has dyslexia, so for him,
he's had to put a lot of energy into doing well in school and so on.
I wonder how the program accommodates kids
who have learning challenges, disabilities, and so on.
Sal: This is, again, another surprising thing that wasn't by design.
When I started, I viewed it as for my cousins,
maybe catered to someone like myself,
or probably a lot of you all, when you all were 12 or 13 years old.
Some of the biggest feedback we get are from parents
and students with learning disabilities.
Dyslexia, ADHD, actually some parents
of autistic students have loved it and what it is,
dyslexia, probably the main -
One is the videos are very, it's not just -
I've been told this by dyslexics, that just the fact
that I'm writing it out, it's not just printed text that just pops up,
is a big deal, the fact that I'm talking while I'm doing it,
it helps integrate everything and that's the same thing
for people with ADHD.
The fact that I'm using these different colors
for the different concepts.
I think the biggest thing, and once again,
this goes to the form factor, is that it's self-paced.
I think a lot of a dyslexic student, they're stressed,
and as soon as you're stressed, you can't learn.
That's the thing that most -
There's stress if it's taking you half a second longer
to process something, but you have this assembly line,
move along at the same pace, that's going to leave
your son behind and now there's none of that stress.
He can take as much time as he needs to digest the concept.
Yeah, it's weird.
I don't want it to seem like this is a cure all for everyone,
but we didn't design it, but the gifted students love it,
the students who are falling behind love it,
the adult learners, so it is one of those things.
If you just give people a chance to learn,
you don't talk down to them, you respect their intelligence,
you don't just teach them formulas,
and you give them instant feedback, it's amazing,
it kind of works for everybody.
Nick: Thank you.
Jeff: Sal, at root in all of this, is a product that has proven
to be incredibly effective and you mentioned earlier,
YouTube originally had limitations on the duration of the video
and that certainly contributed to the form factor,
but I'm assuming over time there's been a lot of iteration.
From a product development perspective,
could you shed a little light on the approach that you've taken,
because you're doing something very right, obviously and -
Sal: Yeah, I've learned now that there are words
to describe our process, lean and agile and all of this kind of stuff.
It is literally just put stuff out there and see what happens.
There's that, that's kind of the process, and I think,
in terms of the actual thing that goes out there,
it's amazing how much money and resources have been wasted
on trying to make educational materials that look polished,
that look like this, and as soon as you watch them you're disengaged.
I think it's this focus on the end user and nothing else
and not trying to pretend when I started and now as an organization,
we never want to fake that we're good quality.
A lot of these attempts to really polish up things
are to fake that it's good quality,
because to maybe the buyer who's not the user,
the buyer might superficially look at something and say,
"Oh, there's computer graphics, that must be good quality,"
but I think the big takeaway from the Khan Academy
if something is really going to take on, it just has
to purely cater to the user.
Even if it is scrappy and not the most professional thing, it'll still resonate.
In terms of the process, I'm now getting approached
by a lot of - I want other people other than myself to teach
and I've been approached by some medical schools
and others, "We want to do something like this in our program."
I've sat through some of those meetings and they go on.
We have to talk to this department.
So now my policy is when anyone wants to say,
"We think we have some people who might be able
"to make videos and we want to use them,"
I say, "No preliminary meetings, just come to my office,
"I'll go take a walk, and make the videos.
"I'll show you how to do it," and I just want them to start making videos.
They're like, "Wait, we haven't planned."
I was like, "No, they teach these classes.
"Just tell them to come make a 10 minute video
"and then we'll talk about how we can improve them."
It kind of scares these people,
the fact that they might actually produce something. (laughter)
I think that's the take.
Even in our organization, since we're such a small organization,
we're like six people, going on eight or seven people now.
We're very bandwidth constrained, so we're starting to -
I tell Shantanu, who's our president, if me and him
are in the same meeting at the same time,
there's something wrong with our process.
We force people to go on walks for meetings, so it's a fixed -
I don't want to -
Jeff: By all means (crosstalk)
Sal: Okay, yeah, we do that.
A lot of the (crosstalk)
It's funny, if it's an important meeting,
I say I'm going to go to El Camino and back.
If it's a shady meeting I'm going to the train stop and back.
(crosstalk) (laughter)
You kind of know where you fit in the hierarchy
(laughter) how long of a walk.
The other thing is we actually want to eat our own dog food,
which is the reason why we're able to scale,
why such a small organization is able to, on some level,
educate two million kids and maybe 200 million kids eventually,
or whatever, is that we're using these technologies.
Even our board meetings, right now our board meetings,
we spend three hours just giving an update.
I'm like, "This is silly, I'm just going to make YouTube videos,
"explaining what we've been up to the last week."
I have the screen - Huh?
(unintelligible) It's a roadshow and our board can pause
and repeat it and now (laughter) we're thinking
of making this a practice across the organization,
where we're going to get everyone Camtasia,
and everyone at the end of the week,
instead of writing me an email, like,
"Hey, this is what I've been up to."
They'll have their computer right there,
"This is what I'm working on," and just archive it.
That way when we go into meetings, we're all on the same page,
we know what everyone's been up to.
If someone says something that's unfamiliar,
I don't have to pause the meeting, I can go back
and see what they're up to and actually get a much better -
Actually, I've told a bunch of people this.
I have a buddy who's working at another startup
and I told him this idea and he bought into it
and he told their CEO, because she wanted him to write a white paper
about what he's up to and he's like,
"Well how about I do a screencast,
"because now you can pause, repeat.
"It'll be me explaining it as a human being and I can show -"
It was funny, they had a lot of,
"No, that's silly, it needs to be a white paper,"
but no it doesn't, it should really just be -
It takes 10 minutes to make a 10 minute video,
especially if it's just for internal consumption,
as opposed to a day to write a white paper that no one's going to read.
Yeah, that's what we're up to.
Jeff: I was just reminded of effectiveness of the RSA animations,
which is very similar, in terms of mapping out and (crosstalk)
You hear folks, a lot of people in the audience today, I'm sure,
they'll rave about them.
They'll say, "Have you seen this on motivation?" (unintelligible)
Audience Member: Hey Sal, thanks for being here.
A few weeks ago, we watched Waiting for Superman
here at LinkedIn and it was incredibly moving.
Sal: Depressing. (laughs)
Audience Member: Yeah, very depressing.
I learned about the Khan Academy
after watching that movie here at LinkedIn.
After spending time on your site, it was pretty obvious to me
that what you have developed can be the super hero solution
for schools that don't have resources,
for kids that don't have resources, to help them learn.
I'm just wondering if part of the Khan Academy's charter
is to get those kinds of resources into the hands of kids
where they don't have computers at home
or the school systems don't have computers.
Is that part of the conversation?
Sal: Yeah, absolutely.
There's a couple of things here.
One of the things, this is something
that we're very protective of as an organization,
is the reason why I think we're resonating
where a lot of other attempts, governmental attempts,
NGO attempts, for profit attempts have all failed,
is that everyone else is trying to reform the beast.
They're trying to go in there and chisel at it
and lobby this or that and all the rest.
The reason why I think we've worked is we've ignored the beast.
We've just done our own thing and go straight to the student.
At the same time, this Los Altos thing,
which kind of fell in our lap, proves that no,
this can help the beast.
I shouldn't call it the beast anymore. (laughter)
What we're doing is, and this wasn't our plan even a month ago,
but especially the TED talk took this to the next level,
we are building a rollout SWAT team,
and what we're going to do over the next six months -
The other thing we want to be careful of
is not rolling out too fast and ruining.
We're the Trader Joe's model.
We want a community to really want us and we're like,
"Okay, you've got to give us the right space,"
We want the SWAT team over the next 6 to 18 months,
we're reached out now by about 10 school districts a day
who want to do this and so we want to pick
the 10 or 15 that are the most likely to be a success.
Hopefully they won't mainly be affluent school districts like Los Altos.
We're looking for underserved communities,
some charter schools, some independent schools,
some regular middle class private schools, all of the above.
Some fancy private schools, and we're actually going district wide
in fourth, fifth, and sixth grade in Los Altos, as well.
So if you have a fourth or fifth or sixth grader in Los Altos,
you'll start hearing me in your house whether you like it or not.
We want to do that and once we have that
and we learn more, we can productize it.
Then, we're going to explore how it can become a more massive role.
The narrative throughout this is we're also going
to make it more and more self-service.
Like the first question you had asked,
it can be used in any school district tomorrow.
To some degree, that's another volunteer opportunity.
If your school district isn't doing it and you think they should,
you guys can become the ambassadors for it.
You guys all have the same -
If you guys go to our website, it'll be pretty obvious
how you could implement this in a classroom.
You could be that person that goes to the school district
and say, "Look, we can do this."
The Los Altos people are awesome about other people coming in
and observing the classrooms.
If it's local, you say, "Hey, why don't we go meet
"with those Los Altos people, observe their classroom,
"and then we'll implement it here,"
and you guys can shepherd it,
make sure their firewall is set up, whatever, so it happens.
I think that, by itself, could be a pretty, actually,
that might be the most powerful way to volunteer.
Jeff: Sal, how do teachers respond to it?
Do they feel like it's an incredible tool
that helps take their classrooms to the next level?
At times, do they feel threatened by it?
What kind of response do you get?
Sal: We get a positive selection bias.
The ones that reach out to us are the ones
that are probably using us on some level
and those teachers are excited, more excited
than I even thought, originally.
I think the really skilled teachers, the reason
why they went into teaching is they wanted
to form bonds with students, they wanted to be creative themselves
and test the children's creativity, but when they go into a classroom,
there's 30 kids, all different levels, they have to do
all of this classroom management, "Be quiet,"
and actually, that's almost more of the -
If I had to become a teacher tomorrow in a real classroom,
that's the stuff I would have to learn.
I actually did volunteer once in college
and literally within ten minutes, all of the kids
were standing on top of the table and I had no idea what I did wrong.
It was like this ...
The teachers want to be this liberated person
who can form bonds, who can dig in, who have the data,
so the teachers who've seen that, they love it.
These Los Altos teachers love it.
I spoke to all of the Los Altos elementary school teachers
and they're pretty much, as far as I can tell,
it seems like they're on board.
I think the resistance comes from people
who aren't familiar with what we're trying to do
and they just see the headline, they just get a glimpse
of kind of what it's about, so unfortunately
there have been headlines like,
"Is This the Solution to Our Education Problem?"
We think it is on some level, but people have a knee jerk reaction
to this kind of panacea type thing.
They're like, "Oh no, this isn't it and this is going to be
"just drill and kill learning."
They'll say all of that type of thing.
There's obviously a lot of people on -
We try to stay out of political debates, but there's a lot of people
who view Khan Academy as an empowering tool
against things like teachers' unions or against things like -
When someone in a teachers' union sees someone else say,
"Oh, now that Khan Academy's here, this is going to get you guys,"
they immediately react against it.
We try not to enter those debates, but what I will say is
no, we're empowering the teachers.
It's going to free up their time.
Right now, this is why teachers are, I think, so frustrated
is every time there's a new study that comes out
that shows that schools are falling behind
and we're falling behind Senegal or whatever, some other country,
the reaction of policymakers is we have to micromanage more.
The belief is that the micromanagement is all around the focus
of de-risking the worst teachers,
de-risking the worst students, on some level.
What it does is it completely straps everyone else.
What we're doing now is we're liberating everyone.
You can cater to everyone and to some degree,
you are de-risking the teacher who might not have,
and I'm not saying this is most teachers,
but in any industry there is a bell curve
and there is the bottom 5% of teachers and 5% of kids
are in front of the bottom 5% of teachers
and you can de-risk them because now they have an alternative
and now the top 95%, or the top 50%, or the top 5% of teachers
are liberated to fully express their abilities, their creativity.
They could think of stuff like my trading game or even better stuff.
I would say on the whole, the ones that have watched the TED talks,
the ones that have understood what we're trying to do are pretty excited.
The one other dimension is, and this is happening
in Los Altos classroom, there's fifth graders doing
the chain rule in a Los Altos classroom.
As a teacher, that can be a little daunting.
You're a fifth grade teacher, you signed up
to be a fifth grade teacher, and there's a kid
doing calculus in the room.
What we saw from the one teacher when we observed it,
she literally, and he was marked by the dashboard as red,
he wasn't understanding the chain rule,
so she's like, "I'd better intervene," but what was really powerful
was that she went and she said, "You know what?
"I haven't seen this since college and I forgot how to do this
"or what this was all about.
"Why don't we learn it together?"
I was there observe -
It immediately clicked with the kid.
It almost felt like he respected the teacher ten times more
because she was willing to let down her guard
as the source of all correct answers in the world.
A teacher has to feel comfortable.
Actually, on the same line, there was a reporter
who was doing a story on one of the fifth grade classrooms
and there was one girl in there who was doing trigonometry
and the reporter sits down next to her and says,
"Do you think this is fifth grade math?"
and the girl goes, "No, I think it's sixth grade." (laughter)
Jeff: Go ahead.
Ron: Thank you for being here.
I watched your TED talk twice.
Once I discovered it on LinkedIn today, by the way,
and it was like 11 PM, something like that.
I watched it, I was completely blown away,
I called my wife, "I need to show you something,"
so we watched it together the second time.
It made me deeply depressed (laughter)
and I love your system (crosstalk)
The problem here is that you have two aspects in this system.
One is you learn at your pace.
The second one, you exercise collaboratively,
in the room with other kids.
It needs to be implemented in the school system in some way.
You can't do that without implementing in the school system.
School systems are slow.
My kid is four and a half years old.
I want her to do that in two years.
I don't live in Los Altos. (laughter)
Sal: Neither do I.
I have another interesting story to tell you.
I don't live in Los Altos, either, but I'll say I have another interesting -
Ron: Actually, I was growing up in the third world
and I made it here to the Silicon Valley,
which I think is quite an achievement for myself
and now I feel as if I'm back to the third world,
because my kid will not be that genius.
It will create a few million genius kids and a couple of billions
who are as dumb as they are right now. (laughing)
Sorry. (crosstalk)
How can we scale it fast?
I have two years. (laughter)
Sal: I'm actually very close to your -
I actually live about 100 feet from the Los Altos district border.
I live in Mountain View, near Cuesta Park
and the same house costs $300,000 more, literally 200 feet away,
because of this discrepancy in the school system.
One of these fifth graders actually goaded me on when I heard the story,
is that on that same news piece, these kids were doing,
they call it a rocket run, where the teacher sets up this thing,
where they measure how fast they can do something.
They usually do a very simple exercise.
They took all this footage when they went to the classroom
and some of these kids are doing trigonometry
and all sorts of crazy stuff, but the footage they showed
on NBC nightly news was these kids doing arithmetic.
When I talked to the teacher, they loved the news piece,
but they really didn't like the fact that the footage showed
them doing arithmetic, but in the news piece,
they mistakenly said this was a pilot in Mountain View,
so one of the kids said, "Well, at least they think we're in Mountain View,"
(laughter) which I had the same reaction.
I was like, "No, Mountain View must come back."
The simple answer is we're trying to go as fast -
It seems like this will work is if we can do
enough powerful use cases.
The bay area is going to be disproportionately
where most of these use cases are.
Already, I've been told by Los Altos people,
Palo Alto unified, none of these are cheap areas either,
but all of them have started to tour them and they seem interested.
If you can do these really powerful use cases.
Probably the scariest thing is when people all over the country,
like you, see that there are kids in these 10 or 15 schools,
of all different, not just affluent neighborhoods,
but across the board, they're learning at their own pace,
they're engaged in mathematics, the classroom is fun,
and they're doing trigonometry or whatever,
you're going to get scared and you're going
to really rock the boat in your local school district,
you and the other parents.
I think the PTA is probably the biggest, strongest influence.
Hopefully we can address your school district,
maybe it'll be one of the 15, but massive change,
that's what it's going to be.
It's going to be parents having that visceral reaction
that you just had, because that's the best way to disrupt.
I have a two year old, so I have about three years
to get Mountain View up to speed. (laughter)
Ron: Thank you very much.
Jeff: Sal, oftentimes when people think about hacking
and ways in which they can get involved,
I'm sure they're thinking about the code, the product.
You were talking about modules earlier,
but I think parent-led advocacy and demand driven approach
is going to be important to accelerate things.
One of the things we may want to start thinking about
is how we create a little bit of an, "I want my MTV" strategy or energy,
where we make it incredibly simple for parents to come together,
to start requesting it within their communities.
Sal: Yeah, that'd be awesome, actually.
That'd be super powerful.
Yeah, an online campaign.
Jeff: Maybe some folks can get together afterwards
and we can do some brainstorming on that.
Michael.
Michael: Hey Sal, thanks a lot for coming in.
In spirit of brainstorming, I just wanted to throw out
a possibility of LinkedIn Skills seems
like a really natural connection here with Khan Academy,
because we have people on our site who have skills
and they're highlighting the skills over time.
They may be available to help, you may be going
and looking at skills, wanting to learn them,
and that could be a good jumping off point to Khan Academy.
On the flipside, coming back from Khan Academy,
over to LinkedIn, so that just seemed like a really natural -
Sal: Yeah, I'll take another level to that,
because the one thing that we've been experimenting with
is how do we increase the teaching base beyond me.
It's not a rate limiting factor for us where we are right now,
but it would be huge if everyone taught everything they know.
If you had a skill, it's funny the first hedge fund I worked for,
the (unintelligible) retired, but then the second
hedge fund I worked for, they were so impressed
by my videos on finance that I almost didn't have to interview.
They were like, "Wow, this guy clearly knows his finance."
There could be something very interesting with LinkedIn.
We could work out the details where you teach what you know.
One, that obviously has social good to it,
but it's huge marketing for yourself,
just because other people will watch what you know,
and if any employer says, "Well, does he know it?"
Clearly, he's teaching the subject.
Michael: Your video count.
Sal: Your video account, especially.
Michael: 8,000 people have watched this.
Sal: Exactly, especially if other people endorse it
and there's some type of curation going on.
That would be powerful.
We've been thinking, there's TED and there TEDx.
I don't know if you all are familiar with the difference.
TEDx is kind of the franchise.
You could start a TEDx Shoreline and as long as it meets
their standards, you do a conference and then you record
all the videos and then TED will look at some of those videos
and the good ones they'll put on TED.com.
We've been thinking about doing something like that with Khan Academy.
We've jokingly called it xKhan. (laughter)
This could be an interesting -
I'm just brainstorming out loud.
Something like this, it gels with LinkedIn's showing what you know,
your network being able to appreciate that,
and at the same time, helping to potentially build
a very powerful library of really useful stuff.
A lot of it could just be very hands-on,
"Hey, I'm the office manager.
"This is how I think about ordering," very basic stuff
or it could be very sophisticated stuff.
Michael: Nobody knows anybody else's job very well.
Sal: Exactly, and actually, that's a huge corporate kind
of knowledge management difficulty.
This would be -
Yeah, right now in a lot of corporations,
the ability to rise up is based on how well
you can market yourself, but now all of a sudden,
if you're like, "Wow, now I understand what that person does
"and it's brilliant," there's all sorts of positive things
that could be from that.
Michael: Thanks.
Jeff: What if we just created a "tell us what you know"
piece of text on the Skills page, so it's not a status update,
140 characters or less, it's 10, 12,
however long the duration would be in minutes
and we could give people a little space on their profile
to upload the video and use Skills as a jumping off point,
so it's essentially highly targeted marketing
for the right people, the right expertise.
We could also leverage Skills, the module in the middle of that page,
showing some of the most influential people within that skill community.
We may want to think about sending a mail to some of those folks
and it's all for good, so we could say,
"How would you like to get involved with being the first
"to tell us what you know and participate in some kind
"of collaboration between the Khan Academy and LinkedIn?"
Sal: Yeah, that's something that would be awesome.
Jeff: That's a great idea, Mike.
Okay.
Audience Member: Hi Sal, thanks for coming.
I know your focus is primary education,
but I wanted to ask you a little bit about our university system here.
There's been a lot of talk recently about a bubble in higher education.
Sal: Yeah, Peter Thiel.
Audience Member: Exactly.
College costs are ballooning.
As a society, we're placing more and more emphasis on credentials.
Ivy league is the big thing.
Everybody wants their kids to go to the ivy league.
Do you have any thoughts about reforming that kind of system?
Well, not reform, because I know -
Sal: Reinventing.
Audience Member: Reinventing that system specifically
and maybe if there's anything we need to change
our way of thinking, as a culture, so that we can get back on track.
Sal: Yeah, to give you all background, Peter Thiel,
one of the founders of PayPal, he runs Clarion Capital,
another hedge fund guy.
He's been pretty vocal about this bubble in higher education.
He's been good at spotting the previous bubbles.
The housing bubble, the tech bubble, and all of that.
It's a bubble because people are willing to pay
ridiculous amounts of money in perception
that it's a good investment when it really isn't,
which is what a bubble is.
That's true with the housing bubble,
that's true of the tech bubble.
Beyond just talking about it, his attempt at disrupting it,
which I think is in the right direction,
but I don't think it goes quite enough, is he started this program,
where he's targeting the same kids who would otherwise go
to Stanford or MIT or Harvard or wherever and say,
"Look, I'll pay you 100 grand if you drop out of school
"and come start a business."
He's trying to make it so there's something very desirable,
like very prestigious to have, and probably will help your career,
that doesn't cost money, that you would give up that other thing,
you would give up the college degree
and this might become more desirable.
I think what would really work, to take his thing to the -
I've thrown it out as a crazy idea three or four weeks ago
and now it's getting a little less crazy
is I think it would be awesome to start a university,
for lack of a better word, in Mountain View.
This first university, I don't want to make it sound elitist,
but it would focus on the best and the brightest.
It would focus on the same kids that are applying
to Stanford and MIT and Harvard and all of this right now.
I'll take a tangent on why I say that,
because I think that's the only way you can disrupt.
The goal here, instead of these students paying $50,000 a year
and going into debt, they would be paid.
The reason why I say that is if you can make the best education
have negative tuition, then it's a geeky calculus analogy,
by the squeeze theorem, literally, how can anyone else
justify charging anything, if the best education is negative tuition?
You get people to come in and their curriculum
is literally six months at LinkedIn, six months at Google.
They work in software engineering, they work in product management,
they work in marketing, they work in PR, they work in accounting.
Six months at Apple, six months working for a VC firm,
six months developing iPad apps, or whatever and they are paid.
Some of the money goes to the students, maybe 30 grand a year
and some of it goes to the university
to set up the environment that you should have.
It's not this purely commercial thing.
You have all of the things that we all liked about college.
You have a campus, you have pretty trees to read books under,
(laughter) you have venues to meet your future husband or wife. (laughter)
And you have a scaffold of truly academic material
that you can do at your own pace, something like the Khan Academy.
The faculty and you have seminars.
"Hey, I'm working on a project at LinkedIn,
"but you know what, this is going to require some signal processing.
"I don't know signal processing."
I go back to the campus, there are either other students there,
there's Khan Academy resources, or there are mentors
in the valley who are willing to work with me on signal processing.
Then, I learn it.
You go through this, so what's going to happen
is these students are going to end up finishing not with debt.
They're going to have money saved,
they're going to be way more desirable
by this whole slew of companies,
and they have the downside protection,
because they still had a little bit of an academic scaffold.
They'll do well on the MCAT, the GRE, if they decide
they want to become a doctor or a lawyer, they can still do that.
I think if you do that, it'll be pretty hard for Stanford to justify charging ...
The other thing is, you could go right out of the gate,
because if you get the employers involved,
especially these marquee employers,
then maybe even the Khan Academy,
because we have a brand and it's in the right place,
you don't face that difficulty of starting a university
that no one's ever heard of.
People will hear of this university on day one.
I think something like that, if that's successful,
then all of a sudden the tuition inflation becomes very hard to justify.
Then you can start more and more of these around the country
at different levels, different specializations.
Audience Member: I know Olin University in Boston.
I don't know if you're familiar.
Sal: Yeah.
Audience Member: Tried to do something similar to that.
It was like free engineering college.
Most of their professors were from MIT
and they did the project exploration (crosstalk)
I know some people had good results going there.
I don't know if you've looked at that.
Sal: I think the problem there, and actually, I know Olin pretty well.
My adviser at MIT actually ended up becoming a professor at Olin.
I think the problem is ...
The reason why people are paying $200,000 right now
is to have a signal to send to the job market that I kick butt.
Even though Olin, I haven't gone to Olin,
but I can imagine it's probably a very good education,
that's not why people are spending $200,000.
They want that signal, I went to MIT, I went to Cal Tech.
It's the brand.
Olin has a problem of that and it also has the problem
with the connections, I don't know if Google,
maybe Google does, but I don't know if Goldman Sachs
recruits at Olin, though maybe they should,
because they don't know what Olin is.
I think the key thing would have to have some type of partnership
with very marquee recruits.
If you get an ecosystem of ten of the top tier,
the companies everyone wants to work for,
the other companies, the next tier of companies
are going to say, "Wait, if Google or LinkedIn's getting
"all of its talent there, we better get our talent there, too.
"We don't want to look like we're getting the scraps."
I think it's very important to build the whole ecosystem there.
Actually, the big difference would be
that the projects would be stuff that actually matters.
In the past, if I would have recommended this 50 years ago,
people would have said, "Oh my God,
"but you're making people do vocational things.
"That's horrible, it's commercial," but the reality is
the stuff that's going on at LinkedIn right now,
the analytics, the software engineering, the marketing,
the stuff that's going on at Google, it's more intellectual
than the software engineering projects that we worked on
when we were undergrads.
It's more intellectual than almost anything,
the made up projects that a university gives you right now.
I think if you build the whole eco -
I think Silicon Valley is the perfect place to do it.
The one thing that I've discovered through Khan Academy
is there's a lot of people who made it, who are super smart,
who are orbiting the valley just looking for someone to mentor,
looking to disrupt things a little bit.
You can imagine, instead of this school showing off
about how many Nobel Laureates they have on their faculty,
they say, "No, we have the CEOs of this company and this company.
"These entrepreneurs and these people
"who've done amazing things in the world, this is our faculty.
"These are the people you have access to as your mentors."
I think you do something like that,
I think it would be pretty hard to compete with.
Audience Member: Thanks so much.
Sal: Yeah, sure.
Jeff: Okay, these are going to be the last three questions.
Sal's already stayed a little bit extra,
but there have been some great questions.
Audience Member: Yeah, thank you very much for coming.
I have a question going back to scale.
Ron has given us a two year deadline to grow very quickly.
Sal: (laughing) Where do you live, by the way?
Ron: Palo Alto.
Sal: Oh, yeah (laughter) a very underserved community.
Yeah, I think we might be able to meet your goal.
Audience Member: My question is have you thought
about making the Khan Academy lectures more searchable,
basically being able to reach them more easily
from other sites or partnering with other sites
or even your students themselves?
Have you had any experiences with them really growing
your user base because they've shared
their experience with someone else?
Do you think that that's a viable way to grow more quickly
than actually getting an entire educational institution
to come on board and buy into this?
Sal: Oh yeah, just to be clear,
this is something we tell our team the whole time.
This roll out into schools fell into our lap
and we're like, "This is an opportunity
and there's no obvious resistance, so let's do it,"
but our number one goal is actually that.
It's actually the organic, word of mouth, kids telling kids about it,
teachers direct a student, a one off kid or parent trying to learn,
even homeschoolers, that still is.
We want Khan Academy to, if you have nothing else,
you're still able to get an education.
To ask the questions about the searchability,
that's something we're working on.
2,200 videos, it's this huge curation problem.
We're figuring out ways to categorize it better,
ways to make it more searchable.
We're getting transcripts on them so they can be text searchable.
The Google people have told us that that's actually,
it's unfortunate that if you do a text search
for alegbra right now, Khan Academy videos
they don't even come up on the first page.
All sorts of random stuff because there's no text
that says "parabola" and all of this type of stuff.
We're going to work on that so it becomes
a lot more meaningfully searchable.
Audience Member: Thanks.
Audience Member: In terms of making
the Academy's content more palatable to the beast,
is there any academic research going on,
in terms of the efficacy of the program?
Sal: Yeah, we're eager to do more hardcore, rigorous studies.
Even in Los Altos, I've been broadly impressed
with the whole Los Altos school system,
from the teachers, the parents, all the way up to the superintendent.
They're not people who get enamored with an idea
and say, "Let's just go district wide with it for the hell of it."
The two seventh grade classes who have been using it,
they call it algebra readiness classes.
These classes are actually, I guess you'd call them,
they're the students not in the medium track.
These students they did a before and after
and these kids went from ...
I forgot the exact numbers, but it was on the order,
I'm not exaggerating, like 20% proficiency
of algebra and pre-algebra concepts to, I think, it's like 80% on average.
It's a dramatic change.
They actually never had these classes before,
so they don't know what happened in previous years,
but that was pretty powerful for them.
Audience Member: Even instead of doing both fifth
and both seventh grade class, if you were to do
one fifth, sixth, and seventh grade class and not the other
and do cohort -
Sal: Exactly, the fifth grade we're doing that.
They had a fifth grade assessment that they do every year.
The results came out and our fifth grade classes,
despite the fact that we weren't -
I was stressed about it, because the other classes
were literally teaching to the test.
In our classes, they were doing this crazy stuff
that had nothing to do with the exam.
Ours did at least or better than those.
The good thing is we're definitely not damaging anything,
(laughter) which is important.
It's amazing how many times that question is not asked.
We're definitely not doing damage and everyone's more engaged,
so even on that metric alone it makes sense to move forward,
but the more powerful thing is, and everyone recognizes this,
is that these kids are doing trigonometry and algebra,
that's not being measured on the fifth grade assessment.
I'm actually going to administer an SAT
to a control fifth grade class and to this fifth grade class
and I'm hoping to see one thing.
Obviously the fifth graders who have been doing algebra
will do much better on the SAT, but I have a suspicion
they'll do much better than the average high school senior, too.
I think if we do stuff like that and then we can do more rigorous stuff.
These aren't rigorous studies.
This is me administering an SAT,
but these will be the data points that tell us.
Then we can do a really rigorous study.
Audience Member: One of the obstacles you can hit
is that those people that went and got a master's degree
so they could teach middle school math
are going to be reluctant to (unintelligible).
Last comment before I turn it over, if you make the effort
to map your particular modules to the Common Core standards,
that would make it a lot -
Sal: We are doing that as we speak.
They're like 80% done.
We're 80% done mapping.
We have to actually add a lot more modules.
The videos are pretty comprehensive,
but the modules we have to add a lot more.
We're doing that, but it's just a spreadsheet right now.
We're going to surface that so that you can navigate
with the Common Core.
To answer the teacher question, this is the other thing,
teachers can use this to stay -
That's the other side effect, teachers actually using this to learn.
There have been studies that show the best teachers
are actually the ones who have -
The best second grade math teachers are the ones who know calculus,
just because the kids know that there's more there.
They know what's going on.
The teachers can use this to ramp up and stay ahead of the curve.
Audience Member: Well, speaking of second grade teachers,
I am one, so thank you.
I want to say thank you to LinkedIn for inviting me, as well.
I'm from northern California.
I teach at a charter school and I actually have
an employee here's son in my class.
I had a question more about taking it back
to the actual implementation.
The Los Altos schools, are they using a 1:1 ratio
of computers in the classroom?
Sal: Yes.
Audience Member: Are there kids at the computer
doing that math lecture the whole time?
Sal: They have 1:1, although what we found
is you actually don't need 1:1,
because so much of the time is spent doing other things
that you could probably time share the computers.
You could probably do a 3:1 ratio
and it would probably work out just as well,
just because there's some time where you're actually all working
with your peers and you're not even using the computer.
That is a gaining factor.
At some point, you do have to have internet connectivity.
We're thinking about offline use cases for the developing world,
but what we'd like to think is, even when I went to school
in the 80s and 90s in a fairly middle of the road
public school system in Louisiana,
there were computers that just went completely unused.
I think the skepticism for deploying more money
behind computers is justified.
It's like, "What are they doing right now with the computers?
"How is it actually helping anyone?"
I think if you actually give a use case for the computers
and it's actually, now that these people are -
The teachers, the principals, the administrators, the parents
are getting this real-time data, then I think the question becomes,
"How can we operate without these computers?"
Then, there's a narrative here, too, where at least I think
you don't need textbooks anymore.
That's a cost savings.
Audience Member: Then implementing it then multiple grade levels.
With the modules you were talking about,
I've started working through them myself,
because I"m refreshing, trying to get to the calculus level
as a second grade teacher, I guess.
Implementing it within fourth, fifth, sixth, seventh, eighth,
at what point are those kids, because there's only so many modules,
and if you're in school 186 days a year,
how are they going to keep going through all those modules (crosstalk)
Sal: Some of these fifth graders are almost done
with all of our modules that we have,
so we're ramping up, hiring faster so we can stay ahead of them.
The funny answer is, it's funny that this is a problem.
If I had a 12 year old or 13 year old that did that,
I would say, "You know what, just take the SAT,
"take the GED, and go work or something." (laughter)
"Go explore things for a couple years
and if you want to go to college, go to -
That's a good problem.
It's funny, it sounds like a crazy idea, but someone recommended
that we should start schools where it isn't
this is the tuition per month or this is tuition for a semester,
it's just like if your kid gets over 700 on the SAT, you pay us -
Right now, if you go to a private school, $30,000 a year
for 12 years is $360,000, right?
Most of them are still not getting 700s on the SAT, right?
So you say, however long it takes, if it takes them a week,
if it takes them 20 years, if your kid gets a 700 -
We'll educate them, if your kid gets a 700, pay us 100 grand.
It was a joke, but that actually would be good,
because if the kid finishes faster, it's good for everyone.
It's good for the kid, it's good for the school system,
it's good for resource allocation.
I know this is being taped, so don't take my idea seriously
about this performance, but actually -
Anyway, (laughter) the simple answer is it's not a problem.
It's an awesome problem.
Actually, the best thing to do with that kid is,
the kid who's already maxed out everything, make him a TA.
Audience Member: Yeah, I'm just seeing the balance between
language development, writing, reading (crosstalk)
all that other stuff, so you have a sixth, seventh, eighth grader
who has maxed out your modules in calculus,
but they're not prepared yet, in my opinion
to go out to the work field, in terms of their writing ability (crosstalk)
Sal: There's two things here.
One is because these are fifth grade classes,
the same teacher does teach all the subjects.
One, these teachers are frustrated with the other subjects now,
because they feel like it's like stone ages now,
because they don't have this data analytic, self-paced teaching.
Hopefully we can expand and build some tools into the other subjects.
The other thing is we've even thought maybe we should
start one school ourselves.
We actually even thought about doing it someplace around here,
so maybe you would have an option other than ...
It's not by grade level, it's just one room classroom.
In the same room you have Kindergartners,
in the same room you have 18 year olds
and the stuff that you already have maxed out, you are a TA
and the other stuff you are being TA-ed.
I think if you do a model like that, I think it's -
There's all sorts of interesting models
about teaching each other and maturity
that you can only get in that type of a framework.
Right now, you're stuck with just your other ten year olds.
We've all seen it.
If you have older kids around, you act more mature
and if you have younger kids around, you act more mature,
because you have responsibility now.
I think if we explore that a little bit more,
we'll have a way that we can really -
Once a kid is giving more into the system
than they're taking out, pay them.
They should be TAs.
Audience Member: As a teacher, thank you, Sal.
Sal: Oh yeah, thanks, yeah.
Jeff: Speaking of thanks, it's interesting juxtaposition.
At our last In day, we do this once a month,
where employees have an opportunity
to invest time and energy in the things
they're most inspired by and excited by.
Education's a recurring theme for us, reinventing education.
At the last In day, we screened Waiting for Superman.
I think a lot of people in the room today saw it
and it's hard not to walk away from the film
feeling a bit of despair.
I think there is an understanding of things need to improve,
but I also think, perhaps naively, prior to seeing the film,
a lot folks believe that if you live in this country
and you wanted to be educated, you wanted to learn
and do your best and be prepared for opportunity when it came,
that you could and what that movie certainly shed
a very, very dark light on was the fact that that's not the case,
that it's come down to a lottery
and I think most folks here learned the economics
of lotteries at a very young age.
If we all believe that the future of our country,
to a large extent, depends on the next generation
and their ability to be educated,
we don't want to be placing a bet on a lottery,
we want to be placing a bet on people like you.
As depressing as some of those themes were,
I think you represent the exact opposite.
You represent the fact that what could appear
as completely intractable, unsolveable problems
are absolutely solvable and you and I think
you mentioned eight or nine folks,
one of the key things we like to talk about here
is how to scale and how to transform things.
You are living proof of what's possible when someone
with incredible vision, intelligence, and energy
channels that into something -
Sal: Looks (laughter)
Jeff: Sure. (crosstalk)
Channels that into something so extraordinarily important and valuable.
On behalf of all of us, Sal, thank you for everything
you and your team are doing to reinvent education.
I know I speak for all of us when I say we're going to do
everything within our power to help you.
Sal: Awesome, yeah, that's exciting. (applause)