hello facebook and twitter and now
youtube okay thanks
uh uh hello everyone asal here and uh so
as promised uh we are going to continue
with these daily live streams uh given
all of the school closures that are
happening around the country and around
the world
we thought it could be valuable to have
a place especially where we're all kind
of socially isolated right now uh for us
to connect for us to share information
for us to ask questions about how to
navigate the closures
there's been a lot of i guess you could
say news over the weekend some of the
major school districts in the country
have shut down
most recently in new york city and los
angeles announced it's a little over 30
million students in the country so
roughly 60 of the students in the
country
are now trying to do some form of
schooling from home
over the weekend we also released as
soon as we saw that this was happening
and happening fast we wanted to make
sure that
parents and teachers and students had a
way to make sense of what to do uh when
they get back when they get home and
with the school closures uh many schools
have created some type of a
virtualization plan but many of them
haven't because they didn't have the
time to come up with it given how fast
the closures happened and so we released
schedules um we will we've posted them
on all the major social media channels
i'm going to make a video later today on
youtube talking about the schedules
themselves
and how to navigate them but there are
schedules for the students aged there's
a schedule for students
from pre-k through sec
through uh
second grade there's a schedule for
students from third through fifth grade
one from sixth the ninth grade and one
from uh tenth to twelfth grade that
really just structures the day and let
students know okay at this part of the
day you could work on math we obviously
cover math from pre-k with things like
khan academy kids all the way through on
khan academy middle school high school
early college level math english and
language arts khan academy kids is great
for the younger crowd and then as you
get into
elementary school and middle school
we actually just launched what's known
as a beta a kind of an early release of
our english and language arts
but we wanted to highlight there because
it's a chance for students to get a lot
of practice
reading passages answering reading
comprehension questions we also have our
grammar offering to help fill out that
english and language arts and then as
you get into middle school and high
school
there's the opportunity to do things
like uh biology chemistry physics
economics computer science american
history world history civics and
government etc
so what our goal is is we we have a lot
of and i didn't that wasn't a
comprehensive list obviously for high
school students you could also do uh sat
prep which is in reading writing and
math uh but we wanted to structure it
all into these schedules so that parents
students and teachers
can can know what what we should what we
should work on at different parts of the
day the ideal is if that can be
complemented uh with other resources
that could either be provided by the
school the district
or maybe teachers could set up
zoom video conferencing or or google
hangouts so that students could go
someplace for help i think for older
students they could even self-organize
around that and you could also imagine
parents who could volunteer to set up
these video conferencing sessions for
any student who feels stuck who doesn't
know where to start who needs a little
bit of motivation or just needs academic
help uh on our side we are going to try
to
do more live streams than just this one
and
explore ways
that we can also provide more help
because obviously students can get as
much practice as they need on something
like khan academy but it really helps to
feel connected especially in this time
of social isolation
so
one of the things about this live stream
i'd love to take questions from
any questions that that folks have uh
some some khan academy colleagues of
mine are
paying attention to the message boards
on the various uh social media channels
so if you have any questions really
about anything it could be
about the school closures it could be
about
uh you know i i'm trying to navigate it
myself with three young children at home
i'm happy to give advice about um how
we're trying to to handle it
i'm happy to talk about the virus i
actually put a video out over the
weekend as well just a it's a little bit
of a sobering video for people to
appreciate that
the confirmed cases that you hear about
on the news that's
for sure or very likely actually for
sure a subset of the actual cases in an
area because you're clearly not testing
everyone and so that goes into a little
bit of the analysis of what happened in
in wuhan and you typically see a ratio
of about actually greater than uh 10
real cases for every confirmed case so
the reason why i wanted to do that is
you know the earlier that all of us
practice good social distancing from
each other
uh the quicker we can kind of clamp down
on this thing but if we wait a little
while it's just going to get that much
uh worse and that much harder so i'm
happy to answer any questions i can
obviously i'm not an epidemiologist uh
but we've made a lot of content on khan
academy on things like exponential
growth and viruses and uh and i'm
this doesn't this isn't a qualification
but i'm married to a doctor
so we've been having a lot of
conversations about this
over the weekend so let's see i have uh
some questions here so someone asked
this is lee woans
i teach special education preschool new
to khan academy how can we get help for
our students with multiple disabilities
so lee thanks so much for your questions
so
we haven't been able to make a specific
uh
product or content or studies around
students with specific disabilities but
given that you work at a preschool
i would uh definitely look at khan
academy kids it's available in both the
android and ios app stores it is free it
is non-commercial uh it's the team khan
academy kids they used to be the duck
duck moose team uh it's they're really
the top team in in creating content for
early learners they were the folks who
made that early wheels on the bus app in
2008 2009 that made us all realize that
young kids can can can can handle the
iphone or an ipad but what you'll see
there is you know most early learning
apps are very focused on just one
domain or just one part of one domain
but khan academy kids has over 100 books
that the students could read they could
be read too the app can read to them it
has interactive videos not just videos
but
videos that will stop and ask the
students to manipulate things and it has
a lot of exercises and it adapts to the
needs of the student and so uh hopefully
khan academy kids uh will be useful for
your students and let us know we always
want feedback ideas on how we can get
better
let's see
there is
see angela wilson is asking my daughter
needs a ct prep in math where should she
begin
uh so great a question angela so
the general view we don't have specific
act prep on khan academy but generally
speaking if your daughter
just keeps practicing her math her
reading and writing she'll do just fine
on the act i would recommend the sat
prep because if she does well in that
there's a there's a very high
correlation between the two tests so i
think that could be a good activity
because the sat prep will be giving her
practice in in math reading uh and
writing and i know the act also contains
things
like uh like science it's although it's
a little bit more things like data
analysis and so it wouldn't hurt you
know look at some of the schedules we've
posted and have your daughter whatever
the right science is for her to engage
on that and that will just keep those
muscles from atrophying those mental
muscles from atrophying so she'll just
do fine on the act and or the sat or
whatever else she might have to take
tests on
all right see the plug just fell out of
the computer i just want to make sure we
don't run out of
time
you're good on yourself all right
let's see so see sonya tabor says will
you be creating more meditation videos
for kids and maybe for kids and families
i have found them to be really useful
thanks sonia you know this
this was uh the first for those of you
who don't know uh we we posted some
meditation videos a few weeks ago
oh and we're posting them again right
now oh we're posting right now um and it
was just an idea before this crisis
really hit uh where we were thinking
that there's just a lot of young kids
who feel really stressed when you look
at the data
of things like stress depression anxiety
especially we've been hearing from
university presidents is kind of um
i mean talk about another thing that's
unfortunately growing exponentially uh
and and so we said hey there's got to be
a way to help students here and and
there's also a lot of evidence that if
students
are de-stressed they actually can
perform better and i know from personal
experience i talked about this at the
last live stream
about a year and a half ago i was
stressed for various reasons and i
whenever i get stressed i start getting
claustrophobic on planes i just really
have
a trouble uh being on planes and
obviously i have to travel a lot for my
job and it was actually one of my board
members that recommended that i started
meditation and i was i was somewhat
desperate so i was like okay i'm going
to give it a shot uh but when i do
things i tend to do to an extreme so i
said i'm just going to do this every day
and so i started meditating every day
and early initially for about 10 or 20
minutes a day and after about six weeks
i felt a very noticeable difference and
you know for anyone who thinks
meditation is some very esoteric some
hard to imagine uh you know spiritual
thing it really is just about stealing
your mind uh and realizing that you are
not your thoughts realizing
that all of these things that weigh down
on us that we look at at the world
how people are judging us what they view
of us our personas our jobs however we
define ourselves they are us and i think
the more that you can kind of at least
briefly for 10 minutes a day 20 minutes
a day 30 minutes a day escape from that
kind of
mental construction we've we we've made
that stresses out it's very liberating
and it actually makes you more resilient
and one thing that i found you know with
all of the stuff going on with kovid
it's even more important because when
you look at the news
especially with the social isolation it
can
in our minds
we can feel a little bit under assault
but then i keep reminding myself i was
like no i'm i'm still here i'm i'm able
to uh uh you know i have all everything
i need i have my family around me i'm
actually in a quite good circumstance
but i'm i'm i've been religiously and
when i say religiously not in the
religious sense but like i've been
meditating uh every day uh 30 minutes
and i've been um kind of ramping up my
meditation during this because i think
it's just eased my mind and says look
you know
things are going to play out the way
they do all we can do is take the right
action be cautious
my wife has lately uh i been quoting a
lot of frozen as our life philosophy
obviously in frozen one we learned to
let it go
and in frozen two uh do the next right
thing and i think those two statements
are awfully awfully deep uh for an ant
for for uh uh animated movies uh just
you know
uh so regular meditation
let all of these things that we've
constructed in our mind go at least for
a little bit for for 10 20 30 minutes a
day and just focus on the next right
thing don't try to get overwhelmed with
everything that's going
on all right
so
somewhat see this is
jurgen weinhard
are you concerned that your system will
be able to scale based on the surge of
social isolation
go tigers i guess jurgen is a lsu fan
i'm from louisiana so
good on the background research here
again
uh
so will the system scale
we this is uh you know our engineering
team has reassured us that we we we're
going to be able to scale uh this is
really khan academy's duty to step up
here you know as soon as we started
hearing about the school closures we're
like this
we we've got to support the country and
the world in this in this situation
for those of you who are in a position
uh please consider donating because our
server costs were already many many
millions of dollars a year and i have a
feeling that they're going to grow
potentially exponentially uh and so
we're going to need support once again
if you can't afford it
you can't but if you can and especially
if your family or people that you care
about are getting value of this and you
want to support other people to ensure
they're up think about making a
philanthropic donation but yes we have a
you know one thing that i'm super proud
of at khan academy i get
a disproportionate amount of credit for
it we're actually over 200 folks and uh
the the team at khan academy are are
literally the the brightest uh most
passionate team that i've ever worked
with in my life and and so they're all
uh working hard uh from their their
walk-in closet so to speak uh uh in
social isolation uh but making sure that
that khan academy is staying up for for
what might be
many tens of millions of students who
need it over the coming weeks and months
how can those students without internet
connectivity get khan academy so that's
a question that we're really struggling
with
i know some school districts new york
city when they announced that they're
going to close the schools over the
weekend they
made devices available to students i've
had multiple calls over the weekend with
various philanthropists who are thinking
about how to make devices accessible to
students in that area i'm hoping that
some of the
telecom companies
can make the wi-fi hotspots open
uh i hope you know this is a time
where uh sharing wi-fi with your
neighbor uh hopefully it's not uh
frowned upon because i think it is a bit
of an emergency so we're looking at that
there is uh something called calibri
which is used to be known as ka light it
was started by a a
an intern from khan academy many many
years ago
but they have a what you could view as
an offline server that can that has khan
academy on it among other things it's
not full khan academy and it's not the
perfect experience but you can go pretty
pretty far with it the ideal use case
though is to have some form of internet
connectivity so i think we should all
kind of lobby our local telecom
companies uh to to make it as accessible
as possible because it's not just
important for khan academy i think um or
to access khan academy i think in this
time of social isolation you know i had
a i did a video conference with a bunch
of friends yesterday and families just
to connect
and i think that's what we all need you
know between the meditation and the
video conferencing i think that's what's
going to get us
through the the social isolation or the
physical social isolation
and allow us to be in a good place
let's see
any tips on data science subjects for
home study
uh so if you're really learning data
sciences do you know khan academy i
think can help you with a lot of the
prerequisites for data science a lot of
the basic programming we have college
and high school level statistics on khan
academy we have linear algebra on khan
academy depending on how sophisticated
you want your data science knowledge to
be
but then i think if you want to get into
the meat of data science that's where
the moocs whether it's coursera edx have
some great courses for that and udacity
so i highly recommend
those let's see
is
ela
going to be done
and can we assign things from the ela
beta so english and language arts um we
released it on khan academy already and
it's for second through eighth grade and
actually beyond eighth grade the sat
practice is great because that covers
high school level uh reading and writing
the reason why we call it a beta beta
and software jargon means that we've
released it but we're still improving on
it is the content is actually in a good
place but over the next year or two
we're going to you know we have a
situation right now that when you click
on an item students read a passage and
then they answer a question and then
they submit and then the passage shows
up again and they answer question again
we do want to do things like we already
have on our sat prep where there's a
passage and you see five questions at
the same time
so those are the types of changes that
we hope to improve on over the next year
or so but i have to say i've already
been using the content with my own
children
and i i'm i'm saying this on behalf of
the content team that wrote these
questions it wasn't me
they're very very good passages and
items for your students and if your
students uh keep with it i'm i'm
confident that they're going to
for sure not atrophy their reading
comprehension skills and probably
improve on them
so mary lou i would love says i would
love to have a way to get teacher
support as well is is there teacher
conferencing so mary where we are
exploring all of the above
expect in the next few days we might be
announcing either
live streams like this or we might
create links to uh large-scale video
conferences for teachers maybe others
for um parents uh i hope in this week we
can run some
we can run some tests even ways that if
a student is in a given subject we'll
probably start with math then go into
other subjects so if you're an algebra
student there's a certain time where all
algebra students with a question can can
show up and we're exploring ways that
that can happen if you're uh if you're a
fifth grade student if you have a
question ways that people can show up
and ask questions obviously khan academy
itself has a lot of support uh students
have as much practice as they need they
can look at hints they can read articles
uh of course there's the videos but
there's there's nothing like
having a place where you can ask
questions as well before we get to it i
i do highly recommend if there's parents
and teachers listening out there i think
you can organize these things on your
own if you look at that schedule and if
you have every student in your class
doing that same schedule you could say
all right simultaneous with the schedule
we're going to have a zoom or google
hangout or a skype session or if anyone
has questions go to this url and it
could be a teacher or a
parent or a student it could be even an
older student who is
helping staff and answer any questions
that students have i think that would be
a a really valuable uh complement to to
what we're able to provide
okay um how do you
go to the online classes so you just go
to go to khan academy.org it's all free
when you look at the schedules that
we've released you literally just click
on the links and you'll see where those
classes are
one of the things you know there's
things that you might see in khan
academy in the math for example and a
lot of the sciences you'll see it so
that there's all these game mechanics
you'll see mastery points and you'll see
that it has you know your mastery level
on on each skill and as you get
questions right your mastery level
improves and then in other parts like in
our english language arts you'll see the
exercises but they don't have those
mechanics just yet
and so you're going to see these
different experiences in different parts
of khan academy the places where you do
see the mastery mechanics like in math
or in things like uh we have it in
things like physics
and we have a form of that on our sat
practice
i encourage you if you feel like you
already know some of the material take a
course challenge that will be a fast way
to understand what you know and don't
know and the skills that you don't know
you can then go to those units and take
the unit test and then you can quickly
identify which skills in that unit you
know and don't know and if you know some
of the material that's a pretty fast way
to accelerate
one thing that we've seen
several teachers or many teachers tell
us about is it could be valuable to
start no matter what your age is to
start on kindergarten and move your way
up if if you know your kindergarten cold
which uh hopefully many older students
do it'll take you literally
20 30 minutes maybe an hour to finish
kindergarten probably less time than
that and then first grade if you use
things like the course challenges uh
what i would recommend take the
kindergarten course challenge if you get
not 100 move on to first grade if you
get 100
move on to second grade and then um try
to get mastery second third fourth fifth
grade because what you find is many
students even middle school students
even high school students have some of
those gaps in arithmetic that keep them
from really
being able to intuitively understand the
higher level math and you'll find that
you'll get to what in ed terms you'll
call your zone of proximal development
which is really your learning edge
you'll be able to get to your learning
edge within a within a day or two and
you'll feel very confident that you
don't have any gaps
so
let's see are you planning to add
courses for other programming languages
uh not not in the immediate term but uh
we're always open to ideas we have
things like sql sql we have
javascript we have html css and you know
in programming generally especially if
you learn say javascript
the ideas of programming are very
translatable if you know how to program
one language
it you can ramp up very fast on another
language so i think the javascript can
actually get you quite far
let's see um
cindy ewan asks do you need donations so
your site can keep going where is the
best place to donate simple answer is
yes khan academy is primarily funded
with donations uh so thanks for asking
that question cindy uh you can go to
khan academy.org donate uh to make
donations and i think our team is also
posting it and we're putting putting the
link in right now but uh yes uh and
thank you for that question because
that's how we exist
um
so mary lou asked do you have kind of
caring materials for middle school
sciences so
focused middle school science content is
actually a gap that we have today uh
what we wrote in the schedules so i
think there's a few things
if
if if you have if you want to focus on
science i think the high school biology
actually is a great place
because the math prerequisites for high
school biology are not intense
essentially most middle school students
would have the math background necessary
for high school level biology
the other reason why it's interesting is
it's so relevant right now obviously
we're talking about things like viruses
and rna and dna uh and i i don't think
you know at this time
that's going to be much more relevant to
to
to students um
we hope over the next few years we can
launch a middle school science course as
well but i think the high school biology
is a great place to focus for for middle
school students
let's see so we our team is highlighting
some tips from our audience so this is
from helen martin as a former
homeschooling
former home educating parent i can offer
this pro tip when you are first
educating at home you will almost
certainly get significant pushback from
your kiddos expect it and plan on
ignoring certain attitudes and comments
that you would never let slide under
normal circumstances also start the day
with math
thanks helen and i'm going to take that
to heart
my my uh i
my wife is helping the kids get started
on their i guess you could say
homeschooling regimen uh today uh and i
know we've been dealing with uh exactly
that so that makes me feel good that
some of this pushback we just have to
power through it and uh hopefully we'll
all fall into the pattern within within
a few days or or weeks
so uh brian massey tupper says hey sal
can you give an update on missions and
explain why they're going away thanks
for all you do explain course mastery
too
so uh brian thanks for the question so
there is something on khan academy
called missions which many of you all
are familiar with and those who are
familiar with it have probably seen some
messaging or gotten some emails saying
that missions might go away so just to
give you all a little bit of history i
don't want to uh you know i feel like i
should you know sit by the fireplace and
give you khan academy history here um
from the early days of khan academy
people associated with videos but we
always said there should be a way for
students to learn at their own time and
pace get as much practice and feedback
as necessary and in 2011
or 12 we launched missions which is a
way not only for them students to get as
much practice have game mechanics it
would do space repetition practice so
that it would make sure that kids
retained
that knowledge and it's been very
popular we've had many efficacy studies
on it the reason why we created
an alternate alternative to missions is
that we at the time we had two very
different experiences on khan academy if
someone did a web search they would fall
into our library but then you had to
kind of navigate your way to find the
missions and our our view our hope for
khan academy is to always do what a
great teacher or what a great tutor
would do which is come for help and i
will try to help you but then we'll say
hey but why don't you stick with it so
that you don't have this stressful
emergency uh later on and so we wanted
to merge those two worlds of the library
and the missions and so that's what
course mastery is and so when you go to
any topic and say mathematics on khan
academy but it's in other subjects as
well
you'll you'll see every skill has a
mastery state you know it's either
familiar proficient or mastered if you
just click on a scale and you get four
out of five say right you'll be familiar
if you're able to get five out of five
you're proficient but the only way to
get mastery is for things that you're
already proficient in to be able to do
it in kind of mixed skill practice and
that can happen in unit tests and that
can happen in mastery challenges
and it can also happen in course
challenges and so that's a way to ensure
that students can do focused practice on
given skills and get some base level of
fluency but then they're motivated to
get that spaced repetition mixed skill
practice as well so they really retain
the knowledge and hopefully they're
motivating game mechanics we have all
sorts of ideas to improve on them so
that students can go one course after
another at their own time and pace and
and fill in all their gaps and as i
mentioned before what we really like
about the course mastery is that there's
very clear ways for students to
accelerate if they know some of the
material and that's the course
challenges and the unit tests they can
just go straight to that if they feel
like they know some of the material but
they want to understand what they might
need more
practice on
um
so robin asks hi sal any advice to
discourage googling math answers or
using apps that do this well i mean the
simply for all you students listening um
you are not helping yourself if you if
you just google uh math answers
even if you're looking at a khan academy
lesson don't just wait for me to or some
or whoever's making the video to solve
it pause the video try to work it out on
your own and then of course it's fine to
look at someone else's solution so maybe
it's okay to look at googling a math
answer you've already tried to do it and
you want to see if you got the right
answer if you approached it the right
way but you're not helping anyone if uh
you're just you know trying to
essentially copy the answer
from the internet somehow
all right
let's see
sal let's see um
let's see
any tips on how to do
e-learning for young kids like
kindergarten who need more one-on-one
help and don't have parents available to
work with them while stuck home
uh that's katie dun rankin asks that uh
thanks for the question katie you know
that's that's that's a hard uh situation
uh you know obviously we have things
like khan academy kids which will you
know a student could use for 20 to 30
minutes the ideal has always been using
using it aside another human being
ideally a an adult or an older sibling
but really any other human being i think
just makes it a little bit
more social uh so
uh you know i i i have had my my
five-year-old uh on some face time and
video conferencing with some of his
friends now that we're all social
distancing so i think that
type of thing is important uh but we'll
keep thinking about that if anyone out
there has other ideas for uh katie's
question
uh i think uh that would be
that
we would love to share it out
uh so it looks like we are um almost at
time uh we'll be back tomorrow we're
gonna be here every day every weekday uh
while this is going on which uh
unfortunately looks like it might go on
longer than maybe we thought initially
um
and you know i just want to say a few
things uh you know it
in this time of crisis how excited and
inspired we have been to see how many
people are just acting as human beings
and stepping up for other people
we've seen this in
groups wanting to help what we're doing
uh folks donating to this effort and
i've been seeing it in every every walk
of my life and and so i think you know
whenever you go through a situation like
this uh there's definitely a lot to
maybe you know that's not looking great
but i think there's a lot of other
things that should make you make
everyone feel good and it feels great to
be able to feel connected to everyone
and you know we should be grateful that
we have this type of uh video
conferencing so so thank you you know
youtube facebook twitter google
everybody uh for for offering this so
that we can stay connected the other
thing i really want to emphasize is at
khan academy we're launching these
schedules we have all the resources we
have the subjects and grades for kids to
interact with but i don't want to give
anyone the delusion that this is somehow
a replacement for a teacher this is a
very sub-optimal situation and the ideal
circumstances these types of tools use
in conjunction with uh great teachers
and as we go through this crisis
together i hope that we can
help share ways that teachers can use
video conferencing and things like that
to
get closer to that that more ideal state
and and also parents and and other folks
um
so you know i'll i'll just uh leave
leave y'all uh there uh and i'll see you
all tomorrow for all you students uh
have a great start start working i think
you're gonna enjoy uh learning and uh
for all of your parents there uh yeah uh
just think about the meditation and and
uh you know we just do one step at a
time and i think everything's gonna be
okay