Bill: Well, first went the record stores
then crowds thinned down at the library
and now you have to wonder if physical classrooms
could become another casualty of the Internet age.
Well if Khan Academy is any indication, the old
schoolhouse will survive but the way kids spend
their time inside it could change forever.
So why are millions logging on to get lessons from one man?
Could your kids benefit?
My co-anchor, Terry Moran went to find out.
(school bell rings)
Terry: No matter how old you are,
you can probably still remember what the bell
sounded like at your school.
You can still remember pushing your way through the
hallways to your next class or the minute hand on
the clock in your math class that you swore ran
slower than every other clock in the building, but that was then.
This is now.
Khan: 8 meters and the same thing along the side.
Terry: Welcome to the Khan Academy, online learning
on steroids, a one world schoolhouse that is
skyrocketing in popularity, sparking controversy and
fundamentally challenging the very notion
of education in the 21st century.
Khan: What we're talking right now is the learning side.
How can we democratize the information, the
knowledge, so that anyone can get to whatever level
they want to.
Terry: Sal Khan founded the Khan Academy kind of
by accident, more on that in a minute.
First, the sheer scale of this thing.
Seven million students around the world are
attending the Khan Academy online every month
and that number is growing by 400% per year.
The thousands of lessons, everything from Algebra
to Medieval History to the Fiscal Cliff, they've been
viewed more than 200 million times and all for free.
Terry: Are you out to dismantle our educational system?
Khan: I'm not an education radical.
A lot of what I'm doing and we're doing is really
bringing back very, very old ideas that have been
proven, but somehow got lost in the fray?
Terry: Sal Khan is an unlikely education reformer.
He's a former hedge fund analyst, MIT undergrad,
Harvard MBA, who just really stumbled
upon his revolution when he tried to help a young
cousin with her algebra homework back in 2004.
Khan: I started tutoring her remotely. I was in Boston,
she was in New Orleans and after that I started
tutoring other family members and eventually
put the stuff on YouTube.
Terry: In a few weeks, Khan noticed that the "stuff"
that he was making for his relatives was going viral.
The requests from strangers for more, more, more.
Khan: Antibiotics.
Terry: Visually, they aren't the kind of videos you'd
expect to go viral. They're more of a virtual blackboard,
but they work and education reformers all over the
world have noticed, including some heavy hitters.
Bill: There's a new website that I've just been using,
with my kids recently called Khan Academy, K-H-A-N,
just one guy doing some unbelievable 15-minute tutorials.
Terry: Bill Gates did more than look at the Khan
Academy videos. He helped to bankroll the project.
So in 2009, Khan finally quit his day job and
partnered with the Gates Foundation and Google to
form the Khan Academy.
Here's how it works.
Students watch the videos and then work on a
problem set based on the lesson on the website.
If you pass, you move onto the next lesson.
If it looks like you don't understand a concept,
the site takes you back through what you are missing.
The goal is not to replace the traditional classroom.
The goal is to liberate.
Khan: The idea of students being grouped in
age base co-horts and then going at a set pace,
this is the school that we all kind of grew up in,
this is actually not the way students were educated
for most of history.
Terry: Instead, Khan and his allies see classrooms
thrumming with creative activity, spurred by the fact that
kids will have already engaged the subject matter
through the online lessons.
What does your ideal classroom look like?
Khan: It won't be a bunch of chairs all positioned
looking at someone in the front of the classroom.
It'll be a much more collaborative space.
It's not one pace fits all anymore and the teacher
will be doing focus interventions with them.
They'll be mentoring them. They'll be inspiring them.
They won't be lecturing at them.
Terry: About 25-30 schools, most of them based
around Silicon Valley have started implementing
the Khan Academy as a pilot program, exploring how
it might change teaching and learning.
There are plenty of critics, but one big group of supporters.
Khan: The single biggest thing that happened and
it wasn't obvious to us at first, the teachers and the
principal told us, is that the students started to take
ownership of their learning.
They started to not say, "Hey, I'm passive."
"Tell me what to do next."
They started to say, "These are my goals."
"I'm going to seek out the information."
"Teacher, you're my coach. You're my mentor. Help me do it."
Terry: They're already online, maybe at least in some
ways that's where their classrooms can be, too.
Bill: And Khan's book, The One World Schoolhouse,
is in stores now. Thanks to Terry.