- And I have an exciting addition
to these live streams to this daily homeroom.
Which is a team member from our group
that partners with schools and districts and press,
to get communications out to parents
and that is Dan.
Dan are you there?
There's Dan!
And he's gonna help us out,
try to answer our questions together.
He's also going to be looking at the message boards
on the various social media channels
that this is being streamed out to.
To try to surface up the questions
that might be useful for as many people as possible.
Just to get everyone up to speed on what this is,
especially if this is your first time,
Khan Academy is a not for profit with a mission
of providing a free world-class education
for anyone, anywhere.
For many years we've been building resources
for students both in the classroom
and outside of the classroom.
Resources for teachers inside the classroom.
For parents so that they could learn
all the core or most of the core academic skills
from starting with Pre-K with Khan Academy Kids,
going into elementary level Mathematics,
English and Language Arts.
We just launched some English and Language Arts content
going into middle school then high school,
Math, Science, Humanities.
And even things like free SAT practice
that we've partnered with the college board.
And when the school closure situation became a reality,
we realized it's our duty to step up even more.
And so we've been trying to create more and more supports
for teachers, parents, and students,
to navigate this crisis.
Last week we released things like daily schedules
for students of different ages.
But think about how can you put all of these resources
from Khan Academy and resources from other players
together into a very coherent schedule
that can be something that bridges us
until schools reopen.
We've been doing webinars with teachers and parents
to get them up and running.
And we've been doing this.
This live stream which we're calling a homeroom.
Which is away for all of us really to feel connected,
answer each other's questions.
It's a way for us to get feedback
and ideas from all of you.
Actually we are now with our three kids at home
and I told my wife some of the ideas
about we just gotta stick through it.
Well one of the home school parents told me that
on our homeroom live stream.
So it's just a way for all of us to feel connected
in a time of social distancing.
A little bit of community interstitial tissue
as people work on their various,
their various resources.
And so with that I encourage you,
students, parents and teachers,
put your questions, your comments, your ideas
on the message board below,
wherever you're seeing this.
Whether it is on Facebook.
Whether it is on YouTube or Twitter.
And we, Dan and I are going to get to 'em
and try to answer them.
And I'll start with a few quick ones.
See this is from Sonya, "Sal will you be making anymore
meditation videos, maybe one for parents and for teachers?
I need these now more than ever.
You could even read the phone book."
Well that's very generous
that you'd be willing to listen to me read the phone book.
I think you would get tired of that.
But no that's a good catalyst and I would love to do that.
For those of y'all who don't know,
I've gotten serious about meditation over the last
couple of years and you know meditation
can evoke different images in a lot of people's minds.
A lot of people view it as a spiritual thing
or a religious thing, but here we're just talking
about it in the most general possible way
which is just a tool kit to help
for us to become aware of our thoughts
to help still our minds.
For coping with some of what many of us
are going through right now.
And you know the first meditations we put out
this is actually only a few weeks ago.
Were student meditations for dealing with things
like stress and procrastination.
Many of y'all know that stress and anxiety
were already at record highs for a lot of
especially high school and college students.
Especially when it comes to test taking.
And so we wanted to help with that.
But this is a great idea Sonya.
I think we'd wanna do that.
Let's see.
We have Leo, says the question, "In a unit test
or course challenge, are they more difficult
than other questions?"
Good question, Leo.
So today, the way Khan Academy works is,
when you do an exercise,
the exercise might ask you to do five questions,
it's actually coming from a pool of 20 or 30 questions.
And so and whether you're doing an exercise,
a unit test, or a quiz,
it's coming from various pools of questions.
When you're doing unit tests
you're doing multiple skills.
So let's say a unit test has 15 questions in,
or 10 questions in it, it will then be sampling
from a pool of 300 questions.
It is possible that you see questions
that you have seen in the skill-focus practice
or the quizzes, or if you're taking a core challenge,
in the unit task, but it's unlikely, in fact,
it's very unlikely that you're getting a complete repeats.
And we've been doing a lot of analytics on this.
We think that the units tasks and core challenge
are actually very indicative
of where you currently are in your journey.
We are exploring things like making specialized unit tests
and core challenges that can only be accessed in that way.
But we're thinking about whether that will,
whether that will actually
be significantly better than what is there,
but that's the current thing that you have.
Questions from Dan, I think Dan's got some stuff
to share with us.
- Hi, thanks, Sal.
So, we have a great question from Shala Karimi,
apologies if I pronounce the name.
"I (mumbles), do you have any recommendations
on easy chapter books?"
- I don't have recommendations on easy chapter books,
but we have published resources
in our daily schedules for students.
So if you go to, you can just go to khanacademy.org,
there's a link to access the daily schedules.
If you're looking for easy chapter books,
I'm assuming that this would be probably
for elementary school aged students
who you wanna get ramped up reading in chapter books.
We have a link to a reading list
from experts on this subject for different grade levels.
And so I would got to that schedule,
click on that reading list on the part
where we talk about reading practice,
and then you're gonna see a list
of great easy chapter books.
One thing I recently found out from another parent
over the weekend, my wife told me about this,
is that it sounds like Audible,
that's the part of Amazon that has books on,
I guess, audio, that they've opened up
their kid section for free.
So I would also look at the kid section on Audible.
I think you'll get some really cool books
that your children can fall asleep to,
or might even be fun to,
everyone sit around the couch and listen to it together.
So those are my two starters to get you started
on the chapter books.
- Sal, I would add the team's actually putting together
a reading list and hopefully,
we're hoping to get that out next week as well,
broken up by age group and everything, so.
- Awesome, yeah, so you can use those resources
we have linked to, obviously,
Audible is audio versions of it, and as Dan just mentioned,
we're gonna make even clearer reading lists by grade level
in literally coming days.
- Question, Sal, from Mathematics C,
and this is really important one.
"Why are getting questions wrong so important?"
- So, getting questions wrong, and obviously,
you don't wanna get a question wrong
if you can get it right,
it's not like that's gonna do you any good.
But, a lot of times when you do anything in life,
whether it's math or free throws, anything,
when you fail, we oftentimes kind of beat up on ourselves,
sometimes get discouraged,
it hits our ego a little bit, our pride.
I'm like, aw, maybe I don't need to do this thing,
and you're oftentimes tempted to disengage.
And the thing to remember is,
that those times that you've failed,
you're kind of discovering your edge.
And it's when you operate in your edge
that you're going to grow the most.
And so there's even been research studies
that when people fail at something,
let's say a cognitive task like a math question,
but then they reflect why they failed, why they got it wrong
and how they could've done it differently,
that's actually when you form (mumbles).
Those of you who are familiar with things
like weightlifting oftentimes you'll hear people say,
oh, you should do some reps until failure.
Failure is a good thing,
it shows that you've had a real workout.
Sometimes failure has been stigmatized
because you're like, oh, if I fail a test,
that's bad, I got an F, or if I got a bad grade,
or if I get questions on a test,
and then it reflects on me.
And that's why at Khan Academy,
I just described how our items are created.
We wanna give you as many chances as possible
to show that you can become proficient in a concept.
And so, it's not that when you do it once,
you got 80%, you got 20% wrong,
all of a sudden you're just labeled 80% student forever.
You can keep going at it.
This idea generally speaking is called mastery learning,
it predates Khan Academy.
Many advocacy studies showing
that it can accelerate folks' learning.
It was just hard to implement, historically,
if you didn't have some tools
that can have almost an infinite number
of questions give you immediate feedback,
and be able to personalize the individual student's pace.
But that's why failure, when you fail on a question
that you can kind of engage in, you should reflect.
That's when your brain growing the most,
and you just have to reflect on why you got it wrong.
And then you're gonna, you're gonna
your growth will only accelerate.
Dan, more questions?
- Questions, yep, we have a question from Rebecca Dullah
who ask, "Will there be more classes
using Disney and Pixar resources?"
They're one of the more popular ones on our site.
- Yes, so for those of you who aren't aware
of what Rebecca is referring to,
we've had a partnership with Disney/Pixar,
I think with launched it about five or six years ago
where the Pixar team in particular said, hey,
wouldn't it be cool if we could help expose students
to how math, storytelling, and other things
are part of the movie creating process.
And so we have this thing on Khan Academy
called Pixar in a Box.
And you can view it as an enrichment,
but you can see how coding, how math, how writing
are essential for creating some of the movies
that we all know and love today.
Rebecca, to answer your question,
so we have Pixar in a Box,
we don't have any plans right now
for any new content like that,
but definitely, keep us posted.
What are the things you like about Pixar in a Box?
What are the things you want more of?
And obviously, we can always consider possibilities.
- So Sal, we have a question, it's pretty relevant
with school closures happening all over the world.
TJ (mumbles) asks, will Khan Academy try
to accommodate other countries' different subjects?
- So, great question, TJ.
The simple answer is, yes, to a certain degree.
I just had a interaction with our team in India.
We actually have a decent size team, by our standards,
about 14 people in India.
And I was asking them how they're responding
to school closures there.
And they've been doing very similar things
to what we've been doing in the U.S.,
publishing schedules, being able to do more supports
for teacher, parents, and students.
And so those are obviously linked into Khan Academy India.
There's also a fully Spanish version of Khan Academy,
es.khanacademy.org that is used
in much of the Spanish speaking world.
I think this is a good push.
Everything is so fluid, for all I know,
the team might have already done it,
but a lot of the resources we have in English
we wanna make sure that they're gonna
be available in Spanish as well.
So that will serve a lot of the Spanish speaking world.
With the same in Brazilian Portuguese,
we have a lot of usage in Brazil.
We have 40 informal translation projects around the world
in other languages.
And so I look forward to coordinating
with all of these, what we call, our language advocates
and see how we can get similar resources
in those geographies.
They're gonna be, in certain languages,
we only have things like math vocalized
in other geographies like in Spanish speaking Latin America,
we have much more localized.
But that's a really good push, TJ.
- Yeah, I would add that our content in Brazil
is also standards aligned, it's aligned
to the BNCC standards.
So we're covered not just in the U.S.
So Sal, we have a great question from Yen Bow who asks,
this is gonna be a question that pops up frequently,
"How can I not be distracted?
What's the optimal amount of time
to study for a given subject?"
- That's a good question, and I'm always asking it myself.
You know, there's an interesting, we had a researcher,
I believe we published the video
that came to our office about a year and a half ago.
And she's pioneered something called the, which I,
she spreads word about what's called the Pomodoro Technique.
It's called that because it's based on a,
it was started by someone using a timer
in the shape of a Pomodoro tomato.
And the Pomodoro Technique is,
is give yourself a fixed amount of time,
let's call it 20 minutes is what a lot of people talk about,
and you get to set a timer, obviously,
it doesn't have to be a timer
in the shape of a Pomodoro tomato.
But a timer, you can do it on your phone,
you can do it on a computer for 20 minutes.
And say, okay, for this 20 minutes,
I am going to do focused work on whatever I need to work on.
And then, after you're done, set the timer again
for 10 or 15 minutes to give yourself a break.
And actually force the break.
Sometimes after 20 minutes you feel like,
oh, I can keep going, I'm in the zone, so to speak.
And obviously, if you're really in the zone,
you don't need to stop,
but by knowing that you have that break,
it actually makes that 20 minutes a lot more focused,
and a lot more productive.
I know sometimes when I have large blocks of time
and it's unstructured, I kind of can easily procrastinate,
find things to delay with.
But then all of a sudden if I say, oh wait, wait,
I have a mtg in 30 minutes, let me finish this right before,
then I can be very focused.
So that's kind of in line of the Pomodoro Technique.
I think on top of that, especially with things
like school closures and social distancing,
the more that you can find a dedicated part of a desk
that you associate with doing work, you only do work there,
ideally, if you have enough space, it's quiet, etc.,
that would be a great addition as well.
But I think it's, make a list of the things you need to do,
have a schedule, we've obviously published some schedules,
adapt them to your needs, and then set that timer
and say, okay, this is my moment, I'm gonna do this.
When you do it, create a little check list.
It'll get a little dopamine hit
with the neurotransmitter that makes you happy
when you get that sense of accomplishment.
Then give yourself that break, that's important.
Especially in times of social distancing,
try to get a little physical exercise.
If you can go outside, go outside.
Go for your walk with the social distance norms.
And then you come back and you'll be
that much more energized to have another 20 minute session.
- So Sal, we have a Math and Science teacher,
Samir Mijar and he asks, "How can Khan Academy
be helpful to me as I teach my students?"
- Well, that's a big question, Samir.
If we were talking pre Covid-19,
and what I'm saying is still true with Covid-19,
and hopefully post Covid-19,
our whole focus was to support teachers like you.
And every teacher we talk to talked about the scenario
that they get students at a certain grade level,
every student has different gaps.
Some of them are ready for the material,
some of them need to remediate the concepts
from before grade level, some of them are ready
to move ahead, and if you're just one teacher
in a classroom of 25, 30, 35 students,
it's very hard to address
the particular needs of each of them.
You know, and at school it's taught
that differentiation is great a practice,
but in practice, it's actually very hard to do it
when you don't have proper supports.
And so, at Khan Academy, one of our propositions
or values to teachers are
that we wanna be that teaching assistant for you.
We want to help you differentiate.
And so the way that this has worked in classrooms
is that for 20% of class time at least,
and we see lot of good advocacy studies around it,
teachers have students working at their own time and pace
on Khan Academy, and as they do so,
teachers get data on what kids are working on,
what are they mastered, what are they not,
who's engaged, who's not?
And that is actual data that teachers can use
to break students out into more focus groups.
If they see a bunch of students having trouble
in negative numbers, okay, let me take those five aside,
the other can continue to work.
Then they go back in and continue working at their own pace.
Let me now work with the kids
who are having trouble with decimals.
So that is the framework that we think could work very well
in Math and Science class.
If you're serving a group of students
who have significant gaps,
many of them are behind grade level.
I've been talking about Tim Vanderberg a lot,
who is a amazing teacher in Hesperia, California.
Ninety percent of his students
show up in his classroom below grade level.
He actually does two things, he simultaneously
works with the students to learn
at their own time and pace at their grade level unit,
and at the same time he tells all of his students,
these are sixth grade students,
to start as early as early-learning
and a third grade math an arithmetic on Khan Academy
and do that at their own time and pace as well
so that they can fill in all these Swiss cheese gaps
that might have accumulated over time.
In this Covid-19 world, everything I just described
is still operable, and those schedules we've published
talk about how it could work for students
of different age groups
as they're now not being able to work from school.
And as a teacher, I think, one of the powers is
you can continue to monitor that data from your home,
see what the students are working on,
where they're strong, where they're not,
what they need help in.
And if you see that, wow, I still have five or six
of my kids who are really struggling with this concept,
then you could schedule a video conference with them.
You could say, hey, why doesn't everyone come on, you know,
if you're using some kind of a learning management system,
say Google Classroom, you can see here's a link to Zoom
for you five, I'm gonna assign this to you five students,
please join me at 2pm Eastern time, making things up,
we're gonna do a focus session on negative numbers
'cause I'm assuming you've already used,
you've looked at the hints on Khan Academy,
you've looked at the videos and you're still having trouble,
I wanna work with you.
And then you could schedule another for other kids.
And then maybe you can have whole class video conferencing
to say, okay, we'll see how everyone's working.
What can I do, get feedback from some students
to unblock them more.
So I think that whole world of things
are things that could be very powerful
in this now distributive remote world
that we find ourselves in.
Other question- - Sal, we have a question.
We have a question from Jaylon McCann,
it's actually one that I wanna know too.
"Do you have all the Black Hole Badges?"
- It's amazing how much people are into Black Hole Badges.
So simple answer is, for those of you
who don't know what a Black Hole Badge is
or don't even know about badging,
we have badges on Khan Academy for various accomplishments.
And the highest badge is a Black Hole Badge.
And we always wanted to make that
for really exceptional things.
Now, one of the things that happened,
this was about seven or eight years ago at Khan Academy,
I would go and answer people's questions
when they asked them in our discussion boards.
And people didn't believe that it was me.
And so we needed some way to give evidence to people
that that account was actually my account.
And so what we did was we gave me a Black Hole Badge
called a This Is Sal Black Hole Badge.
And I think then the engineer who did that,
he just was trying to maybe butter me up
and he gave me a couple of more Black Hole Badges.
And so I am one of the few people
who has a Black Hole Badge.
I believe there are others and there's
in different times in history different ways
to address it, but given how many questions I get
about Black Hole Badges from students,
I do think all of us at Khan Academy
have a duty to you to be clear
about what it takes to achieve one
and how you can get there 'cause it seems like
that is motivating for a lot of folks.
- Great, thanks Sal.
We have a question from another teacher, Charlene Seuss,
Our students at Khan Academy use MAPPERS for Math, love it,
is there a plan for Khan Academy to do this with reading?"
- That's a great question.
So for those who all, who don't know what that is
there's something called the MAP Growth Assessment
that's taken by 20% of grades three through 8th students
in the United States.
And it measures student growth
which is a really powerful thing.
In fact, most of the advocacy studies
that we use to measure Khan Academy advocacy,
we use the MAP Growth Assessment.
They're run by this non-profit called the NWEA.
And they really are the gold standard in growth.
And so the MAPPER was actually a very simple,
it was actually a (mumbles) project
from some of our team members a couple of years ago
to be able to say, hey, if a student is scoring
in this range on the MAP what might be appropriate
for them to work on Khan Academy?
Done since then is we've actually reached out
to the NWEA and we formed a partnership with them.
And what we're rolling out which is a more (mumbles)
where it's actually integrated with the MAP Assessment.
And that's something that we're doing with districts.
And so for any of you teachers out there
what happens is students take the MAP Assessment
and it automatically populates
personalized learning plans on Khan Academy,
we call it the MAP Accelerator on Khan Academy.
Teachers can adjust it.
We really pride ourselves in our ability
to give teachers (mumbles)
'cause they know the students best.
But then students can work at their own time and pace.
And then when they take the next MAP Assessment,
the growth that's measured, we can then start to see,
hopefully, associations between the time on Khan Academy
and the growth on the MAP.
So the MAP acts for placement on Khan Academy
for personalization and then that work on Khan Academy
we can see how much it drives student growth.
And so that is something, this is a new muscle
we're building for Khan Academy.
We're doing it officially with the districts
so if that's something of interest to folks,
I encourage you to talk to your school principal,
the district's superintendent and say, hey,
we should think about doing this MAP Accelerator.
And the reason why it's a district thing is
there's technical things like rostering,
and making sure that the student IDs all work
throughout the district so that it syncs well
with things like the MAP Assessment.
The question is are we going
to go into English and Language Arts?
So the simple answer is, we don't have plans on MAPPERS
to do that, but MAP Accelerator we do have plans
and I hope that that will be available
in the next several years to answer your question.
Other questions.
- So Sal we have one more question
before we have to close out today.
So this one's from Lucas Muldrop.
What do you think Khan Academy's
biggest weakness is right now?
- Our biggest weakness.
So I'm very aware, I could go through a huge list.
I think there's a couple, we definitely have gaps
in certain subjects and grades.
And people on this that I've talked about
we have Khan Academy Kids which is reading,
writing, social (mumbles) learning and math.
The core of math we have from Pre-K
all the way through Calculus and Statistics.
English and Language Arts is a new muscle
that we are building.
And there's only certain aspects of it
that we can tackle with the modalities
that have on Khan Academy.
We have what's called the beta version
which is almost a pre-release version
of our English and Language Arts.
It has reading comprehension passages,
students can answer questions,
but it still doesn't have all
of the mastery of mechanics yet.
Obviously, we haven't figured out ways
to give students writing practice per se
at those grade levels, so that's a gap.
I think we need to figure out middle school Science.
We have a gap there.
I've recommended that a lot of middle school students
can work on high school biology right now
'cause it's very relevant to the world
and I think they have the background to do it,
to start learning about viruses and RNA and DNA.
And I think in high school
we actually have many more subjects,
Math, Science and Humanities.
I think there's more to add.
I think another gap that I think is super important
is we are building tools that the students
can learn at their own time and pace.
We can give data to students, to parents and teachers.
But we don't view that as a substitute
for the live in-person interaction as you heard
from the previous teacher's question, Samir's question.
The ideal is that this is used in conjunction
with a live teacher or a parent,
or if a student is stuck,
they can get motivated to keep engaging,
power through those failures
which are really powerful learning experiences.
Teachers can take 'em into breakout sessions.
And we were seeing a lot of success with that
in physical classrooms during, you know,
what you could call blended environments
where kids are working on Khan Academy
and they're able to get either peer to peer help
or help from their teachers.
I think in this time of school shutdowns
and the Covid-19 situations,
I think that in-person interaction is even more important
because we're all socially distant,
but obviously we can't be in the same room together.
And so that's why in our calendar
and on this live stream rather than saying,
it'd be amazing if teachers and parents and students
could create viewer conferencing sessions
in parallel to the Khan Academy sessions
to be able to do some of that live in-person interaction.
So I think that's a weakness for Khan Academy.
I think it can be complemented with other things.
I think there's many other weakness
I could get into the detail of the product.
Our team here, we have a big list of stuff
that we hope to tackle over the next few years.
And actually that's a good segue
for me to just kind of close out.
In my closeout, first of all, thanks everyone
for joining, as I said, in all of our live streams.
I think this is now the 6th, 7th one
that we've been doing.
I hope you're finding this useful.
I actually find this incredibly satisfying
to stay connected with folks
in a world where we are socially distanced
and if this can help people feel more connected,
that's a huge, huge thing.
And we are doing everything on our side
that's possible to be able to step up to this crisis.
We're seeing our server cap... our load had up more than 2X.
So things like our costs are going up,
and I just wanna remind everyone
we are a not for profit organization,
we are funded through philanthropic donations.
Many of the gaps, the weaknesses we just talked about
on Khan Academy, these are things we would love to fill,
but we need resources to do it.
We need donations from folks across the board
to make this a possibility.
We've gotten incredible support
from some corporate partners.
If any of you are parents working, distribute it,
try to get your corporations involved with us.
Folks, Bank of America was the first
to step up last weekend followed closely by AT&T,
Google.org, and then most recently,
well I'll announce it tomorrow.
I'm not sure if it's public yet.
But that's just kind of a, that's helping a lot
and we need more corporations.
But our costs, our servers were millions of dollars
before the crisis and now they're going to be double that.
On the order of it was $6,000,000 a year
on just server costs alone much less
we have a team of 200 folks
who are helping develop the content, writing the software,
partnering with school districts, etc. etc.
So our costs are going up and this crisis
and we need your help.
We're running a significant deficit
that we're not sure how long we can do it.
So anyway, thanks everyone for being a part to this.
I will also close out with stay safe,
stay socially distanced, I'm gonna work
on those meditation videos
'cause I think the most important thing is
take care of yourself right now and then
that's going to put you in a position where you can start
thinking about how you can take of others.
Thank you so much, thanks for joining.