Ask me anything with Sal Khan: April 15 | Homeroom with Sal

Welcome to the Khan Academy daily homeroom. This is a way that we're trying to stay in touch and help support parents, teachers, and students as we go through this school closure situation. Many of y'all know Khan Academy; we're a not-for-profit with a mission of providing a free, world-class education for anyone, anywhere. We could have never predicted the scenario we're now in—this very suboptimal situation.

But over the last 10 years or so, we've been building resources that can really help you as a student, a parent, or a teacher bridge and make sure that everyone can keep learning through this crisis. I do want to remind folks that we are not-for-profit. We are funded by philanthropic donations from folks like yourself. So if you're in a position to do so, please think about donating to Khan Academy. You can see some links on this screen right over here.

I do want to give a special shout-out to several core supporters. We were running at a deficit even before this crisis started, and now our usage is about two hundred fifty percent of normal. So you could imagine our budget situation has gotten a little bit more serious. Special thanks to Bank of America, which was really the first to step up that first weekend when the school closures were happening. We were seeing that traffic spike, followed closely by AT&T, Google.org, and Novartis. So whether you're an individual or someone who represents a corporation, we still need help. We're still running at a deficit, and we have a lot of ideas of what we would like to do to support more folks through this crisis, but we are somewhat gated by resources at the moment.

Now, the fun of this session is that we want to make it as interactive as possible. So whatever social media you're watching this on, whether it's Facebook, YouTube, or someplace else, we're always adding new things to it. Feel free to ask questions on the discussion board. This is a forum—very informal. Literally, ask anything. I would like to be surprised; no question will offend us. It's fun to discuss not just how Khan Academy resources might be used or how we might navigate this crisis or implications in education. These are all very interesting topics, but I'm also happy to answer questions about other things that are interesting to you. Or maybe sometimes we want to talk about things other than COVID right now, but we can obviously talk about that as well.

I have team members on Khan Academy, and Dan, who will join us and is standing right over there, will help myself and Dan. Some of our team members are going to be looking at the comments as they come in, so we will answer any questions that you might have. So, let's see, we have a few announcements that we've been making over the last couple of days. One of them is we've released these schedules about three or four weeks ago. That first weekend when the closures were happening, we got a lot of feedback from parents, students, and teachers that they would want even more detailed resources.

So, above and beyond the live streams, the schedules, and the webinars we're running, we released learning plans for students to keep them learning through the summer—not just through the end of the school year but also leveraging some for time of learning. If you go to our main COVID response center, you can see the URLs on the screen. You will see these new learning plans, depending on whether you're in third grade, fourth grade, fifth grade, all the way up through algebra, algebra two, and geometry. They include week-by-week goals for getting mastery on Khan Academy. So I highly encourage folks to check that out and keep learning over the break.

Now, we are trying to get some questions. One from YouTube: Anuj Bhagwan says, "Hey Sal, what motivates you to always push the limits?" Well, I'm always pushing the limits, but I think the things that Khan Academy is working on and our mission and what we aspire to do—there's urgency to it. Even before this COVID crisis, you have hundreds of millions of students around the world, arguably billions, who have access to some form of schooling but could use more support.

You have millions of teachers around the world who know that they want to support their students in better ways, but it's difficult if you're a teacher in a classroom of 30 students, and every student has their own different learning needs, learning at a different pace. They need tools to be able to support them. All of these things—how do you allow more people to have access to world-class resources? How do you create better tools for teachers? How do you connect that to opportunities that exist in the real world?

Without higher education, internships, or jobs, those were always important, and they've just now become a lot more important because of this COVID crisis. I speak for myself, and I speak for a lot of the team members and a lot of the folks supporting Khan Academy. There's an urgency here that, you know, I always think about—for every Albert Einstein we know about or every Marie Curie we know about—how many others were never able to fulfill their potential? And that's a shame.

Even on an individual level, that they could have maybe done so much more is also a shame for humanity because that person could have found the cure for a disease or could have found a way to solve a major issue in our society. I suspect that for every Albert or Marie Curie we discover historically, there's probably been 50 or 100 that we don't discover—that never got the educational opportunities, never got to tap into their potential.

If Khan Academy can be part of the solution to increase by an order of magnitude, by a factor of 10, the number that we can discover—not just those special circumstances like an Albert Einstein, but the whole distribution—so more people can participate in the economy. We're definitely getting into a world with automation where you need higher-level skills to participate. We know what's happening with robotics and computing; they're going to be able to do a lot of the skills that labor has historically done.

As we get more productive, we have two choices: we either have to get all of humanity to be able to participate in the knowledge economy, and I hope Khan Academy could play a role there, or we're going to have tougher times. Obviously, what's going on economically now makes that even clearer.

Let's see, other questions that I'm getting. I'm having a bit of trouble with my regular mouse right now, so please bear with me a little bit. There's a Facebook question from Neon Khan asking, "Sal, can you speak Bengali for me please?" Any of my Bengali family members will cringe if I start to speak Bengali!

"Can through I mean volta party on my accent kuba ba GA h AR Drone ami on ik bangla bully knock into you know I mean Chester Corey." So for those of you who do not know Bengali, I just said I can speak Bengali. I can get by, but my accent is really bad! But I try. I'm sorry; I think I just made about 400 million Bengali speakers around the world cringe, but I guess you know that Neon asked for that!

From YouTube, Katherine Pierce asks, "What's coming to Khan Academy next?" There's a lot going on at Khan Academy; some of which we've talked about and some of which we're trying to accelerate because of this COVID crisis. English and language arts—many of y'all are familiar—we just launched what's known as a beta version. In the software world, beta is like, it's not even quite a first version; it's a version that you put out there to start to learn about how it's used and what's good about it—what's not.

We know it's not a perfect version. A lot of the modalities on Khan Academy were first made for math and sciences, and so you could imagine when we try to put reading comprehension into that same modality, sometimes it's a little awkward. Ideally, in reading comprehension, it's not just a question and a passage, and then a question, and then another passage and a question. You want a passage and then four or five questions like we do in our SAT practice.

We're working on hopefully, over the next many months, improving things like that. We are continuing to partner with districts, and we might be accelerating that over the course of this crisis because more and more districts are thinking about how do they keep students learning during times of school closures. That's on top of the need that districts have always recognized—they administer standardized tests, and they see that some students are ready for grade-level work, some students have a lot of gaps in their knowledge, and some students are ready to move ahead.

But they've historically not had a good way of differentiating, and tools like Khan Academy could be helpful there. We are working with districts to provide things like district dashboards and rostering with them. You will be seeing our chemistry content getting significantly fleshed out. We are constantly improving our math content. We are hoping to add even more subjects. We're talking to philanthropists about, "Wouldn't it be great if we could fund middle school science?" So, that's pure philanthropist territory. Please contact us if you're interested in funding things like that.

Longer term, we're thinking about simple ways to help place and diagnose folks on Khan Academy. Right now, we have a lot of the resources that you can start as early as pre-K with Khan Academy Kids. You can see Cody right behind me gazing over my shoulder, but we have most of the content from pre-K all the way through elementary, middle, and high school for sure in math and science, but increasingly in the humanities and English and language arts.

Because there's so much content, sometimes folks like to know where to start and what to do if they are in a certain grade but already know some of the material. We've been putting out material during this crisis about how to use our mass for your mechanics—if you think you already know some of sixth grade, go take the course challenge. When you start seeing diminishing returns there, go take the unit test, etc., etc. We want to make it more accessible and help people understand where they can go and what types of courses we can curate for those different cases.

The simple answer is we just want to add a lot of content—a lot more content. We want to make it a lot easier to use, to find what you need to work on, and we want it to be a lot more engaging. We have some things; I hope we can get this for back-to-school, but we definitely have some team members who are thinking about how to make the navigation on the site a lot easier.

We definitely have our work cut out a lot there because we're literally trying to cover 13 years of all of the core academic subjects and build tools for teachers and support classrooms simultaneously. We have 59 translation projects around the world, so we are also thinking about how we can support other geographies—in particular places like Brazil, India, and Peru where we actually have team members who are helping drive Khan Academy's mission in those geographies.

I’m sure I’m missing things, but that's some of what Khan Academy has going forward. Hey Sal, Adnan Ibis asks from YouTube, "What's one thing you want to master while being at home?" One thing I want to master while being at home? I think I'm trying to master balancing life and work. I don't know if that's—you wanted a meta-level answer like that, but you could imagine now with school closures. My kids are home, and I said at other live streams, I think all of us were especially, you know, in some group—my job at Khan Academy has gotten busier.

There's more to do. To the previous question, I feel more urgency than ever to try to get some of this stuff done that we've been talking about for a very long time. But if your five-year-old is screaming or wants your attention, it's a tough tension. I don't feel sorry for myself because I know there are millions of parents around the world that are going through at least what I'm going through—probably far worse.

I have a lot of supports at home—my wife, my mother-in-law—we've all been trying to tag-team this, and frankly, I've been able to lean on them more, even though my wife has a full-time job as well. But because of all the Khan Academy thing picking up, I think mastering that balance is something that a lot of parents are struggling with right now. One thing that's clicked in my head recently is, as much urgency as I feel toward my job and as much urgency as I feel toward work, you know, those are moments you don't want to let go of—when your eight-year-old asks for help or she wants to show something that she made or has a question for you because that time in their childhood goes by very fast.

I'm trying to just make sure that I can enjoy that and give them the time they need while also making sure that Khan Academy is able to continue to support our many, many, many people right now. That's, yeah, I think that's the biggest thing. You know, I've had a lifelong quest to— I guess you'd call it a fitness quest. There's a lot of things on the diet and nutritional side that I've been trying to master, but sometimes I fall off the wagon.

From YouTube, Mach Par asks, "Did you expect Khan Academy to be this successful?" I got a, you know, when I was a kid, and maybe not even so much a kid, even when I was in my 20s, and Khan Academy was—you know, I was tutoring my cousins. There’s definitely a part of me—and it’s still there—that I daydream a lot, and I definitely would have these moments where I’m like, “Hey, this thing that I’m tutoring my cousins and if I make tools for them, maybe it scales. If it's useful for them, maybe it could be useful for millions or billions of people one day.”

Wouldn't it be cool if one day there was a new type of institution where anyone on the planet had access to learning? Yeah, I've cited being inspired by books like Isaac Asimov's Foundation series where, in that book, a galactic civilization creates a foundation to shorten a thousands of year galactic dark ages. I remember always being inspired by saying, “Yeah, knowledge is the thing that can most support society and keep us from, I guess, falling apart and devolving so to speak.”

I've always thought those kind of—I guess you could say grand thoughts—but then usually after I let myself go on one of those visions for five or ten minutes, I settle back down and be realistic. I just put one foot in front of the other, just do the next—you know, the next right thing, to quote Frozen 2, and move from there. So I would kind of then just get very, very practical.

I could have never imagined that when I was tutoring my cousins 13, 14 years ago or when I quit my day job about 10 or 11 years ago that it would have truly evolved as fast as it has. But I always did keep that somewhat delusional thing in the back of my mind of like, “Well, maybe this could be like a Smithsonian or a great university or even operate to scale a hundred or a thousand times larger than that.”

Now that Khan Academy is of a larger scale, and you know what this COVID crisis is playing a—I guess you could say an institutional role here for millions of folks, tens of millions of folks around the world, I'm a little less bashful speaking openly about these aspirations of it becoming a multi-generational institution that can empower billions of folks over time.

I still try to balance and I think, like, you know, that's the interesting thing about life; you're always trying to balance making sure you’re putting one leg in front of the other and not getting too far ahead of yourself and staying humble. Thankfully with having big goals, big visions, and not being afraid to, you know, to use a baseball analogy, swing for the fences. That’s always been my hope for Khan Academy, but, you know, I gotta say, even today, as far as Khan Academy has gone, my stress level can sometimes be pretty high because I'm like, “We can't blow it now! We have to go much further to empower so many more.”

Today, more questions? Yes, so from YouTube, Ashutosh Tiwari asks, "Hi, so many people trying to start a YouTube channel and make tutorials just like you, especially during this crisis, but not everybody is Salman Khan. What advice would you give for someone?" Actually, this question, Sad, we also get from a lot of teachers who are having to do remote teaching right now, and they would love your advice in terms of just how to present online.

You know, my number one advice—a lot of times folks end up focusing on the optics, and you know, does it look professional versus, I would say, the authenticity and the human element of it. My number one advice to anyone making content, whether they're doing it kinda in iconic, a de mie style with a pen tablet or they're just doing a video like this—is be yourself. Be you. Laugh at yourself; don’t be afraid to make mistakes—be as authentic as possible.

Human beings can know when someone else is not themselves, when they're not being authentic, when they're reading a script, and you might be reading a script for a very good reason. You want to get all your language precise, et cetera, et cetera, but I think there's a nice balance. You want to have the right vocabulary; you want to get your language right. But there's something powerful about the learner seeing that you are working it through them—you’re truly thinking through it with them.

I think another point of advice is to view—you know, I've heard from some teachers it’s hard to teach to the screen because you might be used to other folks in the room, and this is where, you know, maybe my daydreaming imagination as has been an asset. I imagine when I make content I imagine that I'm talking to my cousins or my cousins at a certain age or my family members. I think it creates a connection, and I think even though we are using technology and I’m making the content now, and it might be used by thousands of people at another time, they’ll feel that connection in it.

Another thing I’d say is to try to really focus on the connections in concepts. Too many times, not just in math but pretty much in every subject, concepts are taught in isolation. Even a little comment, a little connection to like, “Well, yeah, this is why plastics are stretchy.” I actually just did a video on amorphous solids, so that's why it's front of mind for me.

Or, you know, that's why—I mean, you know, actually one of the fun things that I didn't include in my video is why eggs become solid when you heat it up, and that's because the proteins denature. What would be these bound proteins, these globular proteins— they become these kind of stringy things, and they all get kind of entangled with each other. That's why the egg white gets, it kind of becomes an amorphous solid, so to speak.

But if you could connect things to the real world, if you could connect things to what people knew before—you know, in Khan Academy videos, you’ll often hear me say, “Hey, you know, this might look like another concept, but it really is just an extension of completing the square. The quadratic formula is just completing the square for any quadratic.” Or, “The quotient rule in calculus really is just the product and the chain rules combined.”

I think the more that you can connect things to what learners already know—and there’s a lot of learning science behind that as well—that people like to be grounded in what they already know, and most of knowledge is that way. It is connected to other things. That’s my best advice, and have fun doing it. If you don't have fun making the content, the person listening to the content is not going to have fun. And if you're not passionate about the content and excited about it, it's going to be hard for the other person to be excited about it.

One thing I tell myself and everyone at Khan Academy who makes content, not just video content, actually even exercises and things like articles, is if you're not excited about it, if you don't feel the energy, if you don't see the beauty in the concept, it's going to be very hard for the student to feel that same thing. We want them to feel that, and the reality is pretty much every concept has a beauty to it, has an intuitive enough stop to it, has a connection to other things.

Let's see, there's an interesting one from Angel Chopra from YouTube: "Are there any positives that resulted or maybe might result from the coronavirus epidemic?" Well, as you could imagine as we’re in the midst of it, it’s hard to see sometimes the silver linings. It’s easy to point to a lot of things that are stressful or not so great about the crisis.

If I were to say some of the positives or the silver linings, you know, I talked earlier about spending time with—I think a lot of us, if we're lucky enough to be with our families right now, this is time that it's in everyday life. When we're doing the daily grind, so to speak, it's easy to take family for granted. It’s easy to take friends for granted. Now, whether it’s in person, I’m able to spend more time with my kids, with my wife—this is time we’ll never forget and we’ll never get back.

So I think there's something powerful there. I think this crisis has—there’s something about it that makes us want to reach out to our family members and be more connected with them. You know, I’ve talked on this livestream about my mom; she lives alone in New Orleans right now, which is having a very high per capita incident of COVID.

My mom, as you could imagine, is in that high-risk group. Just my worry for her physical health and frankly her mental health because she’s living by herself now—I’ve told myself, “Sal, you can’t just say, ‘Hey, I need to finish this task at work, and I’ll call my mom tomorrow.’” You’ve got to call your mom every day and have a conversation with her.

It's been great I've been doing it because of the crisis, but I’ve kind of realized that I should be doing this all the time—that it shouldn’t just be during the crisis. We’re having good conversations, even though we're 2,000 miles apart—better conversations, frankly, than when I’d call every three days or we’d only chat once a week, so I think that’s been important.

I've been connecting with friends and family that I haven’t talked to for five, ten years on Zoom and Google Hangouts. Those are positives. I think on the education side—obviously, school closures are very suboptimal—but I’m hoping that some of the tools that we might accelerate in Khan Academy and others might accelerate will exist after.

That’s a silver lining. I'm hoping that some of the habits, some of the patterns that students, teachers, and parents are forming during the crisis will have lasting benefits. If you, as a student, are learning, “Hey, I can structure my day; I can keep learning; I can do that during the summers; I can do that when I'm an adult— even after I’ve graduated from high school or college,” those are super useful skills.

Arguably the most important skills that can last you an entire lifetime. We were just talking about teachers and other folks making lessons online to help their students—that’s great! That’s going to have lasting implications beyond the crisis. Now that folks realize how important online access at home is, we’re seeing a lot of telecom companies, philanthropists—Ray and Barbara Dahlia, philanthropists we know who’ve been longtime supporters of Khan Academy—they’ve just distributed 60,000 laptops in Connecticut to low-income high school students.

We’re seeing school districts like Las Vegas/Clark County—we had Dr. Jarquin last week talking about how they are distributing laptops and working with local cable companies to get Wi-Fi access or get online access. These are things that I hope could lay a groundwork that's permanent. Even once we’re past this crisis, people will have that access, which is empowering on so many levels.

I think just the cracks that we’re seeing in our society—large numbers of people, due to no fault of their own, aren’t able to work now because they were working at a restaurant or a travel agency or an airline—all of these things. Even once we get through the worst of the stay-in-place orders, it’s unlikely that those industries are going to come back fully.

We talked about that last week with Bill Gates III. I think that’s making all of us recognize—and governments recognize—that, "Hey, we probably do need supports for these folks." Because it’s through no fault of their own. In order to protect public safety, they’re suffering, and they need some way to support their families.

So, regards to where you’re on the political spectrum, I think it’s making us all realize, “Hey, there are some supports that folks need.” All of these types of things as we go through the crisis will hopefully have some positive lasting implications. We could think of more; feel free to add any that you could think of on the message boards. We're happy to take a look at it.

From Facebook, Samar Abed Rabbo says, "For college students, do you think that we should move to more critical thinking tests that are open book since the works have changed with so much access to information?" Some are, "I think yes and no." There are some times of—you'll hear this and you'll actually hear this commonly in education circles—“Oh, people can Google everything now, why should people know so much?”

“Why should people have facts or content knowledge that they can Google, that stuff, and then they can just work on the projects or the applied, the critical thinking parts of it?” Learning science actually tells us—I'm actually reading a book right now about this kind of survey of learning science; something that we take very seriously at Khan Academy.

The reality is that factual knowledge, that content knowledge—whether it’s at a kind of a factual level or at a conceptual level—is super valuable for forming that critical thinking. I think there’s always going to be a very important place for having that core knowledge, and it will allow you to build more connections.

If you have that some of that core knowledge, you don’t have to apply as much of your cognitive load when you have to do more complex tasks. You know, one way to think about it is, you know, you're playing basketball. Or, so let’s say you’re learning a new sport—let’s say you’ve never played basketball before. You can focus on the rules of the game and maybe movements that are new to you like dribbling.

But you don’t have to think about things like walking or jumping. Those are things you know how to do already because they’re so automatic. There’s analogs in the learning world. There, you know, in math something like your core multiplication tables—of course, it’s important to understand what multiplication really is or how it can be represented.

But if when you’re doing algebra, you have to sit and think “Wait, is nine times six— Is it 54, is it 56?” that’s going to make it very hard for you to engage in algebra. If you are trying to think critically about an economic—if we talk about the situation right now. If you’re trying to think about, “Well, what could be the economic implications of this COVID crisis?”

If you don’t already in the back of your mind have context of saying: “Okay, well we’ve gone through things like this before. You have the Great Depression, which was in the 1930s. And then, okay, what was the historical context there? How did we get out of it? Well, there was World War II, there was the New Deal.” You could say, “Well, how much did each of those things contribute?”

If you don’t have some of that knowledge base there, it’s very hard to think critically about new situations. So I’m a big proponent of—and a lot of what we try to do at Khan Academy is give you practice not just at the— the most basic level of facts, but at the conceptual level and at an understanding and comprehension level, so that you build that fluency.

So you can go higher and higher up that—you know, it's often known as Bloom’s cognitive taxonomy of skills. So you can go higher and higher on that. So, I don’t think it’s an either/or; I think there’s actually a value to having some of that core, that core knowledge.

So there’s a question from Pattie Prentiss on Facebook: "Hi, I’m a college student. Will the pandemic affect availability of classes offered in the future? I heard that colleges and universities will experience fewer students because of the pandemic."

Pattie, it’s a fascinating question. I don’t think—I definitely am not an expert here, and I have been talking to some university administrators and people who are familiar, and I don’t think anyone really knows how all of this will settle, as you could imagine. We hope that we're through the worst of the stay-at-home orders and school closures.

As we go back to school and hopefully the colleges and universities, like K through 12, will be able to open back up. But you could imagine that if the virus starts going exponential again and starts picking back up, it might have to be closed down again. So, it is going to be a hard time for universities.

There is a situation where a lot of students are saying, “Hey, well, if the university is going virtual, maybe I can just stay virtual.” Some of that might happen. There are things like virtual universities, MOOCs, and things like that. You know, personally, I found a lot of value in the physical experience of university. That’s where I met my wife, where I met some of my best friends.

I talked about that I connect with on a regular basis—some of whom I even helped start Khan Academy and other things. I think college is really powerful from a social connection and building yourself in many dimensions. But I think this crisis does make us ask questions of like, “Well, what aspects are nice to have, and what aspects are must-haves?”

There’s a resourcing question; college is increasingly expensive. So are there pathways that are more flexible that can focus on the must-haves, and that could, you know, leave students with a lot less debt? When we say we want—we're not-for-profit with the mission of a free world-class education for anyone, anywhere, that's because we don’t think someone’s education should hold back their ability to be empowered in the world.

But we know far too many people—and I know people even in my own family—who the debt they’ve incurred has been, you know, somewhat debilitating actually for their ability to participate in society because of college. So, we’ll see how all of this plays out.

Well, anyway, these were great questions. We will continue this. We’re here every day at 12 p.m. Pacific, 3 p.m. Eastern in the US, or whatever times when y’all are in Europe, you can figure it out. It’s a place for us to just stay connected, answer questions about education, the economy, viruses. We’re going to have—we have an exciting slate of guests; we're probably going to have two or three guests a week that are interesting and have expertise in different areas.

I’ll just remind everyone: stay safe, stay healthy. If you’re in a position to do so, please think about donating to Khan Academy. We need the help, especially if we’re able to support more folks through this crisis. Thank you.