Ask me anything with Sal Khan: March 23 | Homeroom with Sal
And I have an exciting addition to these live streams to this daily homeroom, which is their team member from our group that partners with schools and districts and tries 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 can learn all the core, most of their core academic skills.
Starting with pre-k with Khan Academy Kids, going into elementary level mathematics, English, and language arts. We just launched some English 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.
When the school closure situation became a reality, we realized that we had our duty to step up even more. 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. Think about how we can 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 livestream which we're calling a homeroom. This is a way for all of us really to feel connected and to each other's questions. It's a way for us to get feedback and ideas from all of you. You know, we are now with our three kids, and I told my wife some of the ideas that we discussed through it when one of the homeschooling parents told me that on our homeroom livestream.
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 resources. And so with that, I encourage you students, parents, and teachers to 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. Dan and I are going to get to them and try to answer them.
I'll start with a few quick ones. I see this from Sonia: "SAB, will you be making any more meditation videos? Maybe one for parents and for teachers? I need these now more than ever."
You can even read the phone book! I just...
Well, that's very—that's very generous that you would like me, that you'd be willing to listen to me read the phone book. I think you would get tired of that, but know 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.
Meditation can evoke different images in a lot of people's minds. Some people view it as a spiritual thing or a religious thing. But, you know, here, just talking about it in the most general possible way, which is just a toolkit to help for us to become aware of our thoughts, to help 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 were actually only a few weeks ago. They were around student meditations for dealing with things like stress and procrastination. Many of you know that stress, anxiety, we're already at record highs for a lot of especially high school and college students, and so especially when it comes to test-taking.
We wanted to help with that, but this is a great idea. So I think we want to do that. Let's see. We have—we have Leo who says, "The questions in a unit test or course challenge, are they more difficult than other questions?"
It's a 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, whether you're doing an exercise, a unit test, or 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 order to take ten questions in it, it will then be sampling from a pool of 300 questions. So it is possible that you see questions that you have seen in the skill-focused practice or the quizzes or if you're taking a core challenge in the unit test, but it's unlikely—in fact, it's very unlikely—they're doing complete repeats.
We've been doing a lot of analytics on this. We think that the unit test and core challenge are actually very indicative of where you currently are in your learning. We are exploring things like making specialized unit tests and course challenges that can only be accessed in that way, but we're thinking about 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.
I think so. Um, so we have a great question from Sharla Karimi. Apologies if I pronounced the name wrong. "I wanted any recommendation 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 know, you could just go to Khan Academy.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-age students who you want to get ramped up reading in chapter books.
We have a link to a reading list from some experts on this subject for different grade levels, and so I would go to that schedule, click on that reading list on the part where we talk about reading practice, and then you're going to see a list of great, great easy chapter books.
One thing I read—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 "M" part of Amazon that has books on, I guess, audio—that they've opened up their kids section for free. So I would also look at the kids' section on Audible. I think you'll get some really good books that your children can listen 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. Sally, Sally, Sally. I would add that the team is actually putting together a reading list, and hopefully we're hoping to get that out next week as well. It's broken up by age group and everything, so awesome.
Yes, so you can use those resources. We've 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 II, and this is a really important one: "Why are getting questions wrong so important?"
So getting questions wrong—and obviously, you don't want to get a question wrong if you can get it right; it's not like that's gonna do any good. But you know, a lot of times when you do anything in life, whether it's math or free-throws or anything, when you fail, we oftentimes kind of beat up on ourselves, sometimes get discouraged. It hits our ego a little bit, our pride, and it's like 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. 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 on why they failed, why they got it wrong, and how they could have done it differently, that's actually when you form growth.
If those of you 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 wrong on a test, then it reflects on me."
And that's why at Khan Academy, you know, I just described how our items are created. We want to 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 an 80% student forever. You can keep going at it.
This idea, generally speaking, is called mastery learning. It predates Khan Academy, with many efficacy 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 to individual students' pace.
But that's why failure—when you fail on a question that you can kind of engage in—that's something you should reflect on. That's where your brain might be going the most, and you just have to reflect on why you got it wrong, and then your growth will only accelerate.
Dan, more questions?
Questions? Yep! We have a question from Rebecca Doula who asks, "Will there be more classes using Disney and Pixar resources? They're one of the more popular ones on our site."
Yeah, 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 we launched it about five or six years ago where the Pixar team in particular said, "Hey, would 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. 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 on 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 we have a question—it’s pretty relevant with school closures happening all over the world. TJ can we ask, "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 an interaction with our team in India. We have a decent-sized team, by our standards, about 14 people in India. And I was asking them how they’re responding to the 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 teachers, parents, and students.
And so those are obviously linked into Khan Academy India. There's also a fully Spanish version of Khan Academy, yes: khanacademy.org, that is used in much of the Spanish-speaking world. I think this is a good push, and you know everything is so fluent. For all I know, the team might have already done it, but a lot of the resources we have in English, we want to make sure that they're going to be available in Spanish as well, to serve a lot of the Spanish-speaking world.
The same in Brazilian Portuguese. We have a lot of usage in Brazil, and 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 going to be—in certain languages, we only have things like math localized 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 BMCC standards, so we're covered not just in the U.S.
So now we have a great question from Yen Bo, who asked—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, we published the video that came to our office about a year and a half ago, and she's pioneered something called the "Pomodoro Technique." It's called that because it's based on the—it was started by someone using a timer that had the shape of a Pomodoro (tomato).
The Pomodoro Technique is, give yourself a fixed amount of time—let's call it 20 minutes is what a lot of people talk about—and you learn at a time. Or, obviously, it doesn't have to be a timer in the shape of a Pomodoro tomato, but a timer could do it on your phone, and you could do it on a computer for 20 minutes.
It's okay for this 20 minutes; I'm 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 could keep going!" I mean, 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 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 meeting in 30 minutes! Let me finish this right before I get in!" then I can be very focused.
So that's kind of in line with 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, you know, 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, you know, 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 at that time and say, "Okay, this is my moment; I'm gonna do this." When you do it, create a little checklist; there's 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, and especially in times of social distancing, try to get a little physical exercise if you can. Go outside, go for a walk with the social distance norms. So that, and then when you come back, you'll be that much more energized to have another 20-minute session.
So we have a math and science teacher, Samir Tujar, and he asked, "How can Khan Academy be helpful to me as I teach my students?"
Well, that's a big question, Samir. You know, if we were talking pre-COVID-19, 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 you know, every teacher we talked to talks 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 some concepts from before grade level; some of them are ready to move ahead.
If you're just one teacher in a classroom of 25, 30, or 35 students, it's very hard to address the particular needs of each of them. You know, in ed school, it's taught that differentiation is a great 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 is that we want to be that teaching assistant for you. We want to help you differentiate. And so the way this has worked in classrooms is that for 20% of class time at least—and we see a lot of good efficacy studies around it—teachers have students working at their own time and pace on Khan Academy.
As they do so, teachers get data on what kids are working on, what they’ve mastered, what they're not, who's engaged, who's not, and then that is actionable data that teachers can use to break students out into more focused groups. If they see a bunch of students having trouble with negative numbers, okay, let me take those five aside—the others can continue to work—then they go back in and continue working at their own pace.
Let me not work with the kids who are having trouble with decimals. So that is the framework that we think can 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 Vandenburg—a lot—who is an amazing teacher in history in California, and 90% 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 the 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 do third-grade math and arithmetic on Khan Academy and do that at their own time and pace as well, so that they can fill in all of these Swiss cheese gaps that might have accumulated over time.
In this COVID-19 world, everything I just described is still operable, and the schedules we've published talk about how it could work for different age groups as they now are not 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.
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 could say, "Hey, here's the link to Zoom for you five. I'm gonna sign this to you five students; please join me at 2:00 p.m. Eastern Time."
I'm making things up; we're gonna do a focus session on negative numbers because I'm assuming you've already looked at the hints on Khan Academy; we've looked at the videos, and you're still having trouble; I want to work with you. And then you could schedule another for other kids, and then maybe you could have whole class videoconferencing to say, "Okay, let's see how everyone's working. What can I do to get feedback from students to unblock them more?"
So I think that whole world of things are things that could be very powerful in this now distributed remote world that we find ourselves in.
Other questions?
Yeah, we have a question from Galen McCann who is actually one that I want to know. "Do you have all the black hole badges? How much people are in the black hole badges?"
So simple answer is for those 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 the black hole badge. We always wanted to make that for, you know, 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 it was me. And so it's some way to give evidence to people that that account was actually my account, and so what we did is we gave me a black hole badge called "This is Sal" black hole badge.
I think then the engineer who did that, he was trying to, you know, maybe butter me up, and he gave me a couple more black hole badges. So I am one of the few people who has a black hole badge. I believe there are others, and there are 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 be clearer about what it takes to achieve one and how you can get there, because it seems like that is motivating for a lot of folks.
Great! Thanks. So we have a question from another teacher, Charlene Zeus: "My students, our students at Khan Academy map—use Khan Academy 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 don't know what that is, there's something called the MAP (Measure of Academic Progress) growth assessment that's taken by about 20% of grades 3 through 8 students in the United States, and it measures student growth, which is a really powerful thing.
In fact, most of the efficacy studies that we used to measure Khan Academy's efficacy, we use the MAP growth assessment—they're run by this nonprofit called the NWEA, and they really are the gold standard in growth.
So the mappers were actually a very simple—it was actually a hackathon 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?" Since then, we've actually reached out to the NWEA, and we formed a partnership with them.
And what we're—a partnership where it's actually integrated with the MAP assessment, and that's something that we're doing with districts. For any of you teachers out there, what happens is the students take the MAP assessment, and that 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 on our ability to give teachers agency because they know the students best. Then, students can work at their own time and pace, and when they take the next MAP assessment, the growth that's measured, we can then start to see hopefully associate patterns between the time on Khan Academy and the growth on the MAP.
So the MAP Accelerator is a replacement on Khan Academy for personalization, and 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, and we're doing it officially with districts.
So if that's something of interest to folks, I encourage you to talk to your school principal, the district superintendent and say, "Hey, we should think about doing this MAP Accelerator." And the reason why it's a district thing is, you know, 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? 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 Lukas Mulder: "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; you know people on this—you know I've talked about we have kind of chemistry—kids—which is reading, writing, social learning, and math.
Then, you know, math—the core of math—we have from pre-k all the way through calculus and statistics. English 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 we have on Khan Academy.
So we have what's called a beta version, which is like almost a pre-release version of our English language arts. It has reading comprehension passages; students can answer questions, but it still doesn't have all of the mastery mechanics yet. Obviously, we haven't figured out ways to give students writing practices per se at those grade levels, so that's a gap.
I think we need to figure out, you know, middle school science. We have a gap there. I've recommended that a lot—well, students can work on high school biology right now because 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, you know, 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 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 teachers' questions, Samir's question, the ideal is that this is used in conjunction with a live teacher or parent where if a student is stuck, they can get motivated to keep engaging, power through those failures, which are really powerful learning experiences.
Teachers can break them into breakout sessions, and we were seeing a lot of success with that in physical classrooms that were doing—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 situation, 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 all this livestream, I'm saying it'd be amazing if teachers and parents and students could create video 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 are many other weaknesses I could get into the detail of the product. You know, 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. You know, and my closeout—first of all, thanks everyone for joining. As I said in all of our live streams, I think this is the sixth, seventh 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 distant.
If this can help people feel more connected, that's a huge, huge thing. We are doing everything on our side—it’s possible to be able to step up to this crisis. We're seeing our server capacity has gone up more than 2x, so things like our costs are going up. And I just want to remind everyone we are a not-for-profit organization; we are funded through philanthropic donations.
You know, maybe 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.
You know, we've gotten incredible support from some corporate partners. If any of you are parents working distributed, try to get your corporations involved with us, folks. You know, 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, you know, our servers were millions of dollars before the crisis, and now they're going to be double that. You know, in the order of—it was six million dollars 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.
So our costs are going up in this crisis, and we need your help. We're running at a significant deficit that we're not sure how long we can do it. So anyway, thanks everyone for being a part of this.
I will also close out with, you know, stay safe, stay socially distanced. I'm gonna work on those meditation videos 'cause I think the most important thing is to 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 care of others.
Thank you so much. Thanks for joining!