A message from Sal Khan for the Khan Academy 2016 Annual Report
Welcome to the KH Academy 2016 annual report. In the actual text of the report, we're going to go into a lot more detail on the financials and other things, but I'm hoping here to give you an overview, big picture.
2016 was a great year for KH Academy. The impact has continued to grow in the double-digit percentages and is accelerating. One of the areas that we've really started to accelerate in 2016 was in content development. Many people associate Khan Academy with mathematics, but what we've really been investing in is going beyond mathematics. We really want to cover all of the core academic subjects that you consider to be part of your education, all the way through the core of college.
And it's not just videos; we're doing a lot on practice, and we're doing a lot of written articles. 2016 was a very big deal in terms of a partnership with the College Board. A few years ago, they reached out to us and said, "We are going to revamp the SAT, and as part of that, we want to address at least a perception of inequity that's been around for decades."
The reason why they wanted to partner with KH Academy is that traditional test prep was associated with gaming the exam. It wasn't about real learning, but they saw that we were focused on filling in gaps in students' understanding. So, we launched with the College Board, and what we've seen over the course of the year is that KH Academy has now used more than all of paid test prep combined.
We're seeing that usage very broad and very deep. What's been even more exciting is the PSAT, which is taken in 10th or 11th grade by 80% of American high school students. In the past, that was just a random practice test you took. But now it acts as a diagnostic for KH Academy. You can take your PSAT scores, give permission to KH Academy, and then KH Academy software knows your strengths and weaknesses, not just in math but in reading and writing as well.
It can immediately give you practice items that are essentially weak point training. Even more powerful, we've been able to follow students from that PSAT through their work on KH Academy to eventually taking the SAT to understand the efficacy of this entire ecosystem.
What you see here on this slide are some of the preliminary results for arguably the largest personalized learning study ever conducted, with over 300,000 students. We saw that those who prepared on Khan Academy for at least 20 hours saw twice the growth from the PSAT to the SAT than they would typically see. This is just the beginning. We're working with the College Board very closely to do even further studies, and we've also seen that it doesn't stop at 20 hours. The more time that students put in practice, the more gains we see.
Another really exciting event in 2016 is that Duck Duck Moose became part of KH Academy. Duck Duck Moose, I would argue, was the best early learning app company out there. In 2016, the founding team said, "We would rather see our work having a social mission and reaching as many students as possible, especially those that are most in need." So, they became part of our team in 2016, and going forward, we're going to be working on early learning apps that holistically approach reading, writing, and mathematics starting at pre-kindergarten and then taking students through early elementary school.
International continues to be a very big part of Khan Academy. Roughly one-third of our usage is outside of the United States. We have increased our focus on India, Mexico, and Brazil, and going forward, we're building tools and platforms to allow each geography to be even more localized to their specific needs.
And going forward, there are a lot of exciting things. What you see here is a screenshot of the student-facing experience for back to school 2017, where students can tell KH Academy what classes they're taking, what grade they're in, and then KH Academy can personalize their experience. We also have game mechanics so that students are motivated to move forward. You can see that right over here. Once you get into a unit page, of course, you see the videos, you see the practice items here, but we are also adding diagnostic quizzes and unit tests as well.
What you see here is our assignments functionality, where a teacher can assign any piece of content on Khan Academy. This is a teacher assigning some practice content. They can assign it to particular students in a particular class, they can set a due date, and then they can see a readout of which students completed which assignments. They can then see which items gave the students the most difficulty so that they can review it in class the next day.
On top of all of this, we have a program called LearnStorm, which is a learning challenge that schools, teachers, and students participate in that celebrates the growth mindset. The more students can show grit and perseverance as they work through practice on Khan Academy, the more awards and recognition the students, their classrooms, their teachers, and their schools will get.
We've piloted this in several geographies in the past, and 2017 is going to be the first time that we do this on a nationwide scale. So, there's a lot going on at Khan Academy. What I just covered is really just a sample of it, but we're really grateful for your support. We have a big mission: a free, world-class education for anyone, anywhere.
Some of y'all have been with us for many years when we were just starting in 2007 out of a walk-in closet. This type of a mission would have seemed frankly delusional, but because of your support, your partnership, and all of the work that we've been able to do together with governments, with teachers, and with students, it's no longer just a dream. It's really happening.
The momentum that we've built together in 2016 is continuing to accelerate into 2017, and I expect it's going to accelerate in 2018 and beyond. So that, as we look back in a decade or two, we'll say, "How could we ever imagine a world where there wasn't a free, world-class education for anyone, anywhere?"