Office Hours With Sal: Monday, March 16 Livestream From Homeroom

Hello Facebook and Twitter and now YouTube. Okay, thanks. Uh, uh, hello everyone! Asal here and, uh, so as promised, uh, we are going to continue with these daily live streams. Given all of the school closures that are happening around the country and around the world, we thought it could be valuable to have a place, especially where we're all kind of socially isolated right now, for us to connect, for us to share information, for us to ask questions about how to navigate the closures.

There's been a lot of, I guess you could say, news over the weekend. Some of the major school districts in the country have shut down, most recently New York City and Los Angeles announced. It's a little over 30 million students in the country, so roughly 60% of the students in the country are now trying to do some form of schooling from home. Over the weekend, we also released, as soon as we saw that this was happening and happening fast, we wanted to make sure that parents, teachers, and students had a way to make sense of what to do when they get back, when they get home.

With the school closures, many schools have created some type of a virtualization plan, but many of them haven't because they didn't have the time to come up with it, given how fast the closures happened. So we released schedules. We've posted them on all the major social media channels. I'm going to make a video later today on YouTube talking about the schedules themselves and how to navigate them. But there are schedules for the students' ages: there's a schedule for students from pre-k through second grade, there's a schedule for students from third through fifth grade, one from sixth to ninth grade, and one from tenth to twelfth grade that really just structures the day and lets students know, okay, at this part of the day you could work on math.

We obviously cover math from pre-k with things like Khan Academy Kids, all the way through on Khan Academy middle school, high school, early college level math. English and Language Arts, Khan Academy Kids is great for the younger crowd. Then as you get into elementary school and middle school, we actually just launched what's known as a beta, a kind of an early release of our English and Language Arts. But we wanted to highlight there because it's a chance for students to get a lot of practice reading passages and answering reading comprehension questions.

We also have our grammar offering to help fill out that English and Language Arts. As you get into middle school and high school, there's the opportunity to do things like biology, chemistry, physics, economics, computer science, American history, world history, civics, and government, etc. So what our goal is, is we have a lot of, and I didn't— that wasn't a comprehensive list obviously for high school students. You could also do SAT prep, which is in reading, writing, and math.

But we wanted to structure it all into these schedules so that parents, students, and teachers can know what we should work on at different parts of the day. The ideal is if that can be complemented with other resources that could either be provided by the school, the district, or maybe teachers could set up Zoom video conferencing or Google Hangouts so that students could go someplace for help.

I think for older students, they could even self-organize around that. You could also imagine parents who could volunteer to set up these video conferencing sessions for any student who feels stuck, who doesn't know where to start, who needs a little bit of motivation, or just needs academic help. On our side, we are going to try to do more live streams than just this one and explore ways that we can also provide more help because obviously students can get as much practice as they need on something like Khan Academy, but it really helps to feel connected, especially in this time of social isolation.

So one of the things about this live stream, I'd love to take questions from any questions that folks have. Some Khan Academy colleagues of mine are paying attention to the message boards on the various social media channels, so if you have any questions, really about anything, it could be about the school closures, it could be about, you know, I'm trying to navigate it myself with three young children at home. I'm happy to give advice about how we're trying to handle it; I'm happy to talk about the virus.

I actually put a video out over the weekend as well, just a—it's a little bit of a sobering video for people to appreciate that the confirmed cases that you hear about on the news, that's for sure, or very likely, actually for sure, a subset of the actual cases in an area because you're clearly not testing everyone. So that goes into a little bit of the analysis of what happened in Wuhan, and you typically see a ratio of about, actually greater than, 10 real cases for every confirmed case.

The reason why I wanted to do that is, you know, the earlier that all of us practice good social distancing from each other, the quicker we can kind of clamp down on this thing. But if we wait a little while, it's just going to get that much worse and that much harder. So I'm happy to answer any questions; I can. Obviously, I'm not an epidemiologist, but we've made a lot of content on Khan Academy on things like exponential growth and viruses. And this doesn't, this isn't a qualification, but I'm married to a doctor, so we've been having a lot of conversations about this over the weekend.

So let's see, I have some questions here. So someone asked, this is Lee Woans: "I teach special education preschool, new to Khan Academy. How can we get help for our students with multiple disabilities?" So, Lee, thanks so much for your question! So we haven't been able to make a specific product or content or studies around students with specific disabilities. But given that you work at a preschool, I would definitely look at Khan Academy Kids; it's available in both the Android and iOS app stores. It is free, it is non-commercial.

The team, Khan Academy Kids, they used to be the Duck Duck Moose team. They're really the top team in creating content for early learners. They were the folks who made that early Wheels on the Bus app in 2008-2009 that made us all realize that young kids can handle the iPhone or an iPad. What you'll see there is, you know, most early learning apps are very focused on just one domain or just one part of one domain, but Khan Academy Kids has over 100 books that the students could read; they could be read to.

The app can read to them, it has interactive videos, not just videos, but videos that will stop and ask the students to manipulate things. It has a lot of exercises, and it adapts to the needs of the student. So, hopefully, Khan Academy Kids will be useful for your students, and let us know! We always want feedback and ideas on how we can get better.

Let's see, there is Angela Wilson asking: "My daughter needs ACT prep in math; where should she begin?" Great question, Angela! So the general view is, we don't have specific ACT prep on Khan Academy, but generally speaking, if your daughter just keeps practicing her math, her reading and writing, she'll do just fine on the ACT. I would recommend the SAT prep. Because if she does well in that, there’s a very high correlation between the two tests. So I think that could be a good activity because the SAT prep will be giving her practice in math, reading, and writing.

And I know the ACT also contains things like science. Although it’s a little bit more things like data analysis, it wouldn't hurt, you know, to look at some of the schedules we've posted and have your daughter work on whatever the right science is for her, to keep those mental muscles from atrophying. So she’ll do just fine on the ACT, SAT, or whatever else she might have to take tests on.

All right, let's see. So, Sonya Tabor says: "Will you be creating more meditation videos for kids and maybe for kids and families? I have found them to be really useful." Thanks, Sonya! You know, this was the first— for those of you who don't know, we posted some meditation videos a few weeks ago. Oh, and we're posting them again right now! Oh, we're posting right now.

It was just an idea before this crisis really hit where we were thinking that there's just a lot of young kids who feel really stressed. When you look at the data of things like stress, depression, and anxiety, especially, we've been hearing from university presidents. It’s kind of— I mean, talk about another thing that's unfortunately growing exponentially. And so we said, hey, there's got to be a way to help students here.

There's also a lot of evidence that if students are de-stressed, they actually can perform better. I know from personal experience; I talked about this at the last live stream about a year and a half ago. I was stressed for various reasons, and whenever I get stressed, I start getting claustrophobic on planes. I just really have trouble being on planes, and obviously, I have to travel a lot for my job.

It was actually one of my board members that recommended that I started meditation. I was somewhat desperate, so I was like, okay, I'm going to give it a shot. But when I do things, I tend to do to an extreme, so I said I'm just going to do this every day. I started meditating every day, initially for about 10 or 20 minutes a day, and after about six weeks, I felt a very noticeable difference.

For anyone who thinks meditation is some very esoteric, hard to imagine spiritual thing, it really is just about stilling your mind and realizing that you are not your thoughts. Realizing that all of these things that weigh down on us, that we look at in the world, how people are judging us, what they view of us, our personas, our jobs, however we define ourselves— they are not us.

I think the more that you can kind of, at least briefly for 10 minutes a day, 20 minutes a day, 30 minutes a day, escape from that kind of mental construction we've made that stresses us out, it's very liberating and it actually makes you more resilient. One thing that I found, you know, with all of the stuff going on with COVID, it's even more important because when you look at the news, especially with the social isolation, it can, in our minds, we can feel a little bit under assault.

But then I keep reminding myself, I was like no, I'm still here; I'm able to, you know, I have everything I need. I have my family around me; I'm actually in quite a good circumstance. I've been religiously, and when I say religiously, not in the religious sense, but like I've been meditating every day. 30 minutes, and I've been, kind of ramping up my meditation during this because I think it’s just eased my mind.

It says, look, you know, things are going to play out the way they do. All we can do is take the right action, be cautious. My wife has lately been quoting a lot of Frozen as our life philosophy. Obviously, in Frozen one, we learned to let it go. In Frozen two— do the next right thing. I think those two statements are awfully deep for animated movies!

Just, you know, regular meditation: let all of these things that we've constructed in our mind go. At least for a little bit, for 10, 20, 30 minutes a day, and just focus on the next right thing. Don't try to get overwhelmed with everything that's going on.

All right, so somewhat see this is Jurgen Weinhard: "Are you concerned that your system will be able to scale based on the surge of social isolation? Go Tigers!" I guess Jurgen is an LSU fan. I'm from Louisiana, so good on the background research here!

Again, will the system scale? Our engineering team has reassured us that we’re going to be able to scale. This is really Khan Academy's duty to step up here. As soon as we started hearing about the school closures, we were like this— we've got to support the country and the world in this situation. For those of you who are in a position, please consider donating because our server costs were already many, many millions of dollars a year and I have a feeling that they're going to grow potentially exponentially.

So we're going to need support. Once again, if you can't afford it, you can't. But if you can, and especially if your family or people that you care about are getting value from this and you want to support other people to ensure they're up, think about making a philanthropic donation.

But yes, we have a— you know, one thing that I'm super proud of at Khan Academy: I get a disproportionate amount of credit for it. We're actually over 200 folks and the team at Khan Academy are literally the brightest, most passionate team that I've ever worked with in my life. They're all working hard from their walk-in closet, so to speak, in social isolation, making sure that Khan Academy is staying up for what might be many tens of millions of students who need it over the coming weeks and months.

How can those students without internet connectivity get Khan Academy? So that's a question that we're really struggling with. I know some school districts— New York City, when they announced that they were going to close the schools over the weekend, they made devices available to students. I've had multiple calls over the weekend with various philanthropists who are thinking about how to make devices accessible to students in that area.

I'm hoping that some of the telecom companies can make the Wi-Fi hotspots open. I hope, you know, this is a time where sharing Wi-Fi with your neighbor hopefully is not frowned upon because I think it is a bit of an emergency. So we're looking at that. There is something called Calibri, which used to be known as KA Lite. It was started by an intern from Khan Academy many, many years ago, but they have what you could view as an offline server that has Khan Academy on it, among other things.

It's not full Khan Academy and it's not the perfect experience, but you can go pretty far with it. The ideal use case though is to have some form of internet connectivity. I think we should all kind of lobby our local telecom companies to make it as accessible as possible because it's not just important for Khan Academy. I think in this time of social isolation, you know, I had a— I did a video conference with a bunch of friends yesterday and families just to connect.

I think that’s what we all need. Between the meditation and the video conferencing, I think that's what's going to get us through the social isolation, or the physical social isolation, and allow us to be in a good place.

Let's see, any tips on data science subjects for home study? So, if you're really learning data sciences, do you know Khan Academy? I think can help you with a lot of the prerequisites for data science. A lot of the basic programming; we have college and high school level statistics on Khan Academy.

We have linear algebra on Khan Academy, depending on how sophisticated you want your data science knowledge to be, but then I think if you want to get into the meat of data science, that's where the MOOCs, whether it's Coursera, edX, have some great courses for that and Udacity. So I highly recommend those.

Let's see, is ELA going to be done, and can we assign things from the ELA beta? So, English and Language Arts, we released it on Khan Academy already, and it's for second through eighth grade and actually beyond eighth grade. The SAT practice is great because that covers high school level reading and writing. The reason why we call it a beta, beta in software jargon means that we've released it, but we're still improving on it.

The content is actually in a good place, but over the next year or two, we’re going to, you know, we have a situation right now that when you click on an item, students read a passage, and then they answer a question, and then they submit, and the passage shows up again, and they answer the question again. We do want to do things like we already have on our SAT prep where there’s a passage and you see five questions at the same time.

So those are the types of changes that we hope to improve on over the next year or so. But I have to say, I've already been using the content with my own children and I'm saying this on behalf of the content team that wrote these questions. It wasn't me; they're very, very good passages and items for your students, and if your students keep with it, I'm confident that they're going to for sure not atrophy their reading comprehension skills and probably improve on them.

So, Mary Lou says: "I would love to have a way to get teacher support as well. Is there teacher conferencing?" So Mary, where we are exploring all of the above, expect in the next few days we might be announcing either live streams like this or we might create links to large-scale video conferences for teachers, maybe others for parents.

I hope in this week we can run some tests, even ways that if a student is in a given subject, we'll probably start with math, then go into other subjects. If you're an algebra student, there’s a certain time where all algebra students with a question can show up. We're exploring ways that can happen. If you're a fifth-grade student, if you have a question, ways that people can show up and ask questions.

Obviously, Khan Academy itself has a lot of support. Students have as much practice as they need; they can look at hints, they can read articles, of course, there are the videos. But there’s nothing like having a place where you can ask questions as well. Before we get to it, I do highly recommend if there are parents and teachers listening out there, I think you can organize these things on your own.

If you look at that schedule, if you have every student in your class doing that same schedule, you could say, "All right, simultaneous with the schedule we're going to have a Zoom or Google Hangout or a Skype session." Or if anyone has questions, go to this URL, and it could be a teacher or a parent, or a student. It could be even an older student who is helping staff and answer any questions that students have. I think that would be a really valuable complement to what we're able to provide.

Okay, how do you go to the online classes? So, you just go to khanacademy.org. It's all free. When you look at the schedules that we've released, you literally just click on the links and you'll see where those classes are. One of the things, you know, there's things that you might see in Khan Academy, in math, for example, and a lot of the sciences.

You'll see it so that there's all these game mechanics. You’ll see mastery points and you'll see that it has your mastery level on each skill. As you get questions right, your mastery level improves. Then in other parts, like in our English Language Arts, you'll see the exercises, but they don't have those mechanics just yet. So you’re going to see these different experiences in different parts of Khan Academy.

The places where you do see the mastery mechanics, like in math or in things like we have it in physics, and we have a form of that on our SAT practice, I encourage you, if you feel like you already know some of the material, to take a course challenge. That will be a fast way to understand what you know and don’t know, and the skills that you don't know, you can then go to those units and take the unit test.

Then you can quickly identify which skills in that unit you know and don't know. If you know some of the material, that's a pretty fast way to accelerate. One thing that we've seen several teachers or many teachers tell us about is it could be valuable to start, no matter what your age is, to start on kindergarten and move your way up. If you know your kindergarten cold, which hopefully many older students do, it’ll take you literally 20, 30 minutes, maybe an hour to finish kindergarten— probably less time than that.

Then first grade, if you use things like the course challenges, I would recommend taking the kindergarten course challenge. If you get not 100%, move on to first grade. If you get 100%, move on to second grade. Try to get mastery second, third, fourth, fifth grade because what you find is many students, even middle school students, even high school students, have some of those gaps in arithmetic that keep them from really being able to intuitively understand the higher-level math.

You'll find that you'll get to what, in ed terms, you'll call your zone of proximal development, which is really your learning edge. You’ll be able to get to your learning edge within a day or two and you’ll feel very confident that you don’t have any gaps. So let's see, are you planning to add courses for other programming languages? Not in the immediate term, but we're always open to ideas.

We have things like SQL, SQL, we have JavaScript, we have HTML, CSS. In programming generally, especially if you learn, say, JavaScript, the ideas of programming are very translatable. If you know how to program one language, you can ramp up very fast on another language, so I think JavaScript can actually get you quite far.

Let's see, Cindy Ewan asks: "Do you need donations so your site can keep going? Where is the best place to donate?" Simple answer is yes! Khan Academy is primarily funded with donations, so thanks for asking that question, Cindy! You can go to khanacademy.org/donate to make donations and I think our team is also posting it, and we're putting the link in right now.

But yes, and thank you for that question because that's how we exist. So Mary Lou asked: "Do you have kind of caring materials for middle school sciences?" Focused middle school science content is actually a gap that we have today. What we wrote in the schedules, I think there are a few things.

If you want to focus on science, I think the high school biology, actually is a great place because the math prerequisites for high school biology are not intense. Essentially, most middle school students would have the math background necessary for high school level biology. The other reason why it's interesting is it's so relevant right now. Obviously, we're talking about things like viruses and RNA and DNA.

I don't think at this time that's going to be much more relevant to students. We hope over the next few years we can launch a middle school science course as well. But I think high school biology is a great place to focus for middle school students.

Let's see, so our team is highlighting some tips from our audience. This is from Helen Martin: "As a former homeschooling parent, I can offer this pro tip. When you are first educating at home, you will almost certainly get significant pushback from your kiddos; expect it and plan on ignoring certain attitudes and comments that you would never let slide under normal circumstances. Also, start the day with math."

Thanks, Helen! I'm going to take that to heart. My wife is helping the kids get started on their homeschooling regimen today, and I know we've been dealing with exactly that. So that makes me feel good that some of this pushback, we just have to power through it, and hopefully we’ll all fall into the pattern within a few days or weeks.

So, Brian Massey Tupper says: "Hey Sal, can you give an update on missions and explain why they're going away? Thanks for all you do! Explain course mastery too." So, Brian, thanks for the question!

There is something on Khan Academy called missions, which many of you are familiar with. Those who are familiar with it have probably seen some messaging or gotten some emails saying that missions might go away. So just to give you a little bit of history, I don’t want to, you know, I feel like I should sit by the fireplace and give you Khan Academy history here.

From the early days of Khan Academy, people associated it with videos, but we always said there should be a way for students to learn at their own time and pace, get as much practice and feedback as necessary. In 2011 or 2012, we launched missions, which is a way not only for students to get as much practice and have game mechanics, it would do spaced repetition practice so that it would make sure that kids retained that knowledge.

It’s been very popular! We’ve had many efficacy studies on it. The reason why we created an alternative to missions is that at the time we had two very different experiences on Khan Academy. If someone did a web search, they would fall into our library, but then you had to kind of navigate your way to find the missions.

Our view, our hope for Khan Academy is to always do what a great teacher or what a great tutor would do, which is come for help and I will try to help you, but then we’ll say, “Hey, but why don’t you stick with it so that you don’t have this stressful emergency later on?” So we wanted to merge those two worlds of the library and the missions, and so that’s what course mastery is.

When you go to any topic and say mathematics on Khan Academy, but it’s in other subjects as well, you’ll see every skill has a mastery stage. It’s either familiar, proficient, or mastered. If you just click on a scale and you get four out of five right, you’ll be familiar.

If you’re able to get five out of five, you’re proficient. But the only way to get mastery is for things that you’re already proficient in to be able to do it in mixed skill practice, and that can happen in unit tests that can happen in mastery challenges, and it can also happen in course challenges.

That’s a way to ensure that students can do focused practice on given skills and get some base level of fluency. But then they’re motivated to get that spaced repetition, mixed skill practice as well so they really retain the knowledge. And hopefully they’re motivating game mechanics. We have all sorts of ideas to improve on them so that students can go one course after another at their own time and pace and fill in all their gaps.

As I mentioned before, what we really like about the course mastery is that there are very clear ways for students to accelerate. If they know some of the material, that's the course challenges and the unit tests, they can just go straight to that if they feel like they know some of the material, but they want to understand what they might need more practice on.

So, Robin asks: "Hi Sal, any advice to discourage googling math answers or using apps that do this?" Well, I mean, simply, for all you students listening, you are not helping yourself if you just google math answers. Even if you’re looking at a Khan Academy lesson, don’t just wait for me or whoever’s making the video to solve it.

Pause the video, try to work it out on your own, and then, of course, it's fine to look at someone else's solution. So maybe it’s okay to look at googling a math answer you've already tried to do and you want to see if you got the right answer or if you approached it the right way. But you’re not helping anyone if you’re just, you know, trying to essentially copy the answer from the internet somehow.

All right, let’s see. Any tips on how to do e-learning for young kids, like kindergarten, who need more one-on-one help and don’t have parents available to work with them while stuck home? That’s Katie Dun Rankin asking that.

Thanks for the question, Katie! You know, that’s a hard situation. Obviously, we have things like Khan Academy Kids, which will, you know, a student could use for 20 to 30 minutes. The ideal has always been using it aside another human being, ideally an adult or an older sibling, but really any other human being I think just makes it a little bit more social.

I’ve had my five-year-old on some FaceTime and video conferencing with some of his friends now that we’re all social distancing, so I think that type of thing is important. We’ll keep thinking about that— if anyone out there has other ideas for Katie’s question, I think that would be something we would love to share out.

So it looks like we are almost at time. We’ll be back tomorrow. We're going to be here every day, every weekday, while this is going on, which unfortunately looks like it might go on longer than maybe we thought initially. I just want to say a few things.

In this time of crisis, how excited and inspired we have been to see how many people are just acting as human beings and stepping up for other people. We’ve seen this in groups wanting to help what we’re doing. Folks donating to this effort, and I’ve been seeing it in every walk of my life. So I think, you know, whenever you go through a situation like this, there’s definitely a lot that may not be looking great.

But I think there’s a lot of other things that should make everyone feel good, and it feels great to be able to feel connected to everyone. We should be grateful that we have this type of video conferencing, so thank you, you know, YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, Google, everybody, for offering this so that we can stay connected.

The other thing I really want to emphasize is at Khan Academy, we’re launching these schedules; we have all the resources, we have the subjects and grades for kids to interact with. But I don’t want to give anyone the delusion that this is somehow a replacement for a teacher. This is a very sub-optimal situation.

In the ideal circumstances, these types of tools used in conjunction with great teachers. As we go through this crisis together, I hope that we can help share ways that teachers can use video conferencing and things like that to get closer to that more ideal state.

Also, parents and other folks. So, you know, I’ll just leave y’all there, and I’ll see you all tomorrow. For all you students, have a great start! Start working! I think you're going to enjoy learning. And for all of your parents there, yeah, just think about the meditation and we just do one step at a time. I think everything’s going to be okay.