Let's use video to reinvent education - Salman Khan

[Music] [Applause] KH Academy is most known for its collection of videos. So before I go any further, let me show you a little bit of a montage. So the hypotenuse is now going to be five. This animal's fossils are only found in this area of South America. A nice clean band here and this part of Africa. We could integrate over the surface, and the notation usually is a capital Sigma.

National Assembly, they create the Committee of Public Safety, which sounds like a very nice committee. Notice this is an alahh, and it's an alcohol start differentiating into a fector and memory cells. A Galaxy! Hey, there's another galaxy! Oh look, there's another galaxy! And for dollars, is their 30 million plus the $20 million from the American manufacturer. If this does not blow your mind, then you have no emotion.

We now have, on the order of 2200 videos, covering everything from basic arithmetic all the way to vector calculus. Some of the stuff that you saw up there, we have a million students a month using the site, watching on the order of 100 to 200,000 videos a day. But what we're going to talk about in this is how we're going to the next level. But before I do that, I want to talk a little bit about really just how I got started.

Some of y'all might know, about five years ago, I was an analyst at a hedge fund, and I was in Boston. I was tutoring my cousins in New Orleans remotely, and I started putting the first YouTube videos up, really just as kind of a nice to have, just kind of a supplement for my cousin, something that might give or refresh her or something. And as soon as I put those first YouTube videos up, something interesting happened—actually a bunch of interesting things happened.

The first was the feedback from my cousins. They told me that they preferred me on YouTube than in person. And once you get over the backhanded nature of that, there was actually something very profound there. They were saying that they preferred the automated version of their cousin to their cousin. At first, it's very unintuitive, but when you actually think about it from their point of view, it makes a ton of sense. You have this situation where now they can pause and repeat their cousin.

Now they can, without feeling like they're wasting my time, if they have to review something that they should have learned a couple of weeks ago, or maybe a couple of years ago. They don't have to be embarrassed and ask their cousin; they can just watch those videos. If they're bored, they can go ahead; they can watch it at their own time, at their own pace. Probably the least appreciated, I guess, aspect of this is the notion that the very first time you're trying to get your brain around a new concept, the very last thing you need is another human being saying, "Do you understand this?" And that's what was happening with the interaction with my cousins before.

Now they could just do it in kind of the intimacy of their own room. The other thing that happened is, you know, I put them on YouTube just for the, you know—I saw no reason to make it private, so I let other people watch it, and then people started stumbling on it. I started getting some comments and some letters and all sorts of kind of feedback from random people around the world. And you know, these are just a few—this is actually from one of the original calculus videos, and someone wrote just on YouTube.

It was a YouTube comment: "First time I smiled doing a derivative." And let's pause here. This person did a derivative, and then they smiled! And then in response to that same comment—this is on the thread, you could go on YouTube and look at these comments—someone else wrote, "Same thing here. I actually got a natural high and a good mood for the entire day since I remember seeing all of this Matrix text in class, and here I'm all like, I know Kung Fu."

And we got a lot of feedback along those lines; you know, it's clearly it was helping people. But then, as the viewership kept growing, I started getting letters from people, and it was starting to become clear that it was actually more than just a nice to have. This is just an excerpt from one of those letters: "My 12-year-old son has autism and has had a terrible time with math. We have tried everything: viewed everything, bought everything. We stumbled on your video on decimals, and it got through. Then we went onto the dreaded fractions—again he got it! We could not believe it. He is so excited!"

And so you can imagine, you know, here I was an analyst at a hedge fund. It was very strange for me to do something of social value. I was excited, so I kept going. A few things other things started to dawn on me: that not only would it help my cousins right now or these people who are sending letters, but it could maybe—that this content will never go old, that it could help their kids or their grandkids. If Isaac Newton had done YouTube videos on calculus, I wouldn't have to—assuming he was good; we don't know.

The other thing that happened, you know, even at this point, you know, I said, okay, maybe it's a good supplement; it's good for motivated students; it's good for maybe homeschoolers. But I didn't think it would be something that would somehow penetrate the classroom. But then I started getting letters from teachers, and the teachers would write saying, "We've used your videos to flip the classroom. You've given the lectures! So now what we do—and this could actually happen in every classroom in America tomorrow—is I assign the lectures for homework, and what used to be homework I now have the students doing in the classroom."

And I want to pause here for a second because there's a couple of interesting things. One, when those teachers are doing that, there's the obvious benefit; there's the benefit that now their students can enjoy the videos in the way that my cousins did. They can pause, repeat at their own pace, at their own time. But the more interesting thing—this is the unintuitive thing—when you talk about technology in the classroom, by removing the one-size-fits-all lecture from the classroom and letting students have a self-paced lecture at home, and then when you go to the classroom, letting them do work, having the teacher walk around, having the peers actually be able to interact with each other, these teachers have used technology to humanize the classroom.

They took a fundamentally dehumanizing experience—a bunch of 30 kids with their fingers on their lips, not allowed to interact with each other; a teacher, no matter how good, has to give this kind of one-size-fits-all lecture to 30 students, you know, blank faces, slightly antagonistic—and now it's a human experience. Now they're actually interacting with each other.

So once the KH Academy kind of, you know, I quit my job, and we turned into a real organization, a nonprofit, the question is how do we take this to the next level? How do we take what those teachers were doing to their natural conclusion? So what I'm showing over here—these are actual exercises that I started writing for my cousins. The ones I started were much more primitive; this is kind of a more competent version of it, but the paradigm here is we will generate as many questions as you need until you get that concept, until you get 10 in a row.

And the Khan Academy videos are there; you get hints, the actual steps for that problem if you don't know how to do it. But the paradigm here—it seems like a very simple thing: 10 in a row you move on—but it's fundamentally different than what's happening in classrooms right now. In a traditional classroom, you have a couple of homework, lecture, homework, lecture, and then you have a snapshot exam. And that exam, whether you get a 70%, an 80%, a 90%, or a 95%, the class moves on to the next topic.

Even that 95% student: what was the 5% they didn't know? Maybe they didn't know what happens when you raise something to the zeroth power, and then you go build on that in the next concept. That's analogous to imagine learning to ride a bicycle. And I give you a bicycle; maybe I give you a lecture ahead of time, and I give you that bicycle for two weeks, and then I come back after two weeks and I say, "Well, let's see, you're having trouble taking left turns; you can't quite stop; you're an 80% bicyclist." So I put a big C stamp on your forehead, and then I say, "Here's a unicycle."

But as ridiculous as that sounds, that's exactly what's happening in our classrooms right now. The idea is, you fast forward and students, good students start failing Algebra all of a sudden and start failing Calculus all of a sudden, despite being smart, despite having good teachers, and it's usually because they had these Swiss cheese gaps that kept building throughout their foundation.

So our model is learn math the way you would learn anything, like the way you would learn a bicycle: stay on that bicycle, fall off that bicycle, do it as long as necessary until you have mastery. The traditional model penalizes you for experimentation and failure, but it does not expect mastery. We encourage you to experiment; we encourage you to fail, but we do expect mastery.

This is just another one of the modules—this is Trigonometry, this is Shifting and Reflecting Functions—and they all fit together. We have about 90 of these right now, and you could go to the site right now; it's all free. Not trying to sell anything, but the general idea is that they all fit into this knowledge map. That top node right there, that's literally single-digit addition. It's like 1 + 1 is equal to 2.

And the paradigm is once you get 10 in a row on that, then it keeps forwarding you to more and more advanced modules. So if you keep—this is going further down the knowledge map; we're getting into more advanced arithmetic. Further down, you start getting into pre-algebra and early algebra. Further down, you start getting into Algebra 1, Algebra 2, a little bit of pre-calculus. The idea is from this; we can actually teach everything—well, everything that can be taught in this type of a framework.

So you can imagine—and this is what we are working on—is from this knowledge map, you have logic, you have computer programming, you have grammar, you have genetics; all based off of that core of, okay, if you know this and that, now you're ready for this next concept. Now that can work well for an individual learner. You know, and I want for you to do it with your kids, but I also encourage everyone in the audience to do it yourself. It'll change what happens at the dinner table.

But what we want to do is use the natural conclusion of the flipping of the classroom that those early teachers had emailed me about. And so what I'm showing you here—this is actually data from a pilot in the Los Altos School District where they took two fifth-grade classes and two seventh-grade classes and completely gutted their old math curriculum.

These kids aren't using textbooks; they're not getting one-size-fits-all lectures. They're doing KH Academy. They're doing that software for roughly half of their math class. And I want to make it clear, we don't view this as the complete math education. What it does is—and this is what's happening in Los Altos—it frees up time. This is the blocking and tackling, making sure you know how to solve a system of equations, and it frees up time for the simulations, for the games, for the mechanics, for the robot building, for estimating how high that hill is based on its shadow.

The paradigm is the teacher walks in every day; every kid works at their own pace, and a teacher gets—this is actually a live dashboard from the Los Altos School District, and they look at this dashboard. Every row is a student, every column is one of those concepts. Green means the student is already proficient; blue means that they're working on it; no need to worry; red means they're stuck. And what the teacher does is literally just says, "Let me intervene on the red kids." Or even better, "Let me get one of the green kids who are already proficient in that concept to be the first line of attack and actually tutor their peer."

Now, I kind of come from a very data-centric reality, so we don't want that teacher to even go and intervene and have to ask the kid awkward questions—"Oh, what do you not understand?" or "What do you do understand?" and all the rest. So our paradigm is to really arm the teachers with as much data as possible—really data that in almost any other field is expected. If you're in finance or marketing or manufacturing, and so the teachers can actually diagnose what's wrong with the students so that they can make their interaction as productive as possible.

So now the teachers know exactly what the student has been up to, how long they've been spending every day, what videos they have been watching, when did they pause the videos, what did they stop watching, what exercises are they using, what have they been focused on. The outer circle shows what the exercises they're focused on; the inner circle shows the videos they're focused on. And the data gets pretty granular, so you can actually see the exact problems that the student got right or wrong. Red is wrong, blue is right.

The leftmost question is the first question that the student attempted. They watched the video right over there, and then you could see eventually they were able to get 10 in a row. It's almost like you can see them learning over those last 10 problems. They also got faster; the height is how long it took them. So when you talk about self-paced learning, it makes sense for everyone, you know, in education speak, differentiated learning.

But it's kind of crazy what happens when you actually see it in a classroom because every time we've done this, in every classroom we've done over and over again, if you go five days into it, there's a group of kids who've raced ahead and there's a group of kids who are a little bit slower. In a traditional model, if you did a snapshot assessment, you'd say, "Oh, these are the gifted kids; these are the slow kids. Maybe they should be tracked differently; maybe we should put them in different classes."

But when you let every student work at their own pace—and we see it over and over and over again—you see students who took a little bit extra time on one concept or the other, but once they get through that concept, they just race ahead. And so the same kids that you thought were slow six weeks ago, you now would think are gifted. And we're seeing it over and over and over again. It makes you really wonder how much all of the labels maybe a lot of us have benefited from are really just due to a coincidence of time.

Now, as valuable as something like this is in a district like Los Altos, our goal is to use technology to humanize—not just in Los Altos, but kind of on a global scale. Well, what's happening in education? And actually, that kind of brings an interesting point. You know, a lot of the effort in humanizing the classroom is focused on student-to-teacher ratios. In our mind, the relevant metric is student-to-valuable-human-time-with-the-teacher ratio.

So in a traditional model, most of the teacher time is spent doing lectures and grading tests, and whatnot. Maybe 5% of their time is actually sitting next to students and actually working with them. Now 100% of their time is. So once again, using technology—not just flipping the classroom—you're humanizing the classroom. I'd argue by a factor of five or ten.

And as valuable as it is in Los Altos, imagine what that does to the adult learner who's embarrassed to go back and learn stuff that they should have known before going back to college. Imagine what it does to a kid—a street kid in Kolkata—who has to help his family during the day, and that's the reason why he or she can't go to school. Now they can spend two hours a day and remediate or get up to speed and not feel embarrassed about what they do or don't know.

Now imagine what happens where, you know, we talk about the peers teaching each other inside of a classroom, but this is all one system. There's no reason why you can't have that peer-to-peer tutoring beyond that one classroom. Imagine what happens if that student in Kolkata all of a sudden can tutor your son or your son can tutor that kid in Kolkata. And I think what you'll see emerging is this notion of a global One World classroom, and that's essentially what we're trying to build. Thank you.

I ask question time. Okay, I've seen some things you're doing in the system that have to do with motivation and feedback, energy points, merit badges. Tell me, what you're thinking there?

Oh yeah, no, we have an awesome team working on it. I have to make it clear: it's not just me anymore. I'm still doing all the videos; we have a kind of a rockstar team doing the software. Yeah, we've put a bunch of game mechanics in there; you get these badges. We're going to start having leaderboards by areas, and you get points. It's actually been pretty interesting just the wording of the badging or how many points you get for doing something.

We see on a systemwide basis, like tens of thousands of like fifth graders or sixth graders going one direction or another depending on what badge you give them. And the collaboration you're doing with Los Altos—how did that come about?

Yeah, Los Altos has been kind of— it was kind of crazy. They—once again, I didn't expect it to be used in classrooms. Someone from their board came and said, "Oh, what would you do if you had Khan Academy launch in a classroom?" And I said, "Well, you know, I would just have every student work at their own pace on something like this. We'd give a dashboard," you know, and they said, "Oh, this is kind of radical; we have to think about it."

And me and the rest of the team thought, "Oh, you know, they're never going to want to do this." But literally the next day they're like, "Can you start in two weeks?" So it's fifth grade math is where that's going on right now—it's two fifth-grade classes and two seventh-grade classes. And I think they're doing it at the district level. I think what they're excited about is they can now follow these kids; it's not an only in-school thing.

I mean, we've even, you know, on Christmas, we saw some of the kids were doing, and we can track everything, so they can actually track them as they go through the entire district through the summers as they go from one teacher to the next. You have this continuity of data that even at the district level they can see.

So some of those views we saw were for the teacher to go in and track actually what's going on with those kids. So you're getting feedback on those teacher views to see what they think they need?

Oh yeah, actually most of those were kind of specs by the teachers. We made some of those for students so they could see their data, but you know we have a very tight design loop with the teachers themselves, and they're literally saying, "Hey, you know, this is nice, but I like that focus graph." A lot of the students say a lot of the teachers said, "I have a feeling that a lot of the kids are jumping around and not focusing on one topic," so we made that focus diagram for them. So it's all been teacher-driven. It's been pretty crazy.

Is this ready for prime time, do you think? A lot of classes next school year should try this thing out?

Yeah, it's ready. You know, it's—we got a million people on the site already, so we can handle a few more, and it's no reason why it really can't happen in every classroom in America tomorrow.

And the vision of the tutoring thing: the idea there is if I'm confused about a topic, somehow right in the user interface, I'd find people who are volunteering, maybe see their reputation, and I could schedule and connect up with those people?

Absolutely! You know, and this is something that I recommend everyone in this audience to do is you can—those dashboards that teachers have, you can go log in right now and you could get—you can essentially become a coach for your kids, your nephews, your cousins, or maybe some kids at the Boys and Girls Club.

And yeah, you can start becoming a mentor or tutor really, really immediately. But yeah, yeah, it's all there.

Well, it's amazing! I think you just got a glimpse of the future of education.

Thank you.

Oh, thank you! [Music]