The Learners Fund - The Khan Academy story

Hi everyone, Salan here from Khan Academy. First of all, let me just thank you for either considering becoming part of the Learners Fund or especially if you are already a member, because the Learners Fund really is the backbone of our philanthropy here at Khan Academy.

We have a big mission, as a not-for-profit, frankly a big mission for anyone, which is free world-class education for anyone, anywhere. What I now sometimes add for folks is the parenthetical: and we're serious about it. It's not just some abstract thing that we want to put out there, but every day we have a team, much more than me. We have hundreds of folks directly under the employ of Khan Academy, about 250 or so folks.

Then there's actually thousands of people who've volunteered or are running organizations in other parts of the world to bring Khan Academy to more and more people. The way that we envision being able to give free world-class education to anyone, anywhere is by offering all of the core academic subjects from pre-K through the core of college across all domains.

You know, math, science, humanities, and even some things that aren't traditionally taught in schools. Things like financial literacy and maybe navigating your life, but to offer that to anyone, anywhere. This also means not just in English. We're in 50 plus languages and growing. We have people on the ground in especially some of the larger countries that can really benefit from this.

We're being used in some way, shape, or form in nearly every country on the planet. Today, there's over 150 million registered users, and as far as we've gotten, we know that the potential is for billions of folks to benefit from the work that we can together do for hopefully generations to come.

Now, the reason why your support is especially important right now and why I am especially excited right now is a lot of y'all know that Khan Academy started in a somewhat organic way. My original background was in technology. Then, after business school, I found myself as an analyst at a hedge fund, and I started tutoring cousins.

I always have told the story; I started tutoring Naadia. She was 12 years old. Word spreads in my family—free tutoring is going on—and before I know it, I'm tutoring 10-15 cousins and family friends. The first KH Academy was me writing exercises for them online so that they could practice at their own time and pace.

As their tutor, their teacher, I could monitor what they were doing. A friend suggests that I make YouTube videos. I initially thought it was a horrible idea, but I gave it a shot, and that helped us scale and reach even more people—many, many more people who weren't my cousins.

To the point that, in 2008, I set KH Academy up as a nonprofit. In 2009, I quit my day job. In 2010, we got our first real funding. That story of tutoring is especially relevant now, given the world that we are now entering into. If you think about it, everything that KH Academy has been doing and stands for is really about scaling personalized instruction.

The reason why there's a lot of evidence—both we've experienced in our lives, but there's also a lot of research evidence tutoring works—is because it's personalized. If a student hasn't learned something yet, a tutor can keep working with them. If a student is bored and ready to move on, a tutor could do that. It can also motivate and support students in ways that it's very hard for a teacher in a class of 30 students to do.

So, to a large degree, what we've been doing at Khan Academy is through interactive exercises and on-demand video and teacher tools. We've been working more and more formally with districts over time. We're trying to bring that level of personalization even when you have one teacher in a class of 30.

Obviously, there are also a lot of folks just coming on their own who might not have access to certain classes and want to tap in or fill in their gaps. Over that time, we've had over 50 plus efficacy studies that have all pretty much said the same narrative.

If students, whether inside or outside of a classroom, are able to put in 30 to 60 minutes a week of personalized practice—depending on the study you look at—they're going 30, 40, 50, 60. There's even some percentages even higher than that. Studies show they're accelerating by a significant amount, which is a big deal in any situation.

There were already far too many kids who were falling behind even before the pandemic, and we know that things have gotten even worse. That's all before you consider what's now possible with generative AI. What we now believe that Khan Academy is on the cusp of doing—many of y'all might be familiar with Kigo, which is the generative AI layer that we've built on Khan Academy using state-of-the-art AI.

I know there's a lot of people talking about this now, but we've been working on this longer than most. We've been working with the leading actors with their state-of-the-art models, and we think built on the platform that we've already developed. We already have the efficacy that we already established and the distribution to families, students, and districts that we already have.

We can get that much closer, using generative AI as a layer on top of all of that, to getting pretty close to emulate what I was able to do with my cousins back then. Not just be a tutor, but also be a teaching assistant for all the teachers out there. Because if we can help them with lesson planning, grading, writing progress reports, and preparing their own knowledge for their classes, that's more time and energy for themselves and their students.

It's more likely that they're then going to adopt the rest of Khan Academy for personalized learning. Likewise, for the students themselves; if they have a question while they're watching a video, or they want to be quizzed on something, or they want a hint—not cheating, but a hint—then generative AI can help support and motivate that much more.

I say all of this because none of it would be possible without your support. As I said at the beginning of this video, the Learners Fund really is the backbone of the philanthropic support we have at Khan Academy. We are primarily philanthropically supported so that we can always have a true north around what's going to be the best for learners and the people who support the learners—parents and teachers.

So, from the bottom of my heart, on behalf of the entire team at KH Academy, but even more importantly, on behalf of today hundreds of millions of learners and one day billions of learners who are going to use the resources that you are supporting, I just want to say thank you. I genuinely think that by working together, we can make it possible to have a free world-class education for anyone, anywhere. If you really think about what that does, it almost helps with almost every other issue that faces us as a civilization.

So, thanks for being part of this adventure. Onward!