Homeroom with Sal & Lindsay Spears - Monday, June 22

Hi everyone! Welcome to the daily homeroom. It's been a little bit of a while. We took a week-long break last week, so hopefully, everyone is doing well.

For those of you who are new to this, this is something we started doing when we started seeing the school closures, but it's really a way for all of us to connect and talk about topics that are both interesting and educational, not just in education but beyond education. We have a really exciting guest from our Khan Academy team today, and we have an exciting set of announcements there.

But before I get into that, I do like to remind folks that Khan Academy is a not-for-profit. We exist because of philanthropic donations from folks like yourself. So, if you're in a position to donate, please think about doing so. A special thanks to several corporations that have stepped up over the last several months, especially once we started having the increased costs due to COVID. We were already running at a deficit before COVID; now, our deficit has grown.

But special thanks to Bank of America, Google.org, AT&T, Fastly, and Novartis! Their help has made a huge difference, but we're still running at a deficit, so anything that folks can do to help would make a big difference.

With that, I'm really excited to introduce a colleague of mine here at Khan Academy, Lindsey Spears, who's a senior math content manager. Lindsey, good to see you! We see each other these days on Zoom a lot.

So, tell us a little bit about the announcements that we have made recently.

Yeah, so really exciting! We've built 10 new courses in math that we're calling our "Get Ready for Grade Level" courses. They start with "Get Ready for Third Grade" and go all the way to "Get Ready for Pre-Calculus." They're built to help students who are going into that upcoming course prepare for it.

And why did we do this?

We did this because we know every year there's a summer slide. Students lose a little bit of what they've learned in the last year over the summer. But this year, with the school closures due to COVID, we knew that was going to be even greater than normal. We wanted to find a way to help address that, and so the courses are really to help students, let's say going into fifth grade. Here's the content you're about to take on in fifth grade, and the topics you're going to explore to have a really successful year with those topics. Here are some skills that we think would really help you prepare and be ready to take on those next topics.

So, we built smaller courses that really get you ready for what you're about to learn in the fall.

Yeah, this notion? This isn't a COVID thing; this even predates COVID. Kids, you know, we talk a lot about it as they move through a kind of a fixed-paced system; they inevitably accumulate gaps. Then you have things like summerification, where not only do you not learn but you often forget, and some of the skills that you did know atrophy. Those gaps continue to exist or maybe even get bigger. That's always an issue, which is why we've always talked about the value of personalized learning; being able to learn at your own time and pace. But this year, to your point, it's likely to be that much worse because some students have been able to keep learning on Khan Academy while others haven't.

So, these "Get Ready for Grade Level" courses are a way for students, parents, or teachers working with those students to make sure they have all of the prerequisite skills up to and including the grade level work. Then they can of course work on it at their own time and pace.

And I mean, this sounds... We had Tim Vandenberg on, I guess we call it "the show." We had him on this show; it seems like a lifetime ago. I think it was about two months ago now. He did something similar with Khan Academy before the "Get Ready for Grade Level." He had all of his sixth graders, 90% of whom were below grade level when they entered his classroom. He had them all start at early learning kindergarten-level math and then go through all of arithmetic on Khan Academy, which is a lot of skills. He has seen really incredible gains with those students. They were not only able to catch up to sixth grade, but they were able to learn sixth grade, and many of them ended up ahead of grade level.

How is this different from what Tim Vandenberg does or has been doing with his students?

Yeah, what Tim does is so exciting. Starting all the way back in kindergarten, and going through... What's slightly different about these courses is they're more focused just on the one course you're about to go into. So, we really thought about what does a seventh-grade math student take on? What are the topics a seventh-grade math student learns? We built a really custom set of content and exercises and videos that support that very specific grade.

So, they fill the gaps, just like Tim does, but they're filling a very personalized or individualized set of gaps that we know for that course. It's sort of like a fast-tracked Tim model.

Yeah, so if I'm understanding correctly, what’s going on here is essentially we want all students to be able to do what the students in Tim Vandenberg's class do. But Tim Vandenberg was using existing things on Khan Academy and his students maybe had to cover third-grade or fourth-grade skills that don't directly feed into sixth grade. What we've essentially done is taken Tim Vandenberg's intent, but we've streamlined it, so that teachers and students have a much better chance of getting to grade level as quickly as possible.

How would you recommend teachers do use it? Would you say that they should have all their students work on it for, say, the first... Well, they could use it over the summer; they could use it for the first several weeks of the school year. Or should they go and do the unit in the "Get Ready for Grade Level" before they do the corresponding unit in the grade level course?

Yeah, I think there are a couple of different models that would work well. Currently, since we're in the summer, doing the full course is a great way to build. If you have some time to spend on math this summer, these are the best things to use that time on.

You could do the complete course over the summer ahead of time. For teachers during the school year, I think there's a lot of value in doing it in line. The way we've built the course is each of the units will say, like in sixth grade, "Get Ready for Ratios," because we know all sixth-graders are going to spend a lot of their year learning ratios.

So, as the teacher is preparing to teach ratios to start that unit, she or he can use the "Get Ready for Ratios" unit. You could even use them at the same time; you could simultaneously be working on sixth-grade ratios while also building those strong foundations to support that learning. Or you could do it one after the other.

So, I think there's a model where you could do the whole thing up front, but really for teachers during the school year, I think there's enormous advantage to doing it during, so that you're filling the gaps right at the time those gaps are needed, and really getting to build the connections between what you've learned in earlier years and what you're learning this year.

And to your point, the units in the "Get Ready for Grade Level" course are actually named so that they line up nicely with units in the grade level course. So, your point about ratios—we know there's a unit in the sixth-grade course about ratios. There's a unit in the "Get Ready for Sixth Grade" course called "Getting Ready for Ratios," right?

Yeah, they pretty much parallel. There are a few units that maybe it's brand new to that year, so there may not be a "Get Ready" unit, but in general you should be able to do a crosswalk between the "Get Ready" course and the on-grade course, and they should match up pretty neatly.

What would you say to a lot of teachers who are like, "Well, this sounds great because every teacher we talk to knows that kids come after a normal summer with all sorts of gaps, and this year is going to be that much worse." But to a teacher's point: "I already have trouble covering all of the grade-level material. Now there’s this whole other course that seems ginormous because it’s covering so much material. How do I do both? What’s the size of this course relative to the normal grade-level course?"

So, the size of these courses is somewhere between a third to a half of the size of the regular course. So, they're actually quite streamlined and smaller than the on-grade courses. It is additional content, and I certainly remember that well from my time in the classroom. But we also think sometimes when you’re filling the right gaps, that it actually accelerates the on-grade learning too.

So it might be additional, but it's the right additional that may make teaching the on-grade stuff go even more smoothly, right?

And we’re seeing a screenshot. It looks like this is our sixth-grade course, so there'd be a corresponding "Get Ready for Sixth Grade" course.

Oh, no, I was saying, to your point, these are shorter courses. Another element here is that students, in theory, if they're ready for grade level, should know a lot of this material. So, they could probably use our acceleration mechanics, things like course challenges, unit tests, mastery challenges, quizzes to accelerate through a lot of the material pretty fast.

That's exactly right!

And on this, I can show you. This is our main on-grade sixth grade, but just to show how to get to the courses—anywhere that you are on Khan Academy, if you click on the courses, the "Get Ready" courses are listed right here.

So we have our main math courses below it, but right here we have the "Get Ready for Third, Fourth, Fifth, Sixth..." So if we click into—or we can go to the main "Get Ready" page, and this has all of the different "Get Ready" courses. If we click into one, I'm just picking this first one here, we can see it's a bit smaller than the main ones.

This has 37 exercises to try as opposed to the main third-grade course, which has over a hundred different skills that you would do in the on-grade course.

And what do you recommend, speaking of acceleration? Let's say you do it in line so that you do the "Get Ready" unit right before or at the same time as the corresponding unit at grade level. Would you recommend teachers maybe leverage like the unit tests? I'm making stuff up. You know, the kids take the unit test. If they're doing well on it, if they get 90-plus percent, maybe they don't even necessarily have to finish the "Get Ready for Grade Level," but they could probably finish it quite quickly. But if they get a lower score on the unit test, then those students should be able to go to the gaps they had.

Yeah, that's right! So, they can accelerate in a few ways. You could take the course challenge, which would show you a variety of skills from the entire "Get Ready" course. Or, if you really wanted to focus on "I really want to see, are they ready for place value?" Is my class ready? So if you went to the "Get Ready for Place Value" unit and just did that unit test, it's going to show you either some students they're ready; they really have all those foundational skills and they're ready for on-grade. And if not, it will help you identify—it'll show the different skills where they were not yet successful—and it'll help that student say, "Okay, here's a few things in place value that I need to go back to and get some practice in."

So it will help them identify how the teachers and the students identify if they're already, you know, ready for the grade level content or if there's a little bit more work they could do to prepare.

And there's a bunch of questions coming in!

So from Facebook, Robin Schwartz asks, "What would you recommend for raising a college freshman who will be in a summer academic skills course? Is there a way to take off the grade level 'Get Ready' for Algebra One? Looks great!"

I think what the question Robin's asking is... I'm not maybe asking about a family member, or maybe Robin is the college... But, you know, if someone’s going to be a rising freshman, depending on what the rising freshman is taking, some freshmen will take a college algebra course; some of them will take a pre-calculus or calculus course. Do they have "Get Ready" for grade level courses there?

We don't have "Get Ready" for grade level specifically for the college courses, but I think the college-level algebra, if you are going to do "Get Ready for Algebra One" or "Get Ready for Algebra Two," a combination of those would probably be a great support for starting a lot of college algebra-level math courses. They're just really going to build that foundational algebra content, the base of all algebra understanding, so really beneficial to pretty much any college course if you wanted to get some practice in.

I think that would be a great place to start!

Yeah, I mean, to your point, college algebra usually is pretty analogous to algebra two in a lot of places, sometimes even a combination of algebra one and algebra two. So, if you’re getting ready for those courses, you are likely to be getting ready for...

And what are the most advanced "Get Ready" courses?

The "Get Ready" courses start at third grade. They start at third grade, but that course includes second grade content and some first-grade content, and then it goes all the way to "Get Ready for Pre-Calculus," is the highest it goes up to. That course is going to include a lot of content from algebra one and algebra two and even a little bit of geometry.

Yeah, and so going back to the question, a lot of students will take a pre-calculus course, and the pre-calculus college course is pretty much the pre-calculus high school course. That would be a valuable thing too for them to take.

Let’s see... we already actually, Cindy Wright from Facebook asked the question that we just answered, which is what grade levels do the "Get Ready" courses cover, and she says we love Khan Academy!

Well, Cindy, we love you too!

Let’s see, we have... from Facebook, Annie Holford Thompson—"Is this math-specific? Anything for English and Language Arts?"

These "Get Ready" courses are math-specific, but we are also building our main ELA content, and so there is ELA content, even including now elementary and middle school, on the site. So there is great content for ELA practice, which would help you get ready for the school year, but they're not specifically "Get Ready for Grade Level" courses like we have right now in math.

This is something we've talked a lot about inside the organization, which is math and ELA are different. They have some similarities, but they're different in many ways. In math, you definitely have these skills that very clearly get built on as prerequisites for each other. While in ELA, there's your background knowledge; there's your lexile level that you can read at.

You can sometimes grok something or understand something - I use a science fiction term, you know, grok something from "Stranger in a Strange Land" to understand something deeply. Grok something at a higher reading level that has some background knowledge that you might not fully have; you can still sometimes engage in a text like that.

While in math, if you're looking at an equation that has a negative exponent in it and you don't understand negative exponents, you're just not going to... you're not really going to have a shot. So that's why these "Get Ready for Grade Level" courses are so relevant in math, especially.

Absolutely! The way the skills in math spiral throughout the years are really valuable to have those foundational skills!

Yep! So, let's see; there are more questions.

So, actually another question from Robin. Thanks! "Will this be for an online class? Do all students get the same exercises?"

Lindsey, I could take a stab at it, but I think the exercises are the same in each "Get Ready for Grade Level," but each student won't see the same items. So if two students are practicing "Get Ready for Ratios," they're both going to see the same skills, but they might see different specific questions.

Not yourself; that's how the thinking of the question is.

Well, that’s exactly right! You know, internally, when we talk about exercises, we’re talking about a bucket of items that are all addressing the same standard or addressing the same skill.

And one of the things—and a lot of folks don't realize—is that, you know, there are tools out there that will give you some practice, but they’re essentially five questions that everyone sees. If you tell your neighbor the answer to question number two is C, then they know the answer is C.

We spend a lot of time in resources, and Lindsey’s team especially, we make far more items than the student is likely to see. So that they can get as much practice as they need in those skills.

And to Lindsey’s point, students that are next to each other will be working on the same standards; they'll be working on the same skills. Not necessarily that they could go from beginning to end and do it in the same order, but very often when they do the mastery challenges, they’ll see different even skills that are being covered that are more relevant to what that student needs to work on.

And when they work on a given skill, the actual problems they see are very likely to be different than what their classmate sees. But as a teacher, you get a skills report, and then if you do things like assignments, you can understand which items gave your students the most difficult demo, which individual questions—which can also be really useful.

So, let's see. Similarly, I might add that the student was going to... If you're thinking about doing this in the summer versus the school year, if you did these in the summer, you would likely see different items than you saw in the school year, even the same student.

So, you would be able to use this multiple times and still see a variety of items, even for one single student.

Yep. Now it says, from YouTube, Simone Cruz asks, "Do you offer certificates that would help motivate the children after they complete the course?"

I don't know if we have certificates, but I do know that we're running a "Camp Khan" this summer, which is a program that's going to have different incentives and weekly learning objectives built around these "Get Ready for Grade Level" courses. It starts today—it actually launched today—but you can join any time between now and I believe it ends August 28th.

There's a webinar later in the week on Thursday about that, but there is a campaign around it that I believe will have some different incentives as students work through it.

Yeah, exactly! You know, "Camp Khan" is, you know, the "Get Ready for Grade Level" courses got launched at the end of last week. They're all live; everyone can do it. Then "Camp Khan" is really a way ideally if every child in the country, or the planet, or I guess the universe, were to start learning this summer, then everyone would be ready for grade level.

Frankly, they could finish the course and then start on their grade level course before they even get back to school.

And "Camp Khan," to your point, I'm very self-conscious, we overuse the whole Khan thing, but [Laughter] the—but "Camp Khan" is about that exactly. It's about motivating students and families to engage over the summer to learn, and it is focused on the "Get Ready for Grade Level" courses, which you and your team have really done an amazing job putting together.

It's useful outside of this COVID strangeness that we're dealing with, but it's especially useful right now when there's going to be a huge variance in students' learning.

So, let’s see. Andres Torres from YouTube asks, "Would we see in the future 'Get Ready' courses for college-level classes?"

I could take a stab at it. I mean, I think if this is well received, yeah, we would seriously think about it. You know, obvious calculus, stats, even a lot of the science courses—one could imagine a "Get Ready" for a course could be really, really valuable.

I don't know; anything to add to that, Lindsey?

Yeah, completely agree!

Yeah, absolutely! Let’s see, from Facebook, Mike Richie says, "I had my son take the fourth-grade curriculum challenge of the course challenge on your site, and he scored 97! It then had him answer six mastery questions, which he got right. Is it safe to say that I can move him on to the fifth-grade curriculum?"

I feel very comfortable if that's how well he did on the course challenge. I think he's probably ready to give fifth grade a try. Nothing is forever—he moves on to fifth grade, and if that's a real struggle, fourth grade is still there for him.

You know, we're always...what we’ve mastered and not changes all the time. We don't stay in a constant state of what we remember, so he could always go back and revisit fourth grade.

But I would feel very comfortable recommending he check out the fifth-grade content.

Yeah, and I completely agree with that. And Mike, if your child is doing that well in the fourth grade, I actually think I'd be intrigued. You could even start the fifth-grade course challenge as well. I wouldn't be surprised if he does quite well on that, and that can help your child accelerate to the skills in fifth grade that they need to focus on that they haven't learned yet, while some of it either they might already know or they might be able to intuit.

You know, they already know how to do three-digit multiplication. I don't think those...those might be the standards better than I do, Lindsey, but in theory, some of the things you might be able to intuit.

So, yeah, but your son or daughter, I think, is very, very ready.

So let's see, from Facebook, Matthew Tyler says, "We have used Khan Academy for years. We're grateful that you are still innovating. Great work!"

Well, Matthew, I will say, I mean, one of the fun things about having Lindsey here is I get a disproportionate amount of the credit, but it's great to see now the people other than Sal—of which most of Khan Academy is—we're over 200 folks who are doing a lot of the heavy lifting, most of the heavy lifting, for making all of this possible.

So, yes, and that's for you, Lindsey, as well!

So let's see, other questions here. For those of you who don't know what I'm doing, I have this little Google Doc below the window where I see Lindsey, where I'm seeing... So, Sofia Patel says, "How do I join Camp Khan?"

Our team put a little URL here; Felipe might be able to get it up on the screen, but it's khan.co/campkon2020.

Oh! There you go; see, is it up on the screen? A "Camp Khan" overview?

Well, it's khan.co/campcon2020, and I don't think capitalization matters, but at least on the URL I'm seeing, the "C" in "Camp" is capitalized and the "K" in "Khan" is capitalized. So khan.co/campcon2020. Hopefully, if you do a web search for it, you'll be able to find it!

Oh, and I've given the note: capitalization does matter! So khan.co/campcon2020.

See, are there other questions?

Oh, it’s easy!

So, Debbie Charlton from Facebook is asking, "Is Camp Khan any age level or just 12 years and above?"

Camp Khan, I believe, is at any age level. It's going to be built around the "Get Ready" courses, which started as "Get Ready for Third Grade." So, they should work for anybody getting ready for next school year in math!

Yeah, let's see; there's another course...And I actually think it's a lot of the mechanics are actually the motivation mechanics. It's really, I think, especially fun for younger students. I would say ages eight to 13 or 14 are probably the students who are going to get the most out of all the fun of "Camp Khan."

I would like to believe that also 14 or 15-year-olds or 16-year-olds would also enjoy it, but I would also like to believe that they don't need all the fun motivation because they're determined young adults to master the skills they need.

So, there’s one last question I see here about, "Do we have a course in differential equations?"

I'll just say we do have a course in differential equations—that's from Keshav Bhattarai. It does not have...our differential equations course right now is just videos; it does not have all of the interactive exercises and course challenges and mastery and everything that Lindsey's been talking about, but we do have it, and it's a little bit of an older course. I remember making it back in, probably, 2010. But it's there, and people still say that they find it useful, so hopefully, you do as well!

Let’s see... so, well, it looks like we're actually almost out of time. Well, Lindsey, what else does the math team foreshadow for us? What else might be coming down the pipeline?

Yeah, so the math team, we're always, you know, working on the existing courses, improving the content, thinking of new ways we can innovate to teach things, and different strategies we can use.

One thing that could be coming—we just heard about differential equations not having practice content. Currently, there's another course, multi-variable calculus, another one of our higher-level courses that currently is all articles and videos.

So learning, as you know, sort of learning components, but we are adding practice components to that. So now the videos will have practice alongside those videos, where you can do the videos and then check for your understanding and do the practice problems, interactive pieces as well.

So we are adding that to one of our college-level courses!

So, maybe another one soon.

Yeah, that's very exciting! Multi-variable calculus... And I do think this is maybe there's other resources in here. I think this is frankly the only place where you're going to be able to get mastery practice.

You already have the videos in multi-variable calculus, but it's going to give you as much practice as you need to understand that you've mastered it.

I'll throw out some other foreshadowing. You know, we have... Lindsey and her team have worked on things like learning plans for the back several months of last school year in the summer. We're definitely looking at: can we create learning plans, which are really... If you're doing "Get Ready for Grade Level" courses or grade-level courses, what are reasonable goals for a student to be? You know, what units should they complete by what date in order to be on pace?

So that's something that we are contemplating if we have the resources to be able to do.

I'll also throw out, and actually, Lindsey probably doesn't know about this. I always have my own little skunk work projects. I will do a plug! There's a side project; it's a Sal project right now. It's not officially Khan Academy, but maybe one day it will be if it gets off the ground.

We’re calling it schoolhouse.world. And the reason why I'm mentioning it is obviously you can learn on Khan Academy at your own time and pace. Use "Get Ready for Grade Level" courses, do the grade-level courses, but many of you are wondering what can I get tutoring—could is there a place where someone, a live person, could help me?

And schoolhouse.world is—it's a... it's called an alpha; it's a very nascent experimental project where people can sign up, and it'll pair people who can run group tutoring sessions on different topics on Khan Academy with students who need it. They're starting their phonies—many of you all should go to schoolhouse.world, and there’s a little registration form, and they're kind of letting people in as we have enough teachers and we have enough students.

They're focused right now on calculus because it seems like over the summer there are a lot of students who need help in calculus who are preparing for the next school year.

So especially in calculus, there are going to be 22 classes for free by volunteer teachers, volunteer tutors in calculus this week. So go to schoolhouse.world if you want that!

And obviously, you could imagine a future where many people are on schoolhouse.world, and we're going to be able to draw more bridges between the Khan Academy world and that. But I'll throw that out as well.

So, Lindsey, thanks so much for joining, and I'm very excited for, you know, hopefully a lot of people are going to learn from the work that you and the team have done.

Thanks so much, Sal! Thanks for having me!

Well, thanks everyone for joining! As you can see, the art of management and leadership is just hiring people that are smarter than yourself. And if I were to praise myself, I think I'm relatively good at that!

So, thanks so much for joining this live stream, and I look forward to seeing all of y'all tomorrow!