Daily Live Homeroom With Sal: Wednesday, March 25

Hi everyone! Sal Khan here for our daily live stream. Just as a reminder of what this is for some of y'all who might be new: as the school closures have kind of rolled out around not just the country but the world, we realized that there's a lot of demand for folks to also feel a little bit more connected to each other.

There's just a lot of information going around regarding the school closures. There's a lot of materials that we're putting out, and it would be nice to have a place where we can all connect at least once a day to make sure that we can answer each other's questions and get some of those announcements out. We're calling this something of a national or global homeroom, and the whole point is to ask your questions.

I have fellow team members who are looking at the questions you're asking on Facebook, in YouTube, and on Twitter, and we will get to them. We're also going to be bringing in some guests. Now, one thing I do like to remind folks is Khan Academy is a not-for-profit. We are funded by philanthropic donations. It costs a lot more money than you might think to create a platform that can serve hundreds of millions of people; it kind of is much more than me. We're over 200 full-time employees, thousands of volunteers, and just our server costs are many, many millions of dollars.

It looks like our traffic because of school closures is 2x and approaching 3x of what it normally would be, so we definitely need your help. I want to do a quick thank you to some corporate partners who have stepped up very quickly to help us fund some of that gap, although we need more help from donations of all sizes. But special thanks to Bank of America, AT&T, Google.org, and Novartis who have been some of the first to step up. We need more help from you and from others.

Now, the focus of today's livestream is actually how do we help teachers and parents get set up so that they can help their students? We've been talking about that pretty much in every livestream so far. I've talked about these webinars that we've run in the previous few weeks. We've talked about some of the resources we've put out, like the daily schedule. All of this is available if you just go to Khan Academy.org. You'll see on our homepage; you'll also see a little banner regardless of where you are in Khan Academy.org that will point to some of these resources.

Peter, our professional learning at Khan Academy, Megan is going to join us. This will be a great chance, and everyone can ask questions—students can ask questions, parents, and teachers. But especially we're going to start with some of the questions from parents and teachers on how do you get set up? How do you look at student dashboards? What are best practices? Things like that.

As I wait for Megan to get on, I will give a few more announcements above and beyond this livestream. At Khan Academy, we're trying to see what other supports we can give you. So yesterday was the first time that we ran a virtual classroom for algebra students. These are students in Algebra 1 or Algebra 2, and this was at 10 a.m. Pacific. We did it yesterday, and we were able to cover some examples and answer questions about systems of equations.

Tomorrow, we're going to do it again. You can see an example of what it looks like. It really did feel like a classroom, and I think there were about a thousand students. We're all experimenting with new things, and I was able to answer a lot of the students' questions. Tomorrow we’re going to do it again.

We got a lot of positive feedback from it. So on Thursday, once again at 10 a.m. Pacific, tomorrow's topic is actually going to be factoring and graphing quadratics. It's not just me giving a lecture; we’re going to give you a problem to work on for students to work on. They're going to be able to fill out surveys on what they think the answer is, they’re going to be able to vote on questions for me to answer. So we’re going to try to make it feel as much like a live interactive classroom as possible.

With that, I'd love to bring on Megan, and we could start answering some questions. Megan, are you there? Oh hey, hi Fallon, hi everyone! How are you?

Good, good, good! Maybe a good place to start is I just talked about the algebra 1 and algebra 2 virtual classrooms, but we’re also leading webinars for teachers and parents. If you could tell us a little bit about those?

Absolutely, Sal. We know that this is a pretty chaotic time for everyone—students, parents, teachers—and we are trying to offer opportunities for parents and teachers, as well as students, to ask their questions and find a space where they can share some of the things going through their heads right now and how we might be able to best support them through this transition.

Over the past couple of weeks, we've had a couple of webinars around getting started on Khan Academy as both a parent and a teacher. Then we ran one last Friday on tips for effective remote teaching and learning, and the recordings for all of those are available on the site, along with some supporting resources.

Coming up in the next couple of days, this afternoon we have office hours again for teachers to get their questions answered by some of our ambassadors who are really exceptional. Then we have another webinar tomorrow from one of our ambassadors talking about some of the best ways for teachers to get effective results using Khan Academy. We'll be looking to add another parent webinar next week to help parents get started with both Khan Academy and Khan Academy Kids.

Awesome! Thanks, Megan. Maybe just a starting question that we've gotten many versions of what I'm about to ask you, but a lot of teachers and parents are just feeling a little overwhelmed. Schools closed with not a lot of notice, not a lot of planning—this is a new frontier for all of us. Speaking to a teacher, and to some degree a parent now who is feeling overwhelmed, how should they even think about remote learning, and what steps might they want to take?

I think that's a really key point, Sal, is that a lot of people are feeling overwhelmed, and there wasn't a lot of time for preparation. Teachers in particulars are preparers. I was a classroom teacher for nine years, and I couldn't imagine the shock of transitioning from being in the classroom, brick-and-mortar space with my students, to jumping fully remote so quickly.

One thing that I've heard from a lot of teachers and a lot of parents is: take a deep breath! It's not the expectation that you are going to cover everything you could cover in your classroom right now. It's really important to cut yourself and your students some slack and just know that the fact that you are taking the endeavor of getting them active learning and focusing on some key concepts is really great.

Taking time to embrace the emotional impact for both you as a parent or a teacher and your students is important. Build in some time into your time with students to reflect with them. You shared some of those schedules—take some time to reflect on what's going on right now and incorporate that into the learning experience.

I'd say the other piece that I would really focus on is communication. I fear sometimes that working remotely with students and teachers gives the illusion that there's less need to communicate, but in fact, we really need more communication right now. Taking the time to either connect live with students or send a message to students, finding opportunities to create that human connection, even if you're not in the same physical space, is so important right now.

I’m getting a question here from Debbie Charlton, who’s actually one of the Khan Academy teacher ambassadors. Debbie is asking, “How can you assign content to specific students based on what they have not worked on yet but others may have?”

So we have the situation where, I guess, always kids might be at different levels and might be working at different things, and to some degree we support that. But how does a teacher maybe assign that, or should they assign that? How do you think about that?

Yeah, I think it's a good question that we think about not just in this time but especially now where you have the additional challenge of not being able to see that student. What is really great about Khan Academy is the ability to assign these broad mastery goals.

When we think about what are the students trying to accomplish for the year, are they trying to work on Algebra 1? Are they trying to complete third-grade math or maybe high school biology? Our mastery extends beyond math, and I think starting with that mastery goal allows students to work at their own time and pace and helps them identify areas of opportunity.

We have some resources right on the site, right from that banner when you get to Khan Academy, that will connect you on how to set up a mastery goal. Any teacher could leverage that—it's a really good starting point. Then once you're able to see students' progress, we see maybe after three to five sessions of working towards that mastery goal, the teacher reporting will allow teachers to identify growth opportunities—skills that students might need additional support with.

From there, there's an assign button, and teachers can assign to individual students, small groups of students, or the entire class with outlined exercises to identify and support learning in that gap area. So the short version is: assign a mastery goal and use the data to make supporting assignments. We have again some resources right on our website that walk teachers through this, and some specifically to support in that remote learning situation.

We have another kind of related question also from Debbie, which is a question I think many teachers are asking: “How does it work with Google Classroom?” We just talked about assignments and to what degree should kids, who are at different levels, be supported? What support or integration do we or don’t we have with Google Classroom, or how would you use it?

It's a good question, and we do integrate with Google Classroom. The best thing about that is that, as we know, a lot of teachers are establishing their classrooms on Khan Academy now. I can empathize with the setup and roster management with students.

If your students are already comfortable with Google Classroom, you can connect Google Classroom directly to Khan Academy. You don't have to add a new roster; you don’t have to create a new class. As you set up your class, there's an option that says “Connect with Google Classroom,” and it will import your roster directly.

In a time where students are already having to learn so many new tools, and we want them to focus more on learning the content than learning new technology, by integrating Khan Academy with your Google Classroom account, students can access that in the same way they've already been using it. So, you're taking a step of stress off of you and off of your students.

Awesome! Then we’re getting a lot of questions here. One of them, this is from Sonal Zhu. She asks, “As a parent, where to start on Khan Academy as a roadmap for a seventh grader? Are there live classes Khan Academy plans to offer?”

I could take maybe the first stab at that one. As many of y'all know, we published schedules for students of different age categories, and we do have one that a seventh grader would fall in.

I think one of the things we are thinking about is can we start, especially now that it looks like some of the school closures might be longer and maybe go through the summer? We are trying to think about maybe we could create some goals or learning plans for students, but those haven't been released yet.

We're going to try to do everything we can with the resources we have in terms of live classes. These live streams, these webinars, these classrooms we're doing, we started with algebra. This is really just an experiment. We started the first one yesterday; we're going to do another one tomorrow. We're going to see where this goes, what capabilities we have on our side to do more and more.

I don’t want to jump the gun on it because we are very resource-constrained right now, but I would love to figure out ways to support middle school students as well. Algebra, we picked because that's a major area that a lot of folks foundationally need. But obviously, middle school math, pre-algebra, and other subjects as well might be interesting.

Let’s see, we have a question from Facebook. It says, “Our school wants us to filter everything through Google Classroom, so it's more of a one-stop shop. I'd love to be able to link their assignments straight to Google from Khan; any chance that could be available?”

That's essentially very similar to what you had just answered. The simple answer is yes! While we know it's a common ask for teachers, we have heard that even prior to this remote learning transition.

We find that connecting with Google Classroom allows you to easily bring in the roster. Students can log in to Khan Academy simply by using Google single sign-on, and they'll see their assignments the moment they log in right on their learner homepage. That way, students don’t have to go digging around for that. So while it's not a direct connection to posting the assignments in Google Classroom, it does make it much easier for the students right now.

Thanks, Megan! That’s super helpful. Let’s see, there are a couple of questions here, a little bit more student-facing, but we could try to answer a couple of these quickly. From YouTube, Kara's Alexander says, “How's Khan Academy helping out with AP exams?”

Well, Kara, we’ve had content for many of the core AP exams even before this crisis hit—AP Calculus, AP Stats, AP Biology, Chemistry, Physics, Micro, Macroeconomics, CS Principles, American History, Civics, and Government. I think I got all of them; I might have missed art history. So we’ve always had that content that you can learn at your own time and pace—to use the unit test, the course challenges, the master challenges to make sure that you’ve really digested a lot of that material.

Even before this crisis hit, historically, as we’ve gotten closer to AP exams, we have tried to run some webinars and live streams for students right when they’re trying to prepare. We’re going to try to explore that for this year as well.

Let’s see… other questions on YouTube. Courageous Cuber says, “Is it okay for me to study physics in seventh grade?”

My two cents: yeah, if you're ready to study physics in seventh grade, no one should stop you. That’s great! What I would say is, to do physics on Khan Academy, we have the algebra-based physics. You should definitely know the basics of algebra, which includes quadratics, factoring quadratics, and the basics of trigonometry like sine, cosine, and tangent.

If you know those things, you’re actually ready for high school-level physics. If you don’t know those things, you could jump in and learn those particular units, and actually, you’ll have the math background to engage on the physics side.

Let’s see… well, Astro Jaden on YouTube has a pretty big question. “What was the origin of Khan Academy? How did you come up with the idea of creating a nonprofit organization?”

So I'll answer it as concisely as I can because I’ve been known to talk about this. For many of y'all who know, it started as a project with my family members. I kept thinking, “What more tools could I make for my family members?" It’s eerily similar to the situation we're in now where we're just like, “Okay, there’s a big need—what tools can we create?”

This was back with me and one cousin, and then more word got around my family: “Free tutoring? What’s going on?” So I started writing the exercises on Khan Academy; an early version—that’s what Khan Academy was initially all about.

It was a friend that recommended I make videos to supplement those exercises. I thought that was a silly idea. You know, I often say that I thought, “YouTube is for cats playing piano.” But I had an idea; that wasn’t mine! I gave it a shot, and that took a life of its own. By 2009-2010, I had hundreds of thousands of people using it, and I had trouble focusing on my day job, where I was an analyst at an investment firm.

I sat down with my wife, who said, “Hey, maybe we should start this off as a nonprofit. Hopefully, we’ll find people who could donate,” and I took the plunge. The whole reason I wanted to do it is as a not-for-profit.

I live in Silicon Valley, and people were offering to fund it as a for-profit business, and for this particular role in society, it felt like the wrong thing to do.

There’s nothing wrong with for-profit businesses, but for something in education, where you don’t want to make it based on who has the ability to pay, you want to help level the playing field. You want to have universal access. If someone wants to learn, there should be no friction to it.

That was the point. We set up this mission: free world-class education for anyone, anywhere. It was somewhat delusional, eleven years ago, for a guy operating out of a walk-in closet. But over the last ten years, with the help of this really incredible team at Khan Academy and the many thousands of people who’ve donated to this effort—and we need more help—we’ve been able to make, I think, a bit of a dent and really scale to a lot of folks.

I think this whole school crisis due to COVID-19 highlights the importance of us existing. The work that this team has been able to do shows why it was important that we’re not-for-profit. There’s a lot going on in tech, and a lot of people are doing really great things, but in this time of school closures, you need something that is universally accessible.

Part of that is, it has to be free. That’s where we are fairly unique; truly free—so no shady stuff with ads, no “kind of free” but then there might be some payment for better things, no “we’ll sell your data” type of free. None of that! Truly free and not doing anything shady with data is important right now.

You have to have a breadth and depth of subjects. We have gone into many amounts and many areas where there might not be a business model, so other EdTech players haven’t gone there. That’s why we’re able to go from early learning through elementary, middle, high school—core, college in math, reading, writing, sciences, etc.

Because of its nonprofit nature, it brings more people to the effort, and that’s why we’re able to have forty translated versions of Khan Academy, most of which are done by volunteers around the world.

Thanks for the question! I could talk more about it if folks are interested. So let’s see… other questions that we're getting here.

This is from Facebook. Amy asked, “If I'm using Khan Academy for high school seniors, what ground rules do I want to set?”

Megan, why don't you take a stab at that?

I might have some ideas although I haven’t raised high school seniors just yet. We had a couple of ideas from the webinar the other day that I think would be comfortable with but might not put into this framing of remote learning. Usually, at the beginning of the year, a teacher will set classroom norms for their students, and what we find to be most effective is including your students in that conversation about classroom norms.

You know, things like raising your hand or what process to follow when you’re going to use Chromebooks in the classroom. The same type of thing applies to remote learning. You have to re-establish norms with your students about what your expectations are and what behaviors are appropriate for when you're having a remote learning session.

If you’re thinking about seniors—and I taught high school science, so I can relate to your seniors for sure—I would think about taking the time to set learning norms and remote classroom norms with your seniors. What are the best practices for your students and for your new classroom setup?

By including your students in that conversation, they’re more likely to hold each other accountable and follow those rules because they felt like they were a part of the process. Establishing those norms for you and your students makes everyone feel a little bit more comfortable in the space.

Salim, did you have something to add to that as well?

No, I think that's exactly right! You know, this is a time especially for high school seniors where, as I wrote about in one world schoolhouse, a lot of what we call teenage angst I believe actually comes from, in most of human history, by the time someone was 13 or 14 years old, they were proto-adults and were given significant responsibilities in most of human history for their clan or tribe.

In modern society, for 13, 14, or 15-year-olds, we don't give them a lot of responsibility beyond themselves—we treat them oftentimes like children. I think especially for high school seniors, as you mentioned, Megan, the more agency and ownership we can give them—if it’s authentic, they feel like they have a voice in it—they're setting ground rules for themselves.

I've taught high school seniors, and I've found that when you say, “Hey, what norms would you want to have?” and how will you enforce it as a group, kids as young as 12 and 13 step up to that challenge.

They come up with better and stricter norms they’re willing to enforce than I would have put on them, and I think that’s definitely true of high school seniors—especially in this time that everyone’s in their own “walk-in closet” so to speak. Everyone's socially distancing; it’s even more important to rely on their individual agency, so that makes a ton of sense with what you said, Megan.

Let’s see… there’s a question from Facebook by Judy: “Can students retake quizzes and tests as many times as they want, or can I put a limit to it?”

I'll take the first attempt at that. The simple answer is yes, they can take quizzes and tests as many times as they want. And you know, that's an actually important principle that we wanted at Khan Academy.

It would have been a lot easier for us to just make quizzes that you take once and you're done, and that’s just your score. But we’re strong believers in mastery learning. If you get an 80% on something that shouldn’t be like your permanent state for the rest of your life—that you’re a C student in factoring quadratics or photosynthesis?

You should have as many attempts as you need to take it—but every time you take it, it's actually going to be a different quiz. We’ve written many items, more than most people probably realize, to have that capability.

We want students to say, “Oh, I got a 70% that time! Let me take another attempt and see if I can improve my score.” They could try to learn a little better and then try to improve my score. So, I guess there might be situations—but in general, we favor kids taking as many times as possible.

Any things to add to that?

Sure! One thing I’ll add that teachers find useful: while we do encourage students to try and try again, we also want to see how students are progressing. If you choose to make a quiz an assignment, you do have the opportunity to look at how students answered questions on their first attempt and their last attempt.

If you want to see how they did on the first time out of the gate, you can look specifically at those answers in our teacher reports and then look at where they ended up, so you can see their progress over time.

If you wanted a snapshot of their first attempt, you have access to that data, but we do want to continue to encourage students to learn and grow. So, exactly what Sal said—there is no mechanism by which to limit the attempts they make, but you as a teacher can still see that information.

So, it’s in some cases, it’s the best of both worlds!

Thanks, Megan, that’s super helpful. Let’s see, we have more questions here. This one is from YouTube by Alga Marble Racer: "Sal, how do you make money from Khan Academy? It is a nonprofit."

That’s a good question, and when we think about—huh. The simple answer, for those who don’t know, a lot of people say, “Isn’t Google nonprofit because it’s free?” And free and nonprofit don’t mean the same thing—although Khan Academy is both of those things.

A lot of for-profit companies like Google have actually been great supporters of Khan Academy. Even in the early days, they were one of our first funders. They’re able to offer their services for free, but they make money in other ways—through ads or other types of things.

What makes a nonprofit different from a for-profit is that Google is owned by shareholders; they have owners of the company. If you buy some Google stock, you are one of those owners of Google. Khan Academy has no ownership. I have no ownership in Khan Academy; I have as much ownership as anyone listening does.

It’s a public good, and the way that I and the whole team here live is that we do get salaries from Khan Academy, and that is governed by a board. So no one owns Khan Academy. There’s a board of directors; the board is made up of some of those folks who are representative of some of the major donors to Khan Academy. Some of them are other people who are experts in education or in other fields, and they’re the ones that govern.

They can hire or fire me; they set my salary, and similarly, they set the budget for the whole organization. So we take salaries. Now, where does that money come from? It comes from philanthropic donations.

Every time I talk about the budget of Khan Academy, I get a little bit of a cortisol boost of stress because it’s a large budget, but it’s small compared to the impact that it’s having. Khan Academy’s budget is about sixty million dollars a year, but we impact probably this year hundreds of millions of students. Every year in past years, we’ve had on the order of 15, 16, 17, 18 million students come every month, and that's been growing.

Over the last couple of weeks, that’s been growing 2x and 3x, and so we do need that support. We do need those donations from corporations, from individuals; as small as you can see on the screen, $3.00 makes a difference for us. If you are in a position to benefit from Khan Academy and support it so that other people can benefit from Khan Academy, please, please do so. We really appreciate that.

Other questions? One from YouTube: teacher question comes from Catherine Carey. “If we want to supplement learning with Khan Academy with our own materials so students can see some of us, what’s the best way to deliver our content electronically?”

I could throw out a few ideas, and I'm curious what Megan thinks. One thing we've been encouraging with the schedules, especially at this time of social distancing, is that kids can work asynchronously on something like Khan Academy. It would be amazing if teachers can organize video conferences using Hangout, using Skype, or Zoom, so that they can answer questions and do things analogous to what we've been doing with some of these live classrooms.

But obviously, you could do it with your students. There’s also a world where you can create materials yourself at a whiteboard or use a digital tablet, the way I have here at Khan Academy. I know my children's school is doing that, so there’s a lot of work that my kids are doing. Like a writing assignment: teachers often make a video putting it on their LMS—using Google Classroom or something else—so that the students know, “Okay, here’s my checklist for the day. Oh, I got to watch a video by Mickey.”

One of my sons’ teachers is focusing on how to analyze certain forms of text. Here’s the assignment, then he does it; then he submits it on the LMS. But it would be really cool! I’ve been seeing some incredible teachers do even at my children’s school—they’ve been having touchpoints roughly at least once a day with students so they can ask questions.

Megan, do you have any other ideas there?

I would, you know, hugely endorse everything you just said because, as you mentioned, in this time of social distancing, having that social experience is so much more vital to students' lives every day. They’re used to being around each other and leaning on their teacher to share parts of their day or to ask questions.

So I think everything you mentioned is really wonderful, and if teachers have the opportunity, I do like to recommend that along with the live experience make sure that it can be recorded because we know that students just as much as adults are struggling with schedules right now.

Maybe they're responsible for watching younger siblings, or they only have access to a device later in the day. If you are going to connect, try and make a recording as well so that all of your students have access to that material.

The other piece I might recommend is that if you are making your own assignments, if you can do them in something like Google Docs or Google Sites and allow students to leave comments for each other—that could be one of those reflection activities that, you know, Sal, you’ve offered in our daily schedules.

Students can leave positive, reinforcing comments for each other so that they’re still connecting beyond just that one moment.

That’s a great idea! I hadn’t thought about that—collective journaling, where everyone has a little section and not only do you write yourself but you can see how everyone else’s day is. I love that idea, Megan!

So time flies when you’re having fun. We have created a ton of questions here that I wish I could get to, but the good thing is we’re doing this every day! So come back tomorrow at 12 p.m. Pacific time, 3 p.m. Eastern or whatever time zone you might be in.

Thanks for joining, and thanks, Megan, for joining. You know, as I say every day, these live streams are a way for us to stay connected in this time of social distancing. The silver lining through this crisis that we’re all going through is that we’re all going through this together. I get a lot of energy doing this, and I’m sure I speak for Megan and the entire Khan Academy team.

It’s really an honor for us to be of service in this time of need, and we want to do everything possible for every teacher listening, every parent listening, every student listening—to make sure you feel supported and you feel connected. Thank you so much, and see you tomorrow!