Khan Academy Ed Talks featuring Ben Gomes - Thursday, April 22

Hello and welcome to Ed Talks with Khan Academy, where we talk to influential people in the education space. Today, we are happy to welcome Ben Gomes, who's the Senior Vice President of the Learning and Education organization at Google.

Before we get into talking to him, I want to remind you that we are a non-profit here at Khan Academy, and a lot of our work is possible because of donations from folks like you. So we encourage you, if you are in a place to do so, to find our site and give what you can to keep supporting our work.

In addition, as the pandemic has happened, we have needed some additional support to be able to continue to provide the education experiences to students who need them. We want to specifically recognize corporations who have provided that support, including Bank of America, AT&T, Google.org, Novartis, Fastly, and General Motors. Thank you!

In addition to this live video feed, you can also get an audio version of our Ed Talks and Homeroom with Sal in podcast form wherever you find your podcasts. Look for Homeroom with Sal, and you will find us there.

So with that, I want to welcome our guest today, Ben Gomes, as I said, the Senior Vice President of Education and Learning at Google. Ben, welcome!

Ben Gomes: Thank you for having me here, Christian. I also just want to take the opportunity, as I saw the intro, to thank Khan Academy for the amazing work you've been doing for so long and especially during the last year. It's just wonderful.

Christian: Well, thank you, and we are happy to do it. Let's start off. Tell us a little bit about your journey. How have you come to lead the Learning and Education group at Google? What's been your path to get here?

Ben Gomes: You know, if I think about a lot of my career, a lot of it has been about learning and curiosity. You know, I spent 20 years in search at Google. When I thought about search, a lot of it for me was about being able to answer that curiosity of the moment, being able to get that answer really quickly. That stimulates more curiosity, hopefully in the long run.

After working on search for 20 years, I wanted to focus more on learning and education across Google’s products. If you think about Google as a whole, Google's mission is to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful. A lot of information is used for learning and is used for changing what people can do in the long run. A subset of that is education, where it's structured, and you get a credential at the end of it.

There's a lot of aspects of Google’s products that can be used for that purpose, whether it's search or YouTube or Classroom or G Suite and Workspace. So I was really interested in that and I think it's a core part of Google’s mission. For me, it was following a path that I've always been interested in, and taking it to a deeper level.

Christian: Got it. Great! Tell us a little bit about your education journey. Were there any particular teachers who were particularly influential to you in your success?

Ben Gomes: Definitely! Well, first of all, my mom. She was a school teacher and taught geography, which is a subject I don’t think is taught in the United States. But she was really influential in stimulating curiosity because she'd take us out into an area and then say, "How do you think this landscape came to be?" It got you thinking about how this could have happened. You may not know the exact answer, but just that process of thinking was really great.

There were other teachers in my school. There was a priest who really influenced my thinking about the importance of service and serving others. And there was a chemistry teacher who not just influenced me but a whole generation of students in my school to go into the sciences. He was a disciplinarian, which is not common today, but his passion for chemistry was so evident. He encouraged us to do projects and play, and a lot of us came to love chemistry and through chemistry, to love science because of that.

Christian: That's great! So thinking about the field of education and the intersection with technology, technology is changing obviously very quickly, but we've seen some huge advances. How do you think we can bring those together and what opportunities are there because of the improvements in technology we've seen?

Ben Gomes: Well, I think we need to figure out how to help teachers in all kinds of different ways. The key things that we have tried to do at Google is to understand where we can help teachers and learners actually focus on the learning and teaching task at hand. That’s a core part of how we want to think about the use of technology in this space: as a tool to help people—whether it's the teachers or the students—to get what they're trying to do done.

Tools like Classroom are structured around trying to make the teacher's workflow process and the student's workflow process easier in giving out assignments, quizzes, and all these sorts of things. There are also more complex ways in which you can begin to use technology in your domains, but the first aspect of it is trying to figure out what teachers need—what is the need of the day that we can actually provide using technology.

So I think it starts with the teacher and what they need, and then it proceeds from there to the tools that need to be built to satisfy their needs.

Christian: That's such a good point. We often see technology coming in to tell teachers what they need as opposed to asking them. How are you going about finding out what teachers need?

Ben Gomes: It's a great question! In an ideal world, having taken on this role, I would have loved to go into classrooms and actually ask teachers in person. But I took on this job in the middle of COVID, where that's not been a possibility. However, we do get a lot of user feedback from teachers. We have a lot of forums with teachers and so on, and we use that really strongly to prioritize what we're working on.

That feedback coming from teachers is something we can't ignore. We can't satisfy all the needs that they have, but we prioritize based on what they are telling us is most important to them—what causes them the most problems and what would help them the most in solving those problems.

Christian: That makes sense. So what are some of the things that you see your group at Google working on in the future?

Ben Gomes: So, there are some very interesting products. First of all, there are further generations of Classroom. We just announced 50 new features a couple of months ago, and we are still in the process of rolling those out. Some have rolled out already, and some will be rolled out soon.

Additionally, we have an app called Read Along, which is used to help children learn to read. What it does is speech recognition and voice synthesis so that a child can receive feedback on whether they are reading text correctly or not. We're working together with the non-profit called Pratham to try and change outcomes in literacy levels for children. We've been able to see improvement in literacy in a short time period with this non-profit working with this tool to help improve outcomes.

I think there are a lot of different ways in which we can begin to use technology more deeply in the classroom, helping the student get feedback, and helping the teacher assign and manage lessons effectively.

Christian: One of the things we can think about technology doing is maybe helping expand the classroom out into the world. Do you think there are opportunities there?

Ben Gomes: Yes! The role of technology today has changed significantly. When computers first started, they were very good at doing things that humans were terrible at doing—large computations and complicated mathematics. But they were terrible at doing things we are capable of, like understanding what a chair is. That was an unsolved computer vision problem for a long time.

Today, the technology is beginning to do things like that. Recently, I got interested in botany, and during COVID, I would go for walks and began to think about the plants and trees around me. There's an app called Google Lens that allows you to take a picture of a plant and it tells you what it is.

Ten or five years ago, this just didn’t work very well. Now, it does. You can look at a plant and begin to figure out what it is. It connects you to the real world, and I think this can be very useful in the classroom. For example, our use of augmented reality models in search allows students to visualize complex subjects, like the skeleton or parts of the body, in a context where they might not have access to actual specimens in their classrooms.

Christian: That makes sense. We have a couple of questions coming in. We have an interesting question from Susanna Garcia Dominguez on YouTube. She wonders, "In that Google is the backbone of our internet experience, are people getting smarter?"

Ben Gomes: It’s a really interesting question! Here's my perspective: When I use search, there are times in the past when I would hit a wall in what I needed to know to take the next step. But today, I can ask that question and get an answer quickly and decide whether I want to take that interest further. It allows me to develop curiosity and exploration that helps my mind develop differently than if I had to always find an expert or a book.

Having access to information means we can follow our curiosity, which makes it easier to learn. I think this fosters a continuous curiosity, which is vital for lifelong learning.

Christian: It's interesting—we had a guest yesterday who's a cognitive scientist, and we were also talking about curiosity. He mentioned it can be powerful but also fragile, often fading as we grow older. He discussed how we are curious about things we think will help us learn something new about things we already know. This strikes me as related to using the internet to build knowledge. Does this resonate with you?

Ben Gomes: Very much so! I think that sense of wonder about the world around us can inspire us in the moment and lead us to something that lasts longer.

Christian: I’m going to shift gears a little. We have a question from Lek Menkowitz—a suggestion that you should talk to teachers worldwide, not only in the U.S. The learning and teaching process nowadays is less focused on assignments and quizzes.

How are you thinking about working with teachers globally or internationally?

Ben Gomes: It's really important to us, and we actually do have forums that reach out worldwide. From a personal perspective, I’ve always been interested in education in the context of India, where I grew up. During COVID, learning has been experienced differently in different places, and we are aware of that.

We're working with different countries, like Indonesia, to make Classroom useful in that context. We also work in India with things like Read Along. There are many different needs in different contexts, and we're thinking about a range of needs and what we can build to satisfy broad needs around the world, as well as specialized needs in particular places.

Christian: That different context is so important. They mentioned the importance of tests and quizzes, which vary significantly in different education systems. How do you think about assembling information together to build your knowledge base?

Ben Gomes: I think I’m acutely aware of the differences having come from a different educational system myself. We’re looking at education in various countries to understand what is happening, and what the needs are, in many places the education system is policy-driven. So we need to look at this on a country-by-country basis.

Christian: Got it. That makes sense. Here’s a different question from Jennifer Zhao on Facebook: What do you think are key skills students should learn to be ready for the future?

Ben Gomes: At the end of the day, the future is changing at a faster and faster pace. One of the key skills I think is getting comfortable with learning, which comes back to curiosity. If learning is self-driven and driven by curiosity, it becomes fun. This enables you to continue to learn over time.

So, the key skill is the ability to continue to learn. Foundational skills like language, mathematics, and sciences will always be important. Beyond that, different skills will be necessary over time and will be hard to predict, so being flexible and adaptable is really important to thrive in the future.

Christian: One more concern about the future is equity and leveling the playing field. Is there a role for technology there?

Ben Gomes: There are lots of ways in which we’re thinking about this. For example, during COVID, many places lacked internet access or high-speed connections. We have been working on making our apps available offline so that people can work when they’re not connected.

We're also working with the Indonesian government on data availability and making more Chromebooks available. We're focused on making sure the basic sets of educational tools are more broadly available, which is important for ensuring education works for everyone.

Christian: Absolutely. Do you think there are concerns as we begin to use more machine learning and AI? Are we just replicating our existing biases in these new forms, and how can we ensure that we're not doing that?

Ben Gomes: That's a really important question. We work to ensure that we build models that do not reflect biases in society. It's complex and involves both research and deployment components, and many efforts are ongoing in various areas. This is definitely an area of concern that a lot of people are paying deep attention to.

Christian: As you think about your team and building it out, what skills and capabilities do you look for as you're building your own teams?

Ben Gomes: I look for passion about the topic. Any endeavor has difficulties, and having that passion helps people get through those challenges and keep their larger goals in mind.

In the context of education, I want to understand what teachers need. Similarly, in different areas like Google Scholar, we try to understand what researchers need. The humility to understand what people need helps us serve those needs better.

Christian: So you're looking for folks who have that user-centric mindset.

Ben Gomes: Yes! Google has always focused on the user, and everything else follows from that.

Christian: One more question from YouTube—Susanna Garcia Dominguez asks, "What sacrifices have you made in your own journey to get where you are today?"

Ben Gomes: It’s an interesting question. I think I've been very fortunate in my life in some of the choices I made. I did choose to go into computer science when it wasn't as widely recognized.

I often think of the sacrifices of others being far greater than my own, especially my parents and teachers. I feel I’ve benefited from what other people have done, and I feel a need to serve others as a result of that.

Christian: Tell me more about how computer science was viewed when you started out—how did you pursue it even though it wasn't that popular?

Ben Gomes: When I started, many people encouraged me to go into medicine or law. But my interest was in building things, and that aspect of engineering appealed to me. The pleasure of creating something doesn’t go away and can play a role all through your life.

Christian: What advice would you have for learners just starting out, thinking about their future education and careers?

Ben Gomes: A breadth of interest has served me well. I found what was interesting in various areas as I began working at Google. Pursuing what piques your curiosity makes learning fun and not just a task. So, I would say find what interests you and pursue that since it will yield benefits in the short and long term.

Christian: Great! That seems like good advice for us to end on. Thank you so much for joining us today, we appreciate having you.

Ben Gomes: Thank you so much, Christian, for having me here.

Christian: Great! And to all of our guests, thanks for joining us today. To everyone out there listening, we will see you next time!