Office Hours With Sal: Friday, March 20. Livestream From Homeroom

Is there a lag? Okay, stand by. Here we go.

Hello! I think we are up now. So, uh, thanks for joining our, uh, morning live stream here at Khan Academy. We're calling it something of a homeroom, a national homeroom, or international homeroom, I guess.

You know, every day we are trying, uh, different types of technology, so we're trying new technology today. Hopefully, it works out, but definitely bear with us. I think we've definitely improved from earlier this week when I was operating from my not-so-great Wi-Fi. But, but things have improved. So, you know, thanks for joining. For those of y'all, uh, this is the first day that you're joining this homeroom. It's really a way for all of us to connect.

As I'm sure many of you know and are experiencing, uh, we now have over 40 million students in America who are now, uh, not in physical school. They are trying to learn from home, and we have approaching a billion kids around the world who are in that situation. Over the last few, well really over the last decade, Khan Academy has inadvertently been building things that can hopefully help folks navigate this school closure situation.

This is a very sub-optimal situation, but we have, over the years, created things like Khan Academy Kids for early learners—that's for ages three through six—covers the Head Start standards all the way through first grade in reading, writing, math, and social-emotional learning. Then I guess you could say the main Khan Academy, whether you're on the website or you're on our app, it goes for sure all the way in math through elementary, middle, and high school, and even some of the core of college.

A lot of people associate us with videos; it's not just videos. In fact, most of what we put resources to are interactive exercises that have solutions to every problem. Students should never be able to run out of practice. They get feedback; there's game mechanics to make sure they really master the concepts. There's data and reporting for teachers or parents if they want to help the students progress.

We've recently launched a beta, which is kind of a first draft version of our English and language arts—it's not quite as rich as what we have on the math side, but the exercise items I think are quite good. That goes from second through eighth grade. And then, as you get into high school, not only do we have the math but we also have the sciences—biology, chemistry, physics, economics, computer science.

For those of you in middle school, I actually highly recommend high school biology. I think you have the math background to handle it, and it's very relevant to the world that we're in today. We also have SAT practice in reading, writing, and math, and that's an official partnership with the SAT, so we're with the College Board.

We realized last week that we got to be able to put these things together in a way that feels more structured in a world where so many students are going to be working from home. And so that's why over the past weekend we launched the schedules on Khan Academy. There could be links depending on what social media channel you're looking at. You could also just do a web search; if you just go to khanacademy.org, we have banners that lead you to the schedules and the other resources that we're having.

But that helps structure students' days for, uh, young students, old, middle school students, high school students, uh, elementary school students. And we've been getting a lot of good feedback from that, and we're constantly tweaking it so it becomes better and better. So please give us feedback on that.

But the purpose of this homeroom— that was a long parenthetical— the purpose of this homeroom is to, as folks work at their own time and pace on those types of schedules, to feel a connectedness. You know, when you're in a real school there's a homeroom and there's announcements, and we get to see each other. We get to kind of prepare our minds for the day.

And so this is really for everybody. It's for students, it's for parents, it's for teachers, just as a way to start their day. And, in this time of, uh, social distancing, hopefully feel a little bit connected. A couple of announcements. As many of y'all know, I've been mentioning this in the last few live streams, Khan Academy is a not-for-profit with the mission of a free world-class education for anyone, anywhere.

Not-for-profit means no one owns Khan Academy. It's a public charity; I don't own Khan Academy. You own as much Khan Academy as I do, and we are dependent on philanthropic donations. And, uh, we are proud and we want to step up in every way possible to serve everyone during this situation. But what happens with a not-for-profit like ours is our servers are actually— our usage has more than doubled as of the latest data that I saw from yesterday, and that increases our cost.

But, uh, our funds come from philanthropic donations from folks like yourself. So we definitely, uh, need help. And so, let’s see. I just— looks like the screen just clipped out on me. Oh, it's back! All right, sorry. Uh, so, so, we need help. But I do want to, uh, thank several. There's many of y'all who've been donating at all different levels. I definitely want to thank some corporations who've stepped up in record time over the weekend.

Bank of America was the first to step up when they found out kind of our situation and how much, uh, the resources we had to put out there were—what we were hoped to do to get everyone through this school closure situation. And they encouraged us to think big, so Bank of America gave a very generous donation over the weekend. You could read up about that announcement.

And just this morning, I really want to thank AT&T and Google.org for following close behind Bank of America and also stepping up with significant support so that we can handle all the extra programs we want to do, the server costs that have roughly doubled now. And we were frankly already running at a deficit before this because you can imagine, uh, you know, serving up content.

We have a team of over 200 folks and serving up content to, uh, tens and what is likely hundreds of millions of folks, uh, now, um, is—does take a lot of resources. So thank you for everyone there. Uh, so with that said, with my asking for support from the world, and we need more, I'll turn to your questions.

So the first question, and this is one we get pretty consistently, is: As a parent, how should I figure out what my child should be learning? So in those schedules that we put out, they have—and you should definitely feel free to modify those schedules so they work for you and depending on what works for your child.

But in each of those areas, so for say math, you know we give some grade levels that might be appropriate for students of a certain age. And I would say if your student has historically felt, say, confident in math and has done quite well in math, you can just start them right at grade level. They can take something called the course challenge—that's right from the course page—and on that course challenge, it'll take about 30 to 40 minutes. They'll have to answer about 30 to 40 questions, and then it will tell them what they got right or wrong.

And the things that they got wrong, I would recommend going to those units in course. And so on those units, if the student feels like they know a good bit of that unit, they can go to the unit tests and take that, and then that'll give them credit for what they know. Then they can focus on the skills that they don't know, and then the game mechanics for the entire site has unit tests, course challenges, other things, mastery challenges, uh, so that it encourages kids to show that they have mastery, that they can fill in all those gaps in their knowledge, that they can do the skills in a mixed topic type of environment.

So that's one method. If you're a child, or if you're a student and you've maybe felt a little bit weak in math, one thing that we've seen—Tim Vandenberg, this, uh, a teacher that I've been really, really impressed by over—over I've heard about him a couple of weeks ago—he actually starts all of his sixth graders at kindergarten.

And that's not to, you know, talk down to him; it's actually because he has very high expectations for them. What happens there is that the students, by starting at kindergarten, they're able to build some momentum. If, obviously, a lot of sixth graders, most sixth graders will get through the kindergarten content; they can do it through the course challenges in literally, uh, 30 or 40 minutes. Then they go to first grade. You can do all of early learning on Khan Academy. You can do arithmetic.

And he also makes all of the students do the third grade because he sees that that has a lot of foundational things in it, like your basic, um, arithmetic fluency and your basic multiplication fluency, things like that. And then he has them simultaneously working at grade level. So, I think, uh, this situation might be especially if you have a child, or if you are a student who's historically struggled in math. I recommend spending more time so you can work at grade level and make sure that you don't have any Swiss cheese gaps going forward.

And the same thing is true in English and language arts. You should always be working at a level that you're getting a few questions wrong; it's a little bit difficult, but you can definitely engage on it, uh, would be my best advice. Since I think over the next few days and weeks, because Khan Academy has all of the grade levels, it's a good time to try to triangulate where is that learning edge, and you should be able to get to it in about a week and then learn from there and really have strong foundations.

So, let's see. Kaili Kamiyoka says, "Hi Sal, as a tutor, how do you figure out where the students' gaps are?" So, a very similar question. If you really want to go for gap funding, you should start students at the very, very basic material. That's why we created mechanisms on Khan Academy to accelerate through it.

But that's really the only way to go skill by skill and ensure that students have no gaps. And what we see over and over again is even students who are a student, you know, in middle school, they still have a few gaps, or they're still not completely fluent at certain things from arithmetic or things that came before. And we see many high school students who are not fluent at middle school skills or elementary school skills.

And so it's really valuable. It might seem like you're taking a step back, but it's kind of a "go slow to go fast." If you take that week to start from the beginning and build up all your skills, then when you get to the middle school math or the algebra, you'll find that you're right in the right place.

If you're looking at other topics on Khan Academy like biology or physics—I mean, I'd advocate the same thing. Economics—take the course challenge, understand what you know, what you don't know, and then go back and fill in those gaps in the appropriate units.

So, Underground School says, "Other than career preparation, what is the role of learning in life?" So, you know, Underground School, it's interesting—an interesting name—you know, it's a deep question of what is the role, you know, what is the purpose of life, period. And, you know, I think one of the things that makes us as human beings fairly unique—I mean, we know what some of them are.

We have opposable thumbs, although, you know, all of our primate and ape cousins have opposable thumbs. We have, uh, we have a large brain, and we walk on two legs upright, uh, and we have language, which is maybe a byproduct of our long, large brains, and maybe all those things come together: the opposable thumbs, the brains, and the language.

And I think that learning is one of the most fundamental human things that makes us feel human. And so I've gotten letters over the years from Khan Academy from people who are past their career or well into their career, and they realized later in life how much joy there is just for the sake of learning—just trying to understand this mystery that we find ourselves in, called life—understanding the universe a little better.

And what I've told, what I've said in multiple live streams is, you know, some students have asked, "How do I get motivated?" And I remind, you know, that this content that you can learn on Khan Academy, that you can learn your textbooks, this is a lot of what you see in a lesson or a unit is someone's life work, or it's probably many hundreds of people's life work, and they would have done anything to see that knowledge that you now see: How does photosynthesis work? What does mitochondria do?

Um, calculus—you know, people like Newton and Leibniz spent their last decades, uh, trying to derive these things, and you can now kind of understand it in a more distilled format. I think that's incredibly exciting, and, uh, and it just changes your perspective on everything, and it also just makes you a better citizen. You know, in a world where we want democracy, we want people to be able to participate. There's an obligation on the person themselves to be as informed as possible, to be able to look at the data that exists in the world, to be able to think critically about the world, and that's what education is going to provide.

You'll also be more fun at dinner parties—better dinner party conversation.

All right, Kirsten Martin says, "How does a teacher use Khan Academy to teach a class at multiple levels? What should the teacher component focus on?" So, uh, Kirsten, you know, in a tr— if we weren't in the school closure situation and the teachers that I've seen use Khan Academy to great effect, and I've visited hundreds of classrooms over the years, and Tim Vandenberg's the most recent, um, that I've talked to—I haven't visited his classroom yet.

The teachers will spend some time with the students who are learning at their own time and pace on Khan Academy. I don't think it's a bad idea to start all of your students at kindergarten and then let them progress as quickly as possible, or, you know, our early learning and arithmetic, and let them progress as quickly as possible, maybe simultaneously while they do the grade level.

What Tim has done is he has all the students start early math, but then he also assigns, let's say they're sixth graders or seventh graders, he will use our assignments functionality to assign unit one in sixth grade and then unit two. What he does is he has a double expectation for his students. He says, "Remediate; fill in those gaps as quickly as you can. If you don't have gaps, it'll happen quite quickly."

And simultaneously, work on the grade level stuff. And I expect you to be done— I expect you to be done one-fourth through the grade, one-fourth through the year, halfway through the grade, halfway through the year. Actually, he makes a grading based on that, but it's a mastery learning framework. So if a student's not quite there at the quarter year mark but then gets there later on, he actually modifies their grade to reflect that they have now gotten to that point, and that seems to work really well for him.

And the way it flows in the classroom, when they're—when class is in session, is he's able to look at the data of what students are working on, who's engaged, who's not engaged. Obviously, he can see some of that just by looking at the classroom and what are students having trouble with, and then he can use that to take a handful of students to do a more focused intervention or maybe pair two students together who are trying to work on the same skill or maybe pair a student who's already mastered a concept with the student who's trying to master the concept.

And what you find is it's a very rich classroom. You know, a lot of people imagine that online learning can be kind of this Vulcan or Borg reality where kids are just on computers and learning and then kind of in their isolated places. But done well, it can be highly, highly interactive, and the teacher is able to form good connections with the students. Students are able to talk and interact and teach each other, and obviously, you learn things the best when you actually have to teach it.

Now that we're in this virtual world, I've heard of teachers and parents emulating aspects of that where the kids are working on Khan Academy, and then simultaneously you might have a Google Hangout or a Zoom conference call or a Skype session at the same time where students know that they can go on to that and access their students, their peers, or their teacher, or a parent who might be able to help them.

And you can imagine in this more virtual world that we're finding ourselves in, a parent or a teacher or even an older student could look at the dashboard still and say, "Hey, looks like five of y'all are really having trouble with negative numbers." Yes, Khan Academy has resources and that person said, "Hey, make sure you look at the watch the videos. Make sure you look at the explanations on the hints." But they could say, "Hey, at 10 a.m. I'm going to run a 20-minute session, a breakout session on negative numbers for you five to really help you through it."

Or you might see, "Hey, you know, let's—Khan Academy does certain types of items and problems, but there could be a really rich multi-step application problem that you could say, ‘All right students, keep working on Khan Academy, but half of y'all are ready for this deeper type of question; let's work on that together,’" and you could do it on a Hangout or a Zoom.

So those are the types of frameworks, but we would love to hear from all of you teachers, uh, how you're using it. So, Nadia Ali says, "Hi, my son asks what is the importance of the points he collects?" I answer, "The more points you score, the smarter you are," but he wants to hear it from you.

Well, I'll give a slightly different answer. What I would say is the more you learn, um, the more the richer your life will be. So, that's the number one thing to remember. Uh, the points really are just points; they do, you know, they do help unlock things like avatars and things like that, but, you know, the way our brains are wired, or many of our brains are wired—things like points.

And, you know, I think even in adulthood, many people are still looking to score points in different ways. They could call a bank account appointments, uh, you know, beyond a certain measure, it probably is, uh, uh—but, but, you know, those are just, you know, what's known as extrinsic motivators—things that will hopefully motivate you to get more engaged.

But the best motivators are intrinsic motivators—when you realize that the best thing to do is just build that learning. And maybe you could view the points—we have energy points, we have mastery points. You can see your skills that you've leveled up. You know, that's a way to reflect on what you've learned, and that's actually the most enriching thing of all—uh, more than points or anything else.

But, but that's what the points are; they're indicative of what you've learned. And I wouldn't even say necessarily smart or not smart. Uh, you know, uh, there was a question earlier about growth mindset—actually, that's the next question from Mahala Licitch. I apologize if I'm mispronouncing your name, Mahala.

Uh, but the whole principle of growth mindset is there's people with either a fixed mindset or a growth mindset. Fixed mindset in a domain thinks, "I'm either smart or I'm not," and a growth mindset says, "Well, no, I don't really know my potential unless I'm always willing to step out of my comfort zone, try things that are difficult for me, recognize that when I fail at something, that's when I'm growing the most." That's my opportunity for growth.

And when people have a fixed mindset, if they think they're smart at something, many times they don't want to—uh, many times they don't want to try hard things because it might undermine their self-perception. And if they think they're not smart at something, they don't want to try it because they're like, "Well, I'm never going to be good at it." But people with a growth mindset will always say, "Hey, that's a challenge. I might not succeed, but I'm going to try it, and I'll work on it."

So really, the points are there to reward and show how much effort you've put in and how much you've been willing to push yourself. And that, I think, is the muscle that we all want to build. And you know, if you look in the world, the people who are disproportionately successful are the people with growth mindsets, the people who are always looking to improve themselves, push themselves, and aren't trying to say, "I'm smart or not smart," just, "I'm just going to keep seeing what I can do."

So, several Kaya says, "Anything that we can do as a volunteer? We'd love to be part of the team. Thanks for all you do." Um, so the—there's multiple ways you might volunteer. We have languages; people are subtitling.

I think in this time that we find ourselves in the school closures, if you're in a position, find some kids that you might, you know, in your community who might need help. Contact some teachers, especially kids who might not have a lot of resources. One, try to figure out how to get them resources. I think computers and internet are a lifeline right now—not just for accessing things like Khan Academy, but just to be able to connect with people, uh, now that we ought to be socially distant.

So if you could help some way in that, that could be really powerful for the world. I think if you could run video conferencing tutoring sessions, classes for people who want to learn in your area, you know, we're looking at ways that we could kind of scale that type of thing up. I've—you know, we've recommended our schedules that people do that; that you know, I've already mentioned that teachers, parents, older students are able to organize, create video conferencing places where people can go get help.

I think that could be a great way to volunteer right now. I think there are ways unrelated to Khan Academy that could be great to volunteer. Now, you know, find people who might not have a lot of connection to other people. Get on Hangouts with them, talk to them; I think people need that. I think if there's elderly people in your area, offer to go buy their groceries for them, drop it off on their porches. I think that could be a great service.

So there's a lot of opportunities for service, uh, right now. But in the academic realm and Khan Academy realm, I would say right now it's, uh, you know, run tutoring sessions for folks. And when you do those tutoring sessions on Hangouts or on a Zoom session, some of it might be explaining the concept, but a lot of it might just be motivating. "Hey, remember you could go to Khan Academy, that's the video. Hey, remember using—are you using it right?"

And they can sign you up as their coach, so you can monitor and see how they're able to interact and say, "Hey, so-and-so, it looks like you haven't been working on it. What's going on? How can I help you?" I think that by itself is a huge, huge, huge service.

And we are running— I forgot to mention parent webinars and teacher webinars to help parents and teachers understand how to use our tools and our reports a little bit more. So stay tuned for some of that.

So I have Somal Sahu says, "What is your typical day like?" Well, I think that changes depending on whether you talk about the last week or before the last week. Uh, you know, this week has been a very interesting week for everyone.

But, uh, given—and I feel lucky that Khan Academy is in a position to help, uh, the situation because, as I've said in other live streams, there's three things that people are worried about: their health and your mental and physical health first and foremost, the second is the economics of the situation, and there's a lot of people struggling, especially as restaurants and hotels and airlines are having to lay off folks, so it's a really tough, tough situation we're in.

But the third thing is there's a lot of kids out of school, and there's a lot of adults, uh, that are, uh, home and we're all in the same room together, and, and how do we navigate that and how do we make sure that people keep learning? And, um, so anyway, my day, uh, you know, yesterday I woke up super early. We got a bunch of press inquiries, uh, just so that we're leveraging to help communicate that these resources exist, then we had this live stream.

Simultaneously, we're trying to still put some content out. I have a few that I—I'm in my queue. There's another coronavirus video that I'd actually like to make to just help explain. And people appreciate that, you know, the social distancing is something to take quite seriously.

And the more seriously we do it, and the sooner we do it, the more likely we are able to navigate this thing in a very good way, and it wouldn't hurt the economy too much. Um, and yeah, but, you know, right now it's just constant. Our whole team is now virtual.

And so even while I'm talking, my—I've gotten four text messages that I haven't looked at yet. So it is just like a bit of a war room where we're trying to figure out what goes on. And that day's going pretty long right now. I mean, in the old days, like two weeks ago, my day would be, I try to split my day about a third or third or third.

About a third is I still create content. I still try to make videos or create other things. About a third of my time is working with the team, uh, to help think about where this—the product go, what features can we add? And then another third of my time is roughly doing things like this—uh, external communications, fundraising, talking, press, um, etc. So yeah, that's—that's my average day.

Okay, uh, GalaxyWolfPlays says, "Will there be any new updates for the website and app?" So in the long run, for sure, 100%. I mean that we have a whole team, uh, working on this. You know, even as this crisis was unfolding, we've actually had to re-architect our entire—you know—back end of our infrastructure, of our site, just so it can continue to scale.

And obviously, that's even more of an imperative now that our usage has more than doubled over the last few days. Uh, but we have, yes, we do have plans on a whole host of features. We usually launch them around back-to-school time period.

Uh, but yeah, we have a whole, you know, and there's aspirations for sure over the next year, two years, three years of the types we want to do. We want to add more content; we want to make it easier to navigate. We eventually want to make it easier ways—you know, a lot of people ask, “How do I know where to start?” and I gave—I've given you some ways to do it, but we want to make that even simpler. So there's just a ton of things that we definitely want to add to the site.

Heather Sylvester says, "My son tried to log in the other day and start where he left off in Algebra 1, but is making him start all the way back to the beginning. Is there another way around it?"

Uh, well, I'm sorry to hear that. Um, I'm guessing if your son was—uh, maybe what you're saying is where he left off in Algebra 1 in his Algebra 1 class. So my advice to your son, and to you, is he should take the course challenge in Algebra 1, and then that will give him a good sense of what he knows and doesn't know in Algebra 1.

And we do that because every course, you know, there's some courses people do around the world in roughly the same order at the same pace, but it's usually a little bit different. And so if he takes that course challenge, he'll know where he is, and then he can then focus on the units where he has gaps.

The stuff that he knows, it literally could take him a few hours to show that he has mastered that, and that's good because then he will know that material that much better. He will have reviewed it a few months after because that’s another issue that a lot of kids have—they'll go through the material that's covered in class.

But then by the end of the year and for sure after the end of summer, they've forgotten it. So this is a good chance to review and refresh, and Algebra is one of those foundational things, not just for the rest of math but also for science and economics and pretty much anything else you're going to do in life.

So yeah, I would say the course challenge, use unit tests—that'll help them accelerate. There's also things called mastery challenges; those will all help him accelerate. If he already knows some of that material, it'll take him a few hours to get to a mastery in a lot of that, and then he'll see the areas where he's to work more on it, and he should be able to get—if he does know 60 or 70 percent of the material already, uh, he should get to 60 or 70 percent mastery quite quickly, and then now he can progress from there.

And I would say once he's done with Algebra 1, he should continue on into Geometry or Algebra 2 or whatever else, uh, interests him. So, next we have, uh, David Manos. And first of all, I want to thank David. He's one of our teacher ambassadors. These are incredible teachers around the country and the world who are Khan Academy super users—not only our super users with their own students, but help other teachers, uh, use Khan Academy. So I just wanted to thank David for being one of the ambassadors.

Uh, so he says, "Thank you to you and your team for all you do." Well, thank you for thanking us. A couple of questions: Are there plans to provide down global downloadable packets for teachers who need to provide paperwork for this? And two, are there plans to extend upper math content further, going beyond calculus?

So on the first one, we don't have current plans, but that's an interesting idea. You're an ambassador, so let our team know. I'm assuming that would be for the younger age group that might need more paper-type worksheets. That's an interesting idea, and I think we, we wouldn't maybe have thought about it two weeks ago because we've always viewed ourselves as kind of going side by side with what the traditional kind of paper-based curriculum is.

But in this type of reality, it is something we should explore. Are there plans to extend upper math content further, going beyond calculus? So we do have video content going beyond calculus: multi-variable, differential equations, linear algebra, we have statistics too, which you could argue it's not necessarily beyond calculus; the statistics have exercises.

So long-term, yes, I would love to do it long-term. In the short term, we probably aren't—we—there might be something in multi-variable, but I can't promise that, uh, just yet. Um, let's see. Bunny Hernandez says, "We'd love to help Khan Academy raise funds. How can we get in touch?"

So depending on if you'd like to donate, khanacademy.org/donate. There's also some links, I think, if you're streaming in or if you're getting streamed on Facebook, we're going to put it there on YouTube. You might see some donate links. If you're looking at kind of fundraising in a bigger way, like helping fundraise from other people, uh, pop us a, uh, an email at s-con@khanacademy.org, and I'll forward it to the right person.

So it looks like we are all—oh, look! I just saw the screen kind of clipped out.

Um, so it looks like we're pretty close to time now. So a couple of, uh, announcements. So next week we're going to change the live stream. The live stream is going to be at 12 noon Pacific, 3 p.m. Eastern, as of Monday. We're going to be doing this live stream every week, today, for the foreseeable future to just help us feel connected during this time.

So it's going to be at 12 noon Pacific, 3 p.m. Eastern starting Monday. This was based on everyone's feedback of what would work across time zones and things like that. I really look forward to seeing you all. You know, take care of yourselves, stay socially distant but stay socially distanced, but not socially distant.

You know, interact with your friends. I've been interacting with friends and family—many of people I haven't talked to for a while—but doing it on Hangouts and chats and things like that, and it's actually helped. I think everyone gets through this.

And, you know, as I said it every—at the end of every live stream, uh, this is something, you know, I remind myself whenever it's like, "Oh, I'm in this house for an awfully long time," whatever else is that the whole world is going through this. And, you know, it's, it's a, it's a crummy situation, but, uh, there's very few times in history where the whole world has gone through something like this.

And as bad as it is, it's also an opportunity where I think we're seeing the good in everyone and everyone is trying to help everyone. And, uh, you know, so I think we can all appreciate that aspect of the crisis we are in.

And once again, thank you all for joining. This helps me feel connected to all of you. Uh, and, and thank you to everyone who's helped out, donated, uh, given your donations. We need help. Our server costs are growing very fast.

Uh, and, and another thanks to the corporations that have begun to step up; you know, Bank of America stepped up over the weekend, and then today we just announced AT&T and Google.org. And any corporate leaders out there, we need more help. There are many, many students on Khan Academy right now who need our help to learn, and parents and teachers who need our support.

Thank you very much!