Ask me anything with Sal Khan: March 24 | Homeroom with Sal

Hello everyone. It looks like we are live, and we're getting better at starting on time. Thanks for joining us at our daily live stream at our new time that we started yesterday, now today at 12 Pacific through Eastern. Many people are joining from all over the world. We're calling this a bit of a homeroom because, obviously, in this time of school closures and social distancing, people can use things like Khan Academy at their own time and pace.

But I think we all crave a little bit of social connection and a way to realize that what we're going through, the whole world is going through. As troubling as the scenario we are in as a civilization is, the silver lining is we, I think, in some strange way, feel more connected. And one real, you know, humanity is one group of people right now.

So just for those of you, all, this is the first time that you're attending one of these live streams with this homeroom that we do every day. It's really a catch-all for answering questions, getting announcements out there, really just like homeroom in real classrooms. And it's not just for students; it's for parents, it's for teachers, it's for anyone else who has questions of any form, just to get everyone up to speed on what the resources that are already out there from Khan Academy.

Obviously, for over a decade, we've been building resources that start you as early as pre-k. Our Khan Academy Kids app is suitable for students as young as three, all the way up through the first-grade Common Core Standards, up through six-year-olds. Then, on the main Khan Academy app or website, you can for sure get math from kindergarten all the way through middle school, high school, and the core of college. Also, sciences at the high school level, some humanities at the high school level.

We just launched what we call a beta, which is almost like a pre-release of English and language arts for grades 2 through 8. We also have free SAT practice, which is a partnership with the College Board in reading, math, and writing. We also have topics like economics and others. I mean, I could keep going on about so those resources were always all there. But as soon as we realized that the school closure situation was happening a few weeks ago, we realized we have to step up more; we have to provide more resources.

So that's when we started the live streams. We've been running teacher and parent webinars to help teachers and parents understand what resources there are and how they get started. We have also published a schedule a little over a week ago for students of different age groups, what could be an indicative schedule for them, how you can structure their day leveraging resources from Khan Academy and other resources.

Including, you know, dance videos on YouTube for your PE, or you might want to go outside and run around, or there might be some form of reading lists. This week, some of you all realize we just did it a couple of hours ago. We are also experimenting with doing academic webinars. So, a few hours ago, we ran our first one, which was on algebra, and we focused on the topic of systems of equations. We had great—you know, we had a thousand students participating, and we're taking the video and we're going to put it on our YouTube channel and probably promote it on social media as well. So, you'll at least see a recording of it, and I hope many of you have a chance to join some of these future classes.

So with that, one thing I want to say, you know, we're trying to put out all of these resources, but one question that we're getting from a lot of parents is they're just feeling a little bit overwhelmed right now. How do they focus on things? You know, are they doing a disservice to their children if they don't have everything all figured out just yet? The one thing I want to make very clear to you is no one has it all figured out just yet. Even in my own house, you know, I've figured out some for especially my older kids, but my five-year-old, we're figuring it out. But it is getting day by day better.

So I think the important thing to appreciate as a parent, there's a lot of things going on right now. You're working from home; a lot of people are in an unfortunate situation where even they might not be able to work now. And then you have to—there's childcare as an issue. So, keep it simple, especially in the first week or two. It's not the end of the world if things are a little bit less structured. If your kids, if you're just having quality time with your kids, or just whatever it takes to get through the day.

But I think as we go on, try to just make sure that the kids get a little bit of reading every day, a little bit of math every day. We have suggestions, obviously, Khan Academy, as a resource for both. And there's reading lists for the reading side of things. You know, if your kids are old enough, encourage them to journal.

Then, over time, you could try to layer on more things, try to do more and more of the types of schedules we’ve published. Those schedules are not meant to be rigid; they are meant to be evolving documents. We are evolving them, and you can adapt them to your own needs. But this session, we want to make it as interactive as possible, so I encourage everyone, if you're on Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, start putting your questions in. We have a team of Khan Academy folks, we're gonna be looking at them and surfacing the questions. It looks like a lot of people are thinking about.

I also want to introduce my colleague Dan, who’s kind of co-hosting this livestream today. And we're gonna actually—this is fun because we figured out the technology. Hopefully, over the coming live streams, we’ll be able to bring different guests in, and people who can help out with this. But Dan's gonna help; he's in contact with the team that is surfacing the questions.

So please, please send in your questions. I'll start with one. I see Stacy Wilber from Facebook says, “Can you please put in an adult program so adults can get their diplomas, please?” Stacy, that's one of the dreams of Khan Academy. We don't issue things like diplomas, but we do know a lot of stories about especially adults leveraging Khan Academy to prepare for things like their GED or their, you know, whatever graduate requirements for high school diplomas they might have.

So that's where we could support you right now, but it is a dream to one day be able to connect and work on Khan Academy to, you know, real-life economic or academic outcomes. And Dan, feel free to—I see another question from Facebook: Shahla Karimi says, “Salaam. I have fifth grade, first grade, and something younger daughters. Why, when it’s a little typo, they are all acting out, and they are really emotional since they are home due to virus? How can I help them?”

Well, Shahla, that's a great question. I think right now, there's probably about a billion parents who are experiencing some version of what you're experiencing, including myself. So, I think the first thing to realize is don't beat up on yourself and think it's just like you're the only person who maybe, you know, your kids are acting out. Especially, you know, if they have to stay at home and they're not getting as much social interaction as possible.

I'm not a child psychology expert. I actually hope we can bring some in into these live streams. All I can tell you is try to leverage things like video conferencing, if you have access to it, so that they can connect with their friends. We've been doing playdates at home, obviously, with my youngest, who's five years old. We've been moderating his playdates with some of his five-year-old friends, which can get a little chaotic if you don't want to help them out a little bit.

We've been ensuring that, you know, in this time of social distance, you can still take walks and still have exercise outside. You just have to keep distance from other people, but we're being quite religious about making sure that we go outside at least twice a day if we can. Even if it's raining, we're getting the umbrellas out and saying we're going for a walk because I think it's really valuable to get that.

And then, I think what we're seeing in our own household is still a little bit interesting sometimes. But just everyone is getting a little bit used to this new normal, which is obviously too suboptimal a normal. But I think things will get better. We've had a homeschooling parent in the past say just try to stick with it; it does get better. The kids will get used to it. Obviously, it’s a suboptimal situation for everyone.

But the number one thing is also take care of yourself. Don't get so overwhelmed because obviously, the more as parents we get overwhelmed, and we'll snap at our children, and then everyone will get stout. So, the more that you can kind of keep calm, whatever does to get, you know, whatever you do in your life to get to that meditative state, give yourself some alone time so that you'll have that emotional reserve to deal with where the kids might—the supports they might need.

Fazlu from YouTube, Faizal Kabir, if I'm reading it correctly, says, “This is a crucial moment of coronavirus. How can a student from Bangladesh continue his studies online?” Okay, so it looks like Fazlu, this is from Bangladesh. Thanks for joining us. I think a little late there. So, you know, depending on your level, Fazlu, I think the key is that you actually view this as a glass-half-full scenario where a lot of the demands on your time, especially for younger students, they might have had a lot of social engagements and other extracurricular activities or homework; a lot of those have been loosened.

And so, Khan Academy is a great place to focus on those subjects that you really want to make sure you have a strong foundation in: the high school subjects, early college subjects like biology, chemistry, physics, economics. There's other things off-site; you know if you've graduated outside of Khan Academy, you can move on to things like MOOCs and take more advanced courses at a university level.

I think it's a great time to take on projects where it's one thing to learn a lot of academic things but can you apply it? Can you create, you know, can you create something that can solve problems for folks? Right? Make a software application that can do something. So, I think there's a lot of opportunity, but I think that's the best way to be constructively occupied right now.

And obviously, there might be opportunities to volunteer for people in your community who might need help. If you're a young person, you should, you have to be still socially distanced, but you might be able to help older people who might have trouble leaving their houses and have to be even more social distance, you know, with things like getting groceries or honestly just connecting with them. You know, keep distance and say hello, or send them a text message, or just make sure they feel socially connected.

Cool questions that are related—questions from our students needing help to schedule their study times. So from YouTube, Adnan APUs Kench Walla, as well as teasing, are asking, one, “How should they plan their study schedule?” and two, “If you have any tricks to organize their time?”

So, I—you know, I don't know what age group you're in, but one of the tricks is we have released these schedules that I talked about. If you just go to Khan Academy.org, you'll see several links that say daily schedules. You click on that. I'm assuming y'all are maybe high school-age students. But there's their schedules essentially for every age bucket: high school, middle school, elementary school, and early learners. That's a good starting point.

There's nothing rigid about those; you can copy and paste it and modify it to your own needs. But what I would advise is to have some form of a schedule and make sure your schedule gives you time to rest and relax. I think, you know, there are two extremes that people could fall into right now, and it's completely fine to not have your act together in this first or second week. But, you know, there could be the extreme where there’s no structure, and you're kind of just wandering through your days.

That doesn't feel healthy to me. After many days or weeks of that, you'll, I think, feel a little left and a little bit more blah, so to speak. And that's the other extreme where like, "Oh, I got to study, you know, 18 hours a day," and all that, and that's going—that is also unhealthy.

So, what I recommend is you can use our schedules or create your own, but schedules that cover all the important basics make sure there's time for gaps. Don't just try to power through those gaps. I think especially now we need those gaps even more than ever.

And try to, you know, get front-load the work of your day. That's actually, you know, how I'm trying to do my life, and then by early afternoon say, "Okay, I've done what I need to do to the day; I can give myself a break," and I can, you know, entertain myself, but watch TV, work on a project that I really care about, I can do a little bit of video conferencing with friends.

And, you know, there's always this question about FaceTime and screen time. I think there's good and there's bad screen time. And actually, even with sometimes bad screen time is okay now that we're finding more time at home. But the good screen time, or the better screen time, especially if you're an older student, is your time learning, your time creating, writing, coding.

And I think it's a valuable time to get on a video conference, Zoom or a Google Meet or Hangout or Skype, FaceTime with friends. And I encourage you, you know, don't just try to go a little bit deeper; talk to your friends about what you're really thinking about. What are they stressed about? What are they anxious about? And remind your friends that you're here to support them, because I think we all need to hear that right now.

So this is how we—sorry, quick question for you. It's related to our OSB product. We have a young YouTube person, U So Keen, a penny, who wants to prepare for the SAT exam and doesn't know how to start.

Yeah, Keta, well, we have a very good answer for—for those of you who don't know, the College Board, the folks who administer the SAT, another nonprofit, they've reached out to us about five or six years ago and said we want to address the inequity around test prep. We want to partner with Khan Academy to make the world's best test prep that happens to be free.

And so, we launched that about five years ago, and it's being used by a majority of students who take the SAT. And it's in math, reading, and actually writing as well. You can write things to SAT prompts and get feedback on it.

And so, I think Nina was the name, if I heard correctly. But what I encourage you to do is go to that official free SAT practice on Khan Academy. You can navigate on Khan Academy or just do a web search SAT practice Khan Academy; you'll find it and you get started.

And try to spend equal amounts of time in math, reading, math and reading especially, and also time on writing. What we've seen in the data is the best practices for students are to make sure you are working on skills that are pushing you forward; that you're not just trying to do easy things.

Oh, there you go! Very good; we're getting better at this technology all the time. Try to, you know, follow the recommendations. The recommendations we actually—the software in partnership with the SAT folks, it knows which concepts are most important for not just for the SAT but also for college readiness.

And also, it knows where your weak spots are. So, as you answer more and more questions, it will know your strengths and your weaknesses. And so, it's trying to give you the suggestions that are optimal for you to learn as much as possible. If you've taken the PSAT, you can actually link your PSAT scores with Khan Academy, and if you do that, your PSAT data will inform the software even more what your strengths and weaknesses are.

So, I would go there. And I know we have, you know, the next SAT administration got canceled, but it will come back, I am sure, at some point. And so, I think this is a great opportunity to spend some time every day. We even have it in some of our schedules. Even if you're able to put 30 or 40 minutes a day, that’s great.

And I would say at least once a week try to take a full-length practice test. We're seeing that is also a best practice; that helps a lot of students. And when you take that practice test, try to take it in as most realistic circumstances as you can.

So yes, spend some time on our official SAT practice. Let's see, I have a question from Debbie Charlton that says, “Thank you for all you have been doing to help teachers to use more during this time. As an ambassador, I've been doing conference calls to help teachers get set up and move forward. The items you created have been a huge help to many.”

Oh, well thanks, Debbie, for that comment. For those of you know, Debbie is one of our teacher ambassadors. We have a thousand teachers around the world who are super users of Khan Academy and our super teachers, and they've been incredible mentors for other teachers and other folks to help them get started on Khan Academy and thinking about how they can integrate Khan Academy into their instructional practice.

And especially in a time like this, how they can integrate Khan Academy into, you know, their virtualization plan, so to speak. So thank you, Debbie, for being an ambassador; we really appreciate that. You know, a lot of what we do is informed by the teachers in our ambassador community because we're trying—we want to make sure we have as much support for teachers as possible.

So, Sal, our next question is from YouTube by Pradya Mishra. Her question is, “Hello, is it important to make notes each time we watch a video?”

I think notes can be valuable. I think the most important thing when you watch a video is to try to do it in an active way. So if the video is about to go through a worked example, pause the video, try to solve it, at least attempt it yourself. If the video is about to explain the stages of mitosis, for example, in your biology, try to think about it yourself. Say, “Okay, do what do I know about it? What do I not know about it?”

So you get your brain primed. Then on top of that, I think it is useful for a lot of folks to take notes. It helps kind of multiple modalities to do that, you know, but for other people, it might be more useful to just really make sure their focus is on what's being said. I think sometimes notes can kind of be kind of a blind process too.

So the more that you can take notes, but when you take the notes, you're really processing; so you're not just writing verbatim or drawing verbatim. You're looking at what's happening, and this is true whether it's a video or a classroom. You're like, “Okay, now let me process that and digest it in my own words.” I think that could be a lot more valuable.

The important thing is to really pay attention, and the beauty of videos is you can pause it and say, “Okay, do I really get that? How would I do it?” etc. And then you can play and see how the video creator has approached the concept.

So on Facebook, we have Ria Bhatia who's asking, “Will Khan Academy be putting up AP Computer Science A courses?” The AP Computer Science—I mean, we have AP CS principles that we already have. You're probably aware of it; we don't have AP Computer Science A yet.

You know, what I've told folks is we're trying to add subjects as quickly as possible, functionality as quickly as possible. But we are a nonprofit that is philanthropically supported, and what a lot of folks—my wife was telling me last night. She's like, “Sal, I don’t think people realize the kind of cabinet philanthropically supported kind of me as a large team.” That, you know, and even just our server costs.

So what I would say, we want to be able to serve that, but we're think we're gonna need a little bit more resources. And I'm not asking it from you, Ria, but I'm asking it from everyone listening. The more support we have, the more bandwidth we will have, literally and figuratively, to be able to create more courses.

But I hope that over time we can fill out more and more of these courses, but AP CS Principles is definitely a great place to start if you haven't done so already. And also, our programming platform is a great way to learn. It starts quite simply. It could be used by an elementary school student to kind of draw and make some animations, but you can do some very sophisticated things and things like object-oriented programming and simulations. You can go quite deep on our computer programming platform as well.

So, Sal, we have a question about AP exams with the changes on how the exams gonna be administered. On YouTube, Abdu Zabra asks, “Should we study any differently for the AP exam now that there are 45 minutes and online?"

What—You know, I would still—let's see—the way I would approach it is if it's an AP exam that Khan Academy materials for—and we have chemistry, biology, physics, microeconomics, macroeconomics, government and politics, American history, CS principles, and obviously calculus and stats—if it's one of those, I would still try to get mastery on Khan Academy a week or two before the AP exam as far as you can get.

And then a week or two before the exam, I would look at old sample free response questions and try to do as many of those as possible. We have worked examples of many of those on Khan Academy and many of those subjects.

And so there, I would give the same advice that I gave earlier as when the problem is presented, pause it, try to solve it yourself, and then see how I or someone else might have worked through that problem. But I think if you do that combination of mastery on Khan Academy and then you have a week or two of really doing having a lot of experience with the free response questions—and there's banks of those questions online, some of them have solutions—I think you're gonna be very well prepared for, I guess, you know, this new modality that we might be seeing in a couple of about a month.

And so I would add to that, Adam, on our content team and I are working on how to put together a quick how to study for this based on the new information we have. So, that's a resource we're gonna try to get up hopefully next week to students.

Yeah, and I don't want to jump the gun, but you know, I mentioned earlier that, you know, we're exploring ways to do academic webinars. We just did one in algebra earlier. And so, as we get closer to APs, I hope that we might be able to explore some things there, maybe do some office hours and things like that.

So let's see, on Facebook, Kristen Martinez asks, “Is there a way to assign course challenges to students as a teacher?” And I'll let the Khan Academy team confirm what I’m about to say because I know some of the stuff is in flux. You can assign, obviously, specific skills on Khan Academy as a teacher and parents can do this too.

You can essentially—you become your students' coach, but if they say add coach and enter your coach ID, and there's resources that explain how to do that. But you can make assignments of specific skills for specific videos. You can make assignments on unit tests. You can make assignments for course mastery.

So you could say, "Hey, I would like you to get 100% mastered in biology by May 2nd." So, you can do that. And I believe you can assign course challenges. That's definitely on our roadmap. I don't know, Dan or someone from the team, can we confirm that we can—whether we can assign course challenges?

I'll wait for those answers once we can get confirmation. But I do think course challenges are a great way. And I mean, at minimum, you could assign it through something like an LMS. You know, you can put a link to the course challenge. But I do think they're a great place to start. Especially if students already know some of the material.

And to understand where you are in the course—and they're also a great way, you know, as the question about AP tests, as you get closer and closer to the AP test, I would take more and more course challenges as well because that makes sure that you—you are able to understand what concept is applicable for a given item without knowing what skill is from or what unit, and they're all mixed up.

So I would take course challenges, and I would do a lot of free response for the AP students to kind of prepare as it gets closer.

Yeah, so Sal, just an update on that one: currently, you cannot assign course challenges or spiral view in course mastery unfortunately. Yep, you can assign course mastery; you can't assign spiral view. And then the course challenges, you could just send a link to your students for it to get started on that.

But yeah, unfortunately, don't have that yet where it’s, you know, all of the other assignments come with it. Alright, so we have a question from Facebook, Chris—sorry, from Hatif Mohammed. So, “How can I be a part of Khan Academy as an educator?”

Well, I think they—you know, we always have job postings out, look at those. But I think, you know, in the general sense, we are always trying to connect with amazing educators. So, you should join our Facebook page, our Facebook group for teachers called "Teach With Khan." And that, you know, obviously, stay involved in things like this.

I'm exploring other— we're exploring other projects—and on how we might be able to leverage teacher volunteers to help more students, especially at this time of school closures. So we will be sure to keep people posted on all of the above.

Alright, so I could—let's see how—ask another question here. Someone said, "I added an hour to your dailies given for creative time where my kids have to create rather than consume— their sewing, doodling, learning to juggle, any other ideas for kids on what they can create?"

So, that's a great idea that you added that creative time. You know, in our first version of the schedules, it was kind of implied that that could happen in the afternoons or the evening. But that's cool to kind of put it in the middle. I do think for creative time, depending on what they're doing, it is nice to have large blocks of time because, you know, it just takes sometimes half an hour just to get set up and then you might want to three hours to really create.

So, encouragement people either do in the afternoon or you can modify the schedule like that. So, beyond sewing, doodling, learning to juggle, I think there is...there's a lot, you know. Drawing is great; there are people on YouTube who have these drawing tutorials you can ask them.

You know, you can storytelling is really incredible. You can ask kids to come up with a, you know alternative reality of what's going on, or, you know, what would the world might look like after we're through this crisis? Or there's just a lot of fun writing activities.

We've talked a little bit about coding in this, you know, this is a great opportunity for students to start exploring engineering, things, coding, making inventions. I think social service can be creative. You know, what can especially kids do for their community right now? I think this is actually a moment where kids can step up to serve the elderly, especially with maybe helping them get groceries or just giving them a source of connection in this time of social distancing—that can happen virtually or maybe just, you know, waving to your neighbor or, you know, across the street and things like that.

So, I think there's a lot of, you know, you can make videos, you can make kind of cad amis type videos, explain things to your friends. You can, you know—actually, I played or on the weekend it was my family in another family; we played this game called Pathfinder.

It's kind of a new version of Dungeons & Dragons. But that was—it’s very creative. You go through these adventures together. So, I think there's all sorts of creative things that you can, obviously, you know, you can paint, you can dance, you can choreograph. There’s a lot that can happen.

So, in closing, just one more question from Facebook. Josh Carroll asks, "Are there ways to perhaps help parents teach math in ways that show the applied side—say show how to apply quadratic functions to things like parabolic motion?"

Yeah, I mean for that particular example, if kids are curious, you could actually start going into the physics, which we have on Khan Academy. And if the students already know quadratics—and actually if they even know just the basics of trigonometry, which hopefully they got from some of their geometry classes—but you could even go over that with them; they're ready to go into things like projectile motion, two-dimensional projectile motion.

And you know, one-dimensional projectile motion, you actually don't need any trigonometry; you just need to know a little bit about quadratics. And so that's a very interesting application. And you can actually see how good your predictions hold up, or you can use the math to understand. You go outside, use a timer, throw a ball in the air, figure out how long it's in the air, and then based on that you can figure out how high it went, which is kind of cool.

You can figure out how high a ball went by timing it. And then you could say, "Well, how exact is it?" Because in our equations, we didn't have air resistance; now we do and things like that. But I think that's actually a lot of fun.

And then obviously, you can do the same thing with two dimensions. You could figure out the angle by maybe where it lands or how far it went based on measuring. You know, there's all sorts of interesting things you could do with that. So, physics R is a great place to apply that type of thing. You'll see a lot of that in economics as well, and a lot of the basic algebra actually you'll see in chemistry as well, and actually some of the genetic stuff in biology.

So I think those are all really interesting. They obviously exponential growth—it's not hard to find videos, and we put a few on exponential growth and how viruses spread and how you can convert two days doubling to what the factor is it's being multiplied over any time period in exponential growth.

So I think, you know, if there's a silver lining here, everyone should get out of this crisis learning about exponentiation and what its implications are. So on that maybe not so uplifting note, huh? I just want to thank everyone.

Thanks, Dan, for helping me out. Thanks to the entire team. Thanks for everyone who's joining. We have some of these quick testimonials: Schatzi Cunningham from Facebook says, “My home loves Khan Academy.” We love you too! We are actual homeschoolers, and we're subscribed because you break things down clearly so the youngest could even understand.

Well, appreciate that, Schatzi, but you know we love feedback—positive or negative. We're always trying to get better. And then you, from YouTube, we have Cory Geisler says, “Thank you for all you do, Sal.” And I want to be clear, it's much more than me. Khan Academy is a team of over 200 people, and we have thousands of volunteers around the world who have helped me all year long.

It's not easy going back to college at 42 years old, so thank you for all you do. Well, Cory, we're about the same age, and yeah, I could imagine, you know, I have dreams every now and then going back to college. But I could understand, but I'm happy we can support you, and I applaud you for going back and always learning.

I think that's the biggest skill—it's just continuous learning. So, you know, thanks everyone for joining. This is a great way to connect. I feel more connected to you. I hope we all feel more connected to each other. All of humanity is going through this together, and I'm very confident we're going to get through this.

And as we're going through this, hopefully, we build some empathy and ways to connect with each other that we can carry on once we get to some normalcy. And I will remind everyone, we are not-for-profit. We are funded by philanthropic donations. I want to thank some corporations that have really stepped up recently like Bank of America, ATT, Google Org, and Novartis now to help support our response to the crisis.

Our server costs are going to be two-thirds of what they normally will be, so with millions of dollars. But we still need more help. We're still running at a significant deficit, and it's not clear how long we can run like this. So we need help. We need donations from everyone, even a two to three-dollar donation. These things add up.

So that we can keep doing the work we do, we can keep the site performing well, we can keep serving folks who might not be in the position to donate, and make sure we can support the billion of kids around the world who are out of school and the 50 million kids in the United States who are out of school.

So thank you so much for joining, and I will see you tomorrow!