It all started with mathematics. But now Khan Academy also offers courses and support in history, health care, medicine, finance, biology, physics, chemistry, astronomy, cosmology, music, American civics, art history, economics, computer science, and more. All of it is available for free, 24/7, to anyone in the world with an Internet connection and, more recently, through Khan Academy Lite, to those without Internet access (see sidebar on page 45). Khan Academy clocks 10 million unique visitors per month now using its program and more than 16 million registered users.
I caught up with Sal Khan this past summer to see how things were progressing and where his academy is heading next.
Ari Pinkus: Where do you think we are in the process of rethinking education for the 21st century? Where do you see your biggest contribution?
Sal Khan: We are still in the very early stages. There is starting to be a broad consensus that the Prussian model of moving students together at a set pace with limited flexibility for true exploration and inquiry is not optimally serving students for the 21st century. With that said, it has been difficult for mainstream education to move away from it for a whole series of historical, psychological, and economic issues.
Khan Academy’s biggest contribution has been to allow learners to take agency over their learning at scale. The idea of standards-aligned software and content that caters to a student’s individual needs is not a new one. What is new is a deep and comprehensive tool like this being used by tens of millions of students and hundreds of thousands of teachers. This scale has validated the need for more student-centered, differentiated curricula and has allowed us to be a voice to help catalyze a change away from the Prussian model.
Pinkus: Describe the key tenets of the learning structure for the one-world schoolhouse you imagine and the outcomes you expect it will bring about.
Khan: I go into much more depth on this in The One World Schoolhouse: Education Reimagined [2012], but the 30,000-foot overview is:
- Elevate the role of the teacher from lecturer to master mentor-coach-inspirer. I believe the most effective teachers are those who can help change the mindsets of their students. Teachers who can show students how to inquire and learn and create, how to develop a growth mindset and grit and become excited about learning. Teachers whose passion for learning and helping is unstoppably infectious. Lectures can be OK sometimes, but most of the awesomeness of deep learning happens when teachers and students discuss and explore side by side.
- Offer large blocks of time for students to develop portfolios of projects. These projects could be anything from computer programs to dance performances to an open-ended inquiry into some aspect of science. Every growth area of society is hungry for people who can create, but traditional transcripts and curricula leave little room for true creativity. I believe that the most important part of “the transcript of the future” will be one’s portfolio of creative works.
- Focus on differentiated, mastery-based learning for core skills. The Prussian model moves students together at a set pace. Even when a student has a learning gap (for example, as evidenced by a “C” in a test on basic exponents), the whole class is pushed ahead (moving on to, say, negative exponents or logarithms) and the student can only build as best she can on this weak foundation. This system ensures that students have Swiss cheese gaps in their knowledge, and it is the primary reason why students struggle in more advanced topics. Algebra is not inherently difficult, but it becomes hard to master if you have gaps in your understanding of exponents or decimals or negative numbers. I believe that learners and teachers can now leverage tools like Khan Academy to allow all students to master concepts at their own pace - which has the added benefit of allowing the students to take agency over their own learning.
- Think in terms of student agency. The most important skill that anyone can learn is how to learn. Students tend not to learn how to learn when they are force-marched through a curriculum and focus only on what they are told to do next. With mentorship from their teachers and peers, students should be encouraged to set their own goals and learn to pace themselves. They need to learn to pull knowledge their way rather than have it pushed onto them. Asking schools to focus on student agency is not some esoteric idea. I believe that humans naturally have this instinct and drive to learn, but it is all too often suppressed by 12 to 16 years in a factory-model school.
- Allow for mixed-age cohorts and encourage student responsibility. Over hundreds of thousands of years of pre-human and human existence, we learned in mixed-age environments and, in the more recent millennia at least, gave early adolescents significant responsibilities. This allowed for younger learners to learn from older ones and the older ones, in turn, to feel responsibility for the younger ones. It also allowed older students to contribute to the well-being of their family or tribe. About 200 years ago, we decided to break this pattern by using age as a proxy for development and separated kids by that measure. This factory model made it much easier to deliver information to large groups of students simultaneously, but it also infantilized our youth and caused us to lose one of the most basic and effective human learning interactions - the student-mentor relationship. I believe that what we now call “teenage angst” is really nothing more than a hunger for responsibility and agency in a world where teens have very little. These young people would have a lot less angst - and learn more - if they were allowed to help younger peers and allowed to contribute in some real way to society.
Khan: Most of what I am advocating is already happening in many preschools, especially Montessori schools. Unfortunately, the Prussian model begins to dominate once you get into late elementary school and continues to dominate through middle and high school. To a large degree, this switch came about because, without technology, it was perceived to be much harder to have students explore and master, say, algebra at their own pace than, say, to develop fine motor skills. The whole motivation of Khan Academy is to make tools that can enable the natural exploration and student agency to continue from preschool through college and beyond.
Pinkus: Which subjects are most conducive to self-directed, self-paced learning? Why?
Khan: All subjects. However, I think personalized pacing and mastery are most important when there is a progression of skills for which advanced skills become indecipherable without deep understanding of basic ones. This is most pronounced in mathematics, but is also true in most of the sciences. But as I said, I think all subjects benefit from developing student agency.
Pinkus: How do you respond to people who believe that computer-based instruction is about replacing teachers or lowering the skill level needed to be a teacher?
Khan: I’m the most vocal person out there in support of teachers. Without question, human beings are the most important part of the learning process. I’d prefer my children to be with an amazing teacher-mentor-coach and no other supplies than to be alone with the most state-of-the-art technology. Khan Academy is not about technology for technology’s sake or about efficiency or cost savings. It is about leveraging technology in pursuit of a more human, interactive, creative classroom. And the most important thing in this regard is to free up class time so that students can spend more time with amazing teachers, not less. It also elevates the importance of the teacher from lecturer and grader to master explorer-motivator-advisor-inspirer.
Pinkus: What kind of technical training and professional development do teachers need to be successful using Khan Academy?
Khan: We have coach and classroom resources to prepare teachers to use Khan Academy in their classrooms, and in fact, we have more than 500,000 registered teachers who currently use Khan Academy with their students. There are lots of stories on our website about students and teachers using Khan Academy and helping their studies.
Pinkus: What do you hope to achieve with Khan Academy’s recent partnership with the College Board? How will this collaboration benefit students and families?
Khan: Children of affluent and educated families have the advantage of tutors and summer camps on top of a cultural understanding of how to navigate the system. This is especially pronounced when it comes to college admissions tests, where a billion-dollar test-prep industry exists with the goal of making the playing field even less level.
Our College Board partnership around the new SAT is an effort to change this. Our goal is not to just offer “test prep” in the traditional sense, but also to make sure that students have state-of-the-art content and software tools to truly master concepts so they become college ready. It is our intent that it won’t just be OK preparation that happens to be free. It will be the very best preparation for college, period. In this way, performance on the SAT (which is, after all, trying to measure college readiness) will naturally arise out of the student’s readiness.
Pinkus: What have you learned about success and failure from your own experience tutoring your cousin Nadia and building Khan Academy? How is she doing today?
Khan: In 2004, 12-year-old Nadia was being tracked into a slower math track and believed that she was inherently not good at math. Three years later, she was one of the youngest students in New Orleans to be taking calculus. This was the first example of many that made me believe that a fixed mindset toward learning, coupled with accumulated gaps in foundations (as opposed to some kind of innate lack of ability), was the key reason why most students struggled in math. This is what convinced me that there are millions more students who could reach their potential if they had the tools and support to do so.
It turns out that, outside of being a math rock star, Nadia developed into an amazing writer (which I can’t take any credit for). She’s honestly one of the best young writers I know. She just graduated from Sarah Lawrence and is looking to go to medical school next year.
Pinkus: What big challenges do you face at Khan Academy now? What do you see for the Academy’s future?
Khan: My main challenge is to grow an organization that can meet the challenge of our mission without losing the humanity, quirkiness, and humor that I think is the heart of what people connect with.
In the next 5 to 10 years, we hope to see the Khan Academy experience deepen and broaden across all major topics. I hope our deep, interactive math experience will be extended to all the major sciences. On top of that, I hope that our portfolio-based interactive tools, with which we are starting to leverage peer review (such as our computer science platform), will be extended to other areas, such as writing.
Beyond that, we’re excited to be working with community groups across the world to translate Khan Academy into local languages. Recently, a community group in Myanmar worked to translate our videos into Burmese, and a South African group has done the same, translating content into Xhosa. My dream is for people to be able to access content in their own languages and to be able to learn and grow from the experience.
We are also viewing Khan Academy as a mindset-changing tool, one that can help a student exercise ownership over his or her learning. We’ve already begun to leverage the work of folks like Carol Dweck to perform small growth-mindset interventions with our users, and I only hope to accelerate this work.
It would have seemed crazy only a few years ago, but I think we have a good chance of helping tens if not hundreds of millions of learners globally over the next few years. We know we can help them better tap into their potential. And in so doing, we hope to bring all of us that much closer to a reality in which anyone, anywhere has access to a free, world-class education.
| Khan Academy Beyond the Internet Khan Academy’s mission has been to “enable everyone, everywhere to achieve a world-class education.” The problem, however, is that more than 60 percent of people in the world don’t have Internet access. So, at the behest of a former Khan Academy intern, the organization created Khan Academy Lite (KA Lite) as a way to bring academy lessons to those who can’t get online. Since its start in December 2012, KA Lite has blossomed into a worldwide learning community, supported by a team that formed a separate nonprofit organization, Learning Equality, dedicated to “exploring solutions for distributing and hosting open educational resources via low-bandwidth and offline channels, taking advantage of existing infrastructure or low-cost and low-power hardware solutions.” KA Lite now has thousands of installments in more than 120 countries, including low-income schools in India, orphanages in Cameroon, prisons in the United States, and First Nation communities in Canada. Educators interested in getting involved with developing the open-source KA Lite project, or helping with implementation, can connect with the group at [email protected]. |