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  • The Khan Academy is most known

  • for its collection of videos,

  • so before I go any further,

  • let me show you a little bit of a montage.

  • (Video) Salman Khan: So the hypotenuse is now going to be five.

  • This animal's fossils are only found in this area of South America --

  • a nice clean band here --

  • and this part of Africa.

  • We can integrate over the surface,

  • and the notation usually is a capital sigma.

  • National Assembly: They create the Committee of Public Safety,

  • which sounds like a very nice committee.

  • Notice, this is an aldehyde,

  • and it's an alcohol.

  • Start differentiating into effector and memory cells.

  • A galaxy. Hey, there's another galaxy.

  • Oh look, there's another galaxy.

  • And for dollars, is their 30 million,

  • plus the 20 million dollars from the American manufacturer.

  • If this does not blow your mind,

  • then you have no emotion.

  • (Laughter)

  • (Applause)

  • SK: We now have on the order

  • of 2,200 videos

  • covering everything from basic arithmetic

  • all the way to vector calculus

  • and some of the stuff you saw there.

  • We have a million students a month using the site,

  • watching on the order of 100 to 200,000 videos a day.

  • But what we're going to talk about in this

  • is how we're going to the next level.

  • But before I do that,

  • I want to talk a little bit about really just how I got started.

  • And some of you all might know,

  • about five years ago I was an analyst at a hedge fund,

  • and I was in Boston,

  • and I was tutoring my cousins in New Orleans, remotely.

  • And I started putting the first YouTube videos up

  • really just as a kind of nice-to-have,

  • just a supplement for my cousins --

  • something that might give them a refresher or something.

  • And as soon as I put those first YouTube videos up,

  • something interesting happened --

  • actually a bunch of interesting things happened.

  • The first was the feedback from my cousins.

  • They told me

  • that they preferred me on YouTube than in person.

  • (Laughter)

  • And once you get over the backhanded nature of that,

  • there was actually something very profound there.

  • They were saying

  • that they preferred the automated version of their cousin

  • to their cousin.

  • At first, it's very unintuitive,

  • but when you actually think about it from their point of view, it makes a ton of sense.

  • You have this situation

  • where now they can pause and repeat their cousin,

  • without feeling like they're wasting my time.

  • If they have to review something

  • that they should have learned a couple of weeks ago,

  • or maybe a couple of years ago,

  • they don't have to be embarrassed and ask their cousin.

  • They can just watch those videos. If they're bored, they can go ahead.

  • They can watch it at their own time, at their own pace.

  • And probably the least appreciated aspect of this

  • is the notion that the very first time,

  • the very first time

  • that you're trying to get your brain around a new concept,

  • the very last thing you need

  • is another human being saying, "Do you understand this?"

  • And that's what was happening with the interaction with my cousins before,

  • and now they can just do it

  • in the intimacy of their own room.

  • The other thing that happened is --

  • I put them on YouTube just --

  • I saw no reason to make it private,

  • so I let other people watch it,

  • and then people started stumbling on it,

  • and I started getting some comments and some letters

  • and all sorts of feedback

  • from random people from around the world.

  • And these are just a few.

  • This is actually from one of the original calculus videos.

  • And someone wrote just on YouTube --

  • it was a YouTube comment:

  • "First time I smiled doing a derivative."

  • (Laughter)

  • And let's pause here.

  • This person did a derivative

  • and then they smiled.

  • And then in a response to that same comment -- this is on the thread.

  • You can go on YouTube and look at these comments --

  • someone else wrote: "Same thing here.

  • I actually got a natural high and a good mood for the entire day.

  • Since I remember seeing

  • all of this matrix text in class,

  • and here I'm all like, 'I know kung fu.'"

  • (Laughter)

  • And we get a lot of feedback all along those lines.

  • This clearly was helping people.

  • But then, as the viewership kept growing and kept growing,

  • I started getting letters from people,

  • and it was starting to become clear

  • that it was actually more than just a nice-to-have.

  • This is just an excerpt

  • from one of those letters.

  • "My 12 year-old son has autism

  • and has had a terrible time with math.

  • We have tried everything,

  • viewed everything, bought everything.

  • We stumbled on your video on decimals and it got through.

  • Then we went on to the dreaded fractions. Again, he got it.

  • We could not believe it.

  • He is so excited."

  • And so you can imagine,

  • here I was an analyst at a hedge fund.

  • It was very strange for me to do something of social value.

  • (Laughter)

  • (Applause)

  • But I was excited, so I kept going.

  • And then a few other things started to dawn on me.

  • That, not only would it help my cousins right now,

  • or these people who are sending letters,

  • but that this content will never go old,

  • that it could help their kids

  • or their grandkids.

  • If Isaac Newton

  • had done YouTube videos on calculus,

  • I wouldn't have to.

  • (Laughter)

  • Assuming he was good. We don't know.

  • (Laughter)

  • The other thing that happened --

  • and even at this point, I said, "Okay, maybe it's a good supplement.

  • It's good for motivated students.

  • It's good for maybe home schoolers."

  • But I didn't think it would be something

  • that would somehow penetrate the classroom.

  • But then I started getting letters from teachers.

  • And the teachers would write, saying,

  • "We've used your videos to flip the classroom.

  • You've given the lectures, so now what we do ... " --

  • and this could happen in every classroom in America tomorrow --

  • " ... what I do is I assign the lectures for homework,

  • and what used to be homework,

  • I now have the students doing in the classroom."

  • And I want to pause here for --

  • (Applause)

  • I want to pause here for a second,

  • because there's a couple of interesting things.

  • One, when those teachers are doing that,

  • there's the obvious benefit --

  • the benefit that now their students

  • can enjoy the videos in the way that my cousins did.

  • They can pause, repeat at their own pace,

  • at their own time.

  • But the more interesting thing is --

  • and this is the unintuitive thing when you talk about technology in the classroom --

  • by removing the one-size-fits-all lecture from the classroom

  • and letting students have a self-paced lecture at home,

  • and then when you go to the classroom, letting them do work,

  • having the teacher walk around,

  • having the peers actually be able to interact with each other,

  • these teachers have used technology

  • to humanize the classroom.

  • They took a fundamentally dehumanizing experience --

  • 30 kids with their fingers on their lips,

  • not allowed to interact with each other.

  • A teacher, no matter how good,

  • has to give this one-size-fits-all lecture

  • to 30 students --

  • blank faces, slightly antagonistic --

  • and now it's a human experience.

  • Now they're actually interacting with each other.

  • So once the Khan Academy --

  • I quit my job

  • and we turned into a real organization --

  • we're a not-for-profit --

  • the question is, how do we take this to the next level?

  • How do we take what those teachers are doing

  • to their natural conclusion?

  • And so what I'm showing you over here,

  • these are actual exercises

  • that I started writing for my cousins.

  • The ones I started were much more primitive.

  • This is a more competent version of it.

  • But the paradigm here is, we'll generate as many questions as you need

  • until you get that concept,

  • until you get 10 in a row.

  • And the Khan Academy videos are there.

  • You get hints, the actual steps for that problem,

  • if you don't know how to do it.

  • But the paradigm here, it seems like a very simple thing:

  • 10 in a row, you move on.

  • But it's fundamentally different than what's happening in classrooms right now.

  • In a traditional classroom,

  • you have a couple of homework,

  • homework, lecture, homework, lecture,

  • and then you have a snapshot exam.

  • And that exam, whether you get a 70 percent, an 80 percent,

  • a 90 percent or a 95 percent,

  • the class moves on to the next topic.

  • And even that 95 percent student,

  • what was the five percent they didn't know?

  • Maybe they didn't know what happens when you raise something to the zero power.

  • And then you go build on that in the next concept.

  • That's analogous to

  • imagine learning to ride a bicycle,

  • and maybe I give you a lecture ahead of time,

  • and I give you that bicycle for two weeks.

  • And then I come back after two weeks,

  • and I say, "Well, let's see. You're having trouble taking left turns.

  • You can't quite stop.

  • You're an 80 percent bicyclist."

  • So I put a big C stamp on your forehead

  • and then I say, "Here's a unicycle."

  • But as ridiculous as that sounds,

  • that's exactly what's happening

  • in our classrooms right now.

  • And the idea is you fast forward

  • and good students start failing algebra all of a sudden

  • and start failing calculus all of a sudden,

  • despite being smart, despite having good teachers,

  • and it's usually because they have these Swiss cheese gaps

  • that kept building throughout their foundation.

  • So our model

  • is learn math the way you'd learn anything,

  • like the way you would learn a bicycle.

  • Stay on that bicycle. Fall off that bicycle.

  • Do it as long as necessary until you have mastery.

  • The traditional model,

  • it penalizes you for experimentation and failure,

  • but it does not expect mastery.

  • We encourage you to experiment. We encourage you to failure.

  • But we do expect mastery.

  • This is just another one of the modules.

  • This is trigonometry.

  • This is shifting and reflecting functions.

  • And they all fit together.

  • We have about 90 of these right now.

  • And you can go to the site right now. It's all free. Not trying to sell anything.

  • But the general idea is that they all fit into this knowledge map.

  • That top node right there, that's literally single digit addition.

  • It's like one plus one is equal to two.

  • And the paradigm is, once you get 10 in a row on that,

  • it keeps forwarding you to more and more advanced modules.

  • So if you keep further down the knowledge map,

  • we're getting into more advanced arithmetic.

  • Further down, you start getting into pre-algebra and early algebra.

  • Further down, you start getting into algebra one, algebra two,

  • a little bit of precalculus.

  • And the idea is, from this we can actually teach everything --

  • well, everything that can be taught

  • in this type of a framework.

  • So you can imagine -- and this is what we are working on --

  • is from this knowledge map

  • you have logic, you have computer programming,

  • you have grammar, you have genetics,

  • all based off of that core of,

  • if you know this and that,

  • now you're ready for this next concept.

  • Now that can work well for an individual learner,

  • and I encourage, one, for you to do it with your kids,

  • but I also encourage everyone in the audience to do it yourself.

  • It'll change what happens at the dinner table.

  • But what we want to do

  • is to use the natural conclusion of the flipping of the classroom

  • that those early teachers had emailed me about.

  • And so what I'm showing you here,

  • this is actually data from a pilot in the Los Altos school district,

  • where they took two fifth grade classes and two seventh grade classes

  • and completely gutted their old math curriculum.

  • These kids aren't using textbooks,

  • they're not getting one-size-fits-all lectures.

  • They're doing Khan Academy, they're doing that software,

  • for roughly half of their math class.

  • And I want to make it clear, we don't view this as the complete math education.

  • What it does is -- and this is what's happening in Los Altos --

  • it frees up time.

  • This is the blocking and tackling,

  • making sure you know how to move through a system of equations,

  • and it frees up time for the simulations, for the games,

  • for the mechanics, for the robot building,

  • for the estimating how high that hill is based on its shadow.

  • And so the paradigm is the teacher walks in every day,

  • every kid works at their own pace --

  • and this is actually a live dashboard from Los Altos school district --

  • and they look at this dashboard.

  • Every row is a student.

  • Every column is one of those concepts.

  • Green means the student's already proficient.

  • Blue means they're working on it -- no need to worry.

  • Red means they're stuck.

  • And what the teacher does is literally just say,

  • "Let me intervene on the red kids."

  • Or even better, "Let me get one of the green kids

  • who are already proficient in that concept

  • to be the first line of attack

  • and actually tutor their peer."

  • (Applause)

  • Now I come from a very data-centric reality,

  • so we don't want that teacher to even go and intervene

  • and have to ask the kid awkward questions:

  • "Oh, what do you not understand?" or "What do you do understand?"

  • and all of the rest.

  • So our paradigm is to really arm the teachers with as much data as possible --

  • really data that, in almost any other field, is expected,

  • if you're in finance or marketing or manufacturing --

  • and so the teachers can actually diagnose what's wrong with the students

  • so they can make their interaction as productive as possible.

  • So now the teachers know exactly what the students have been up to,

  • how long they have been spending every day, what videos have they been watching,

  • when did they pause the videos, what did they stop watching,

  • what exercises are they using,

  • what have they been focused on?

  • The outer circle shows what exercises they were focused on.

  • The inner circle shows the videos they're focused on.

  • And the data gets pretty granular

  • so you can see the exact problems that the student got right or wrong.

  • Red is wrong, blue is right.

  • The leftmost question is the first question that the student attempted.

  • They watched the video right over there.

  • And then you can see, eventually, they were able to get 10 in a row.

  • It's almost like you can see them learning over those last 10 problems.

  • They also got faster.

  • The height is how long it took them.

  • So when you talk about self-paced learning,

  • it makes sense for everyone -- in education-speak, differentiated learning --

  • but it's kind of crazy when you see it in a classroom.

  • Because every time we've done this,

  • in every classroom we've done,

  • over and over again, if you go five days into it,

  • there's a group of kids who've raced ahead

  • and there's a group of kids who are a little bit slower.

  • And in a traditional model, if you did a snapshot assessment,

  • you say, "These are the gifted kids, these are the slow kids.

  • Maybe they should be tracked differently.

  • Maybe we should put them in different classes."

  • But when you let every student work at their own pace --

  • and we see it over and over and over again --

  • you see students who took a little bit [of] extra time

  • on one concept or the other,

  • but once they get through that concept,

  • they just race ahead.

  • And so the same kids that you thought were slow six weeks ago,

  • you now would think are gifted.

  • And we're seeing it over and over and over again.

  • And it makes you really wonder

  • how much all of the labels maybe a lot of us have benefited from

  • were really just due to a coincidence of time.

  • Now as valuable as something like this is

  • in a district like Los Altos,

  • our goal is to use technology

  • to humanize, not just in Los Altos, but on a global scale,

  • what's happening in education.

  • And actually, that kind of brings an interesting point.

  • A lot of the effort in humanizing the classroom

  • is focused on student-to-teacher ratios.

  • In our mind, the relevant metric

  • is student-to-valuable-human-time-

  • with-the-teacher ratio.

  • So in a traditional model, most of the teacher's time

  • is spent doing lectures and grading and whatnot.

  • Maybe five percent of their time is actually sitting next to students

  • and actually working with them.

  • Now 100 percent of their time is.

  • So once again, using technology, not just flipping the classroom,

  • you're humanizing the classroom, I'd argue,

  • by a factor of five or 10.

  • And as valuable as that is in Los Altos,

  • imagine what that does to the adult learner

  • who's embarrassed to go back and learn stuff

  • that they should have before, before going back to college.

  • Imagine what it does

  • to a street kid in Calcutta

  • who has to help his family during the day,

  • and that's the reason why he or she can't go to school.

  • Now they can spend two hours a day and remediate,

  • or get up to speed and not feel embarrassed

  • about what they do or don't know.

  • Now imagine what happens where --

  • we talked about the peers teaching each other

  • inside of a classroom.

  • But this is all one system.

  • There's no reason why you can't have

  • that peer-to-peer tutoring

  • beyond that one classroom.

  • Imagine what happens if that student in Calcutta

  • all of a sudden can tutor your son,

  • or your son can tutor that kid in Calcutta?

  • And I think what you'll see emerging

  • is this notion of a global one-world classroom.

  • And that's essentially what we're trying to build.

  • Thank you.

  • (Applause)

  • Bill Gates: I've seen some things you're doing in the system

  • that have to do with motivation and feedback --

  • energy points, merit badges.

  • Tell me what you're thinking there.

  • SK: Oh yeah. No, we have an awesome team working on it.

  • And I have to make it clear, it's not just me anymore.

  • I'm still doing all the videos,

  • but we have a rockstar team doing the software.

  • Yeah, we've put a bunch of game mechanics in there

  • where you get these badges,

  • we're going to start having leader boards by area, and you get points.

  • It's actually been pretty interesting.

  • Just the wording of the badging or how many points you get for doing something,

  • we see on a system-wide basis,

  • like tens of thousands of fifth graders or sixth graders

  • going one direction or another,

  • depending what badge you give them.

  • (Laughter)

  • BG: And the collaboration you're doing with Los Altos,

  • how did that come about?

  • SK: Los Altos, it was kind of crazy.

  • Once again, I didn't expect it to be used in classrooms.

  • Someone from their board came and said,

  • "What would you do if you had carte blanche in a classroom?"

  • And I said, "Well, I would just, every student work at their own pace

  • on something like this and we'd give a dashboard."

  • And they said, "Oh, this is kind of radical. We have to think about it."

  • And me and the rest of the team were like,

  • "They're never going to want to do this."

  • But literally the next day they were like, "Can you start in two weeks?"

  • (Laughter)

  • BG: So fifth grade math is where that's going on right now?

  • SK: It's two fifth grade classes and two seventh grade classes.

  • And they're doing it at the district level.

  • I think what they're excited about is they can now follow these kids.

  • It's not an only-in-school thing.

  • We've even, on Christmas, we saw some of the kids were doing it.

  • And we can track everything.

  • So they can actually track them as they go through the entire district.

  • Through the summers, as they go from one teacher to the next,

  • you have this continuity of data

  • that even at the district level they can see.

  • BG: So some of those views we saw

  • were for the teacher

  • to go in and track actually what's going on with those kids.

  • So you're getting feedback on those teacher views

  • to see what they think they mean?

  • SK: Oh yeah. Most of those were specs by the teachers.

  • We made some of those for students so they could see their data,

  • but we have a very tight design loop with the teachers themselves.

  • And they're literally saying, "Hey, this is nice, but ... "

  • Like that focus graph, a lot of the teachers said,

  • "I have a feeling that a lot of the kids are jumping around

  • and not focusing on one topic."

  • So we made that focus diagram.

  • So it's all been teacher-driven.

  • It's been pretty crazy.

  • BG: Is this ready for prime time?

  • Do you think a lot of classes next school year should try this thing out?

  • SK: Yeah, it's ready.

  • We've got a million people on the site already,

  • so we can handle a few more.

  • (Laughter)

  • No, no reason why it really can't happen

  • in every classroom in America tomorrow.

  • BG: And the vision of the tutoring thing.

  • The idea there is, if I'm confused about a topic,

  • somehow right in the user interface

  • I'd find people who are volunteering,

  • maybe see their reputation,

  • and I could schedule and connect up with those people?

  • SK: Absolutely. And this is something

  • that I recommend everyone in this audience to do.

  • Those dashboards the teachers have, you can go log in right now

  • and you can essentially become a coach

  • for your kids, or nephews, or cousins,

  • or maybe some kids at the Boys and Girls Club.

  • And yeah, you can start becoming a mentor, a tutor,

  • really immediately.

  • But yeah, it's all there.

  • BG: Well, it's amazing.

  • I think you just got a glimpse of the future of education.

  • Thank you. (SK: Thank you.)

  • (Applause)

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