0:15
SALMAN KHAN: The Khan Academy is most known
0:17
for its collection of videos.
0:19
So before I go any farther, let me
0:22
show you a little bit of a montage.
0:24
[VIDEO PLAYBACK]
0:25
-So the hypotenuse is now going to be five.
0:27
This animal's fossils are only found
0:29
in this area of South America, nice, clean band
0:32
here, and in this part of Africa.
0:35
We could integrate over the surface,
0:37
and the notation usually is a capital sigma.
0:40
National Assembly, they create the committee
0:42
of public safety, which sounds like a very nice committee.
0:44
Notice this is an aldehyde, and it's an alcohol.
0:48
Start differentiating into effector and memory cells.
0:52
A galaxy, hey, there's another galaxy.
0:54
Oh look, there's another galaxy.
0:56
And for dollars is their 30 million plus the $20 million
0:59
from the American manufacturer.
1:01
If this does not blow your mind, then you have no emotion.
1:06
[END VIDEO PLAYBACK]
1:13
SALMAN KHAN: We now have on the order of 2,200 videos
1:17
covering everything from basic arithmetic all
1:20
the way to vector calculus and some of the stuff
1:22
that you saw up there.
1:24
We have a million students a month using the site,
1:27
watching on the order of 100,000 to 200,000 videos a day.
1:31
But what we're going to talk about in this
1:33
is how we're going to the next level.
1:36
But before I do that, I want to talk a little bit about how
1:39
I got started.
1:41
And some of you all might know, about five years ago,
1:44
I was an analyst at a hedge fund.
1:46
And I was in Boston.
1:49
And I was tutoring my cousins in New Orleans remotely.
1:52
And I started putting the first YouTube videos up, really just
1:55
as a nice to have, just kind of a supplement, for my cousins,
1:58
something that might give them a refresher, or something.
2:01
And as soon as I put those first YouTube videos up,
2:04
something interesting happened.
2:05
Actually, a bunch of interesting things happened.
2:08
The first was the feedback from my cousins.
2:11
They told me that they preferred me on YouTube than in person.
2:16
[LAUGHTER]
2:22
And once you get over the backhanded nature of that,
2:26
there was actually something very profound there.
2:28
They were saying that they preferred the automated version
2:32
of their cousin to their cousin.
2:34
At first it's very unintuitive, but when you actually
2:36
think about it from their point of view,
2:38
it makes a ton of sense.
2:40
You have this situation where now they can pause and repeat
2:43
their cousin without feeling like they're wasting my time.
2:47
If they have to review something that they should have learned
2:50
a couple of weeks ago, or maybe a couple of years ago,
2:54
they don't have to be embarrassed and ask
2:56
their cousin.
2:56
They can just watch those videos.
2:58
If they're bored, they can go ahead.
2:59
They can watch it at their own time, at their own pace.
3:01
And probably the least appreciated aspect of this
3:07
is the notion that the very first time, the very first time
3:10
that you're trying to get your brain around a new concept,
3:13
the very last thing you need is another human being saying
3:16
do you understand this.
3:18
And that's what was happening with the interaction
3:20
with my cousins before.
3:21
And now they could just do it in the intimacy of their own room.
3:28
The other thing that happened is I put them on YouTube
3:31
just for the-- I saw no reason to make it private.
3:36
So I let other people watch it.
3:37
And then people started stumbling on it.
3:40
And I started getting some comments, and some letters,
3:42
and all sorts of feedback from random people around the world.
3:46
And these are just a few.
3:50
This is actually from one of the original calculus videos.
3:53
And someone wrote on YouTube, it was a YouTube comment,
3:56
"First time I smiled doing a derivative."
4:02
Let's pause here.
4:04
This person did a derivative, and then they smiled.
4:09
And then in response to that same comment,
4:11
this is on the thread.
4:11
You could go on YouTube and look at these comments.
4:14
Someone else wrote, "Same thing here.
4:15
I actually got a natural high and a good mood
4:17
for the entire day, since I remember
4:20
seeing all of this 'matrix text' in class.
4:23
And here I'm all like, I know Kung Fu."
4:26
[LAUGHTER]
4:30
And we got a lot of feedback along those lines.
4:32
This clearly was helping people.
4:34
But then, as the viewership kept growing, and kept growing,
4:38
I started getting letters from people.
4:41
And it was starting to become clear
4:42
that it was actually more than just a nice to have.
4:44
This is just an excerpt from one of those letters.
4:48
"My 12-year-old son has autism, and has
4:51
had a terrible time with math.
4:53
We have tried everything, viewed everything, bought everything.
4:56
We stumbled on your video on decimals, and it got through.
5:00
Then we went on to the dreaded fractions.
5:01
Again, he got it.
5:03
We could not believe it.
5:04
He is so excited."
5:06
And so you can imagine, here I was,
5:09
an analyst at a hedge fund.
5:12
It was very strange for me to do something of social value.
5:15
[LAUGHTER AND APPLAUSE]
5:24
But I was excited.
5:26
So I kept going.
5:27
And then a few other things started to dawn on me.
5:30
That not only would it help my cousins right now,
5:32
or these people who were sending letters.
5:34
But maybe that this content will never go old.
5:37
That it could help their kids or their grandkids.
5:40
If Isaac Newton had done YouTube videos on calculus,
5:45
I wouldn't have to, assuming he was good.
5:50
We don't know.
5:51
[LAUGHTER]
5:54
The other thing that happened, and even at this point, I said,
5:56
OK, maybe it's a good supplement.
5:58
It's good for motivated students.
5:59
It's good for maybe homeschoolers.
6:01
But I didn't think it would be something that would somehow
6:04
penetrate the classroom.
6:05
But then I started getting letters from teachers.
6:07
And the teachers would write saying,
6:09
we've used your videos to flip the classroom.
6:11
You've given the lectures.
6:13
So now what we do-- and this could actually
6:15
happen in every classroom in America tomorrow-- what I do
6:18
is I assign the lectures for homework.
6:21
And what used to be homework, I now
6:23
have the students doing in the classroom.
6:26
[APPLAUSE]
6:33
I want to pause here for a second
6:34
because there's a couple of interesting things.
6:36
One, when those teachers are doing that,
6:38
there's the obvious benefit.
6:40
There's the benefit that now their students
6:42
can enjoy the videos in the way that my cousins did.
6:45
They can pause, repeat at their own pace, at their own time.
6:48
But the more interesting thing-- and this
6:50
is the unintuitive thing when you talk about technology
6:52
in the classroom-- by removing the "one size fits all"
6:55
lecture from the classroom and letting students have
6:58
a self-paced lecture at home, and then when
7:00
you go to the classroom, letting them do work,
7:02
having the teacher walk around, having the peers actually
7:05
be able to interact with each other,
7:07
these teachers have used technology
7:11
to humanize the classroom.
7:13
They took a fundamentally dehumanizing experience,
7:15
a bunch of 30 kids with their fingers on their lips,
7:18
not allowed to interact with each other.
7:20
A teacher, no matter how good, has
7:21
to give this kind of "one size fits all"
7:23
lecture to 30 students-- blank faces, slightly antagonistic.
7:27
And now it's a human experience.
7:29
Now they're actually interacting with each other.
7:31
So once the Khan Academy-- I quit my job.
7:35
And we turned into a real organization,
7:37
or a not-for-profit.
7:39
The question is, how do we take this to the next level?
7:42
How do we take what those teachers were
7:44
doing to their natural conclusion?
7:46
And so what I'm showing over here,
7:48
these are actual exercises that I
7:51
started writing for my cousins.
7:53
The ones I started were much more primitive.
7:55
This is a more competent version of it.
7:59
But the paradigm here is we'll generate as many questions
8:01
as you need until you get that concept,
8:03
until you get 10 in a row.
8:05
And the Khan Academy videos are there.
8:07
You get hints, the actual steps for that problem,
8:09
if you don't know how to do it.
8:11
But the paradigm, it seems like a very simple thing.
8:13
10 in a row, you move on.
8:15
But it's fundamentally different than what's
8:16
happening in classrooms right now.
8:18
In a traditional classroom, you have
8:21
a couple of-- homework, lecture, homework, lecture,
8:24
and then you have a snapshot exam.
8:26
And that exam, whether you get a 70%, an 80%, a 90% or a 95%,
8:31
the class moves on to the next topic.
8:33
And even that 95% student, what was the 5% they didn't know?
8:37
Maybe they didn't know what happens
8:39
when you raise something to the 0-th power.
8:41
And then you go build on that in the next concept.
8:43
That's analogous to-- imagine learning to ride a bicycle.
8:47
And I give you a bicycle.
8:48
Maybe I give you a lecture ahead of time.
8:50
And I give you that bicycle for two weeks.
8:51
And then I come back after two weeks.
8:53
And I say, well, let's see.
8:55
You're having trouble taking left turns.
8:56
You can't quite stop.
8:58
You're an 80% bicyclist.
8:59
So I put a big C stamp on your forehead.
9:04
And then I say here's a unicycle.
9:06
But as ridiculous as that sounds,
9:08
that's exactly what's happening in our classrooms right now.
9:12
And the idea is you fast forward.
9:14
And good students start failing algebra all of a sudden,
9:18
and start failing calculus all of a sudden,
9:20
despite being smart, despite having good teachers.
9:22
And it's usually because they had these Swiss cheese
9:25
gaps that kept building throughout their foundations.
9:27
So our model is learn math the way you would learn anything.
9:31
Like the way you would learn a bicycle.
9:32
Stay on that bicycle.
9:34
Fall off that bicycle.
9:35
Do it as long as necessary until you have mastery.
9:38
The traditional model, it penalizes you
9:41
for experimentation and failure.
9:43
But it does not expect mastery.
9:45
We encourage you to experiment.
9:46
We encourage you to failure.
9:48
But we do expect mastery.
9:51
This is just another one of the modules.
9:53
This is trigonometry.
9:54
This is shifting and reflecting functions.
9:57
And they all fit together.
9:59
We have about 90 of these right now.
10:01
And you could go to the site right now.
10:02
It's all free.
10:03
Not trying to sell anything.
10:04
But the general idea is that they all
10:06
fit into this knowledge map.
10:07
That top node right there, that's
10:09
literally single-digit addition.
10:11
It's like 1 plus 1 is equal to 2.
10:13
And the paradigm is, once you get 10 in a row on that,
10:15
then it keeps forwarding you to more and more advanced modules.
10:20
So keep-- this is further down the knowledge map.
10:22
We're getting into more advanced arithmetic.
10:24
Further down, you start getting into
10:26
pre-algebra and early algebra.
10:27
Further down, you start getting into algebra one, algebra two,
10:31
a little bit of precalculus.
10:33
And the idea is, from this, we can actually teach everything.
10:36
Well, everything that can be taught
10:39
in this type of a framework.
10:40
So you can imagine.
10:41
And this is what we are working on--
10:43
is from this knowledge map, you have logic.
10:45
You have computer programming.
10:47
You have grammar.
10:48
You have genetics.
10:49
All based off of that core of, OK, If you know this and that,
10:52
now you're ready for this next concept.
10:56
Now that can work well for an individual learner.
10:58
And I encourage one, for you to do with your kids.
11:00
But I also encourage everyone in the audience to do it yourself.
11:03
It'll change what happens at the dinner table.
11:05
But what we want to do is use the natural conclusion
11:08
of the flipping of the classroom that those early teachers
11:11
had emailed me about.
11:12
And so what I'm showing you here,
11:13
this is actually data from a pilot in the Los Altos school
11:16
district, where they took two fifth-grade classes, and two
11:19
seventh-grade classes, and completely gutted
11:21
their old math curriculum.
11:22
These kids aren't using textbooks.
11:23
They're not getting "one size fits all" lectures.
11:25
They're doing Khan Academy.
11:26
They're doing that software for roughly half
11:28
of their math class.
11:30
And I want to make it clear.
11:31
We don't view this as a complete math education.
11:33
What it does is-- and this is what's
11:34
happening Los Altos-- it frees up time.
11:36
This is the blocking and tackling.
11:38
Making sure you know how to do the system of equations.
11:40
And it frees up time for the simulations, for the games,
11:43
for the mechanics, for the robot building,
11:45
for the estimating how high that hill is based on its shadow.
11:49
And so the paradigm is the teacher walks in every day.
11:51
Every kid works at their own pace.
11:53
And a teacher-- this is actually a live dashboard from Los Altos
11:56
school district-- and they look at this dashboard.
11:58
Every row is a student.
12:00
Every column is one of those concepts.
12:02
Green means the student's already proficient.
12:04
Blue means that they're working on it, no need to worry.
12:06
Red means they're stuck.
12:08
And what the teacher does is literally just says,
12:12
let me intervene on the red kids.
12:13
Or even better, let me get one of the green kids who
12:16
are already proficient in that concept
12:17
to be the first line of attack and actually tutor their peer.
12:22
[APPLAUSE]
12:29
Now I come from a very data-centric reality.
12:32
So we don't want that teacher to even go and intervene and have
12:35
to ask the kid awkward questions.
12:37
Oh, what do you not understand, or what do you understand,
12:39
and all of the rest.
12:40
So our paradigm is to really arm the teachers
12:42
with as much data as possible.
12:43
Really data that, in almost any other field, is expected.
12:46
If you're in finance, or marketing, or manufacturing.
12:48
And so the teachers can actually diagnose
12:49
what's wrong with the students, so that they
12:50
can make their interaction as productive as possible.
12:53
So now the teachers know exactly what
12:55
the student's been up to, how long they've
12:57
been spending every day.
12:58
What videos have they been watching?
12:59
When did they pause the videos?
13:00
What did they stop watching?
13:01
What exercises are they using?
13:03
What have they been focused on?
13:04
The outer circle shows the exercises they were focused on.
13:07
The inner circle shows the videos they're focused on.
13:11
And the data gets pretty granular.
13:12
So you can actually see the exact problems
13:14
that the student got right or wrong.
13:15
Red is wrong.
13:16
Blue is right.
13:17
The leftmost question is the first question
13:19
that the student attempted.
13:20
They watched the video right over there.
13:22
And then you could see eventually they
13:23
were able to get 10 in a row.
13:25
It's almost like you can almost see
13:26
them learning over those last 10 problems.
13:28
They also got faster.
13:29
The height is how long it took them.
13:30
13:33
So when you talk about self-paced learning,
13:37
it makes sense for everyone-- in education speak,
13:39
differentiated learning.
13:40
But it's kind of crazy what happens when you actually
13:42
see it in a classroom.
13:44
Because every time we've done this,
13:46
in every classroom we've done, over and over again, if you
13:49
go five days into it, there's a group
13:51
of kids who have raced ahead.
13:52
And there's a group of kids who are a little bit slower.
13:55
And in a traditional model, if you did a snapshot assessment,
13:57
you say, oh, these are the gifted kids.
13:59
These are the slow kids.
14:00
Maybe they should be tracked differently.
14:02
Maybe we should put them in different classes.
14:04
But when you let every student work at their own pace,
14:06
and we see it over and over and over again.
14:08
You see students who took a little bit extra time
14:11
on one concept or the other.
14:13
But once they get through that concept, they just race ahead.
14:16
And so the same kids that you thought
14:18
were slow six weeks ago, you now would think are gifted.
14:21
And we're seeing it over and over and over again.
14:23
And it makes you really wonder how much
14:26
all of the labels a lot of us have benefited from
14:29
were really just due to a coincidence of time.
14:31
14:34
Now, as valuable as something like this
14:36
is in a district like Los Altos, our goal
14:40
is to use technology to humanize,
14:42
not just in Los Altos, but kind of on a global scale, what's
14:45
happening in education.
14:47
And actually that brings an interesting point.
14:49
A lot of the effort in humanizing the classroom
14:52
is focused on student to teacher ratios.
14:55
In our mind the relevant metric is
14:57
"student to valuable human time with the teacher" ratio.
15:01
So in a traditional model, most of the teacher's time
15:03
is spent doing lectures, and grading tests, and whatnot.
15:06
Maybe 5% of their time is actually
15:08
sitting next to students and actually working with them.
15:10
Now 100% of their time is.
15:12
So once again, using technology, not just
15:14
flipping the classroom, you're humanizing the classroom,
15:17
I'd argue, by a factor of five or 10.
15:20
And as valuable as it is in Los Altos,
15:22
imagine what that does to the adult learner who's
15:24
embarrassed to go back and learn stuff that they should have
15:27
known before, before going back to college.
15:28
Imagine what it does to a street kid in Calcutta who
15:35
has to help his family during the day.
15:37
And that's the reason why he or she can't go to school.
15:40
Now they can spend two hours a day
15:41
and remediate or get up to speed and not
15:44
feel embarrassed about what they do or don't know.
15:47
Now imagine what happens where-- we talked about the peers
15:50
teaching each other inside of a classroom.
15:54
But this is all one system.
15:56
There's no reason why you can't have that peer
15:58
to peer tutoring beyond that one classroom.
16:01
Imagine what happens if that student in Calcutta
16:04
all of a sudden can tutor your son.
16:06
Or your son can tutor that kid in Calcutta.
16:09
And I think what you'll see emerging
16:11
is this notion of a global one world classroom.
16:19
And that's essentially what we're trying to build.
16:22
Thank you.
16:22
[APPLAUSE]
16:31
[SIDE CONVERSATION]
16:34
[APPLAUSE]
17:04
BILL GATES: I've seen some things
17:06
you're doing in the system that have to do with motivation
17:08
and feedback-- energy points, merit badges.
17:12
Tell me what you're thinking there.
17:14
SALMAN KHAN: Oh yeah, no, we have an awesome team
17:16
working on that.
17:17
And I have to be clear.
17:18
It's not just me anymore.
17:19
I'm still doing all the videos.
17:20
We have a rock star team doing the software.
17:23
Yeah, we've put a bunch of game mechanics
17:24
in there, where you get these badges.
17:25
We're going to start having leader boards by areas,
17:28
and you get points.
17:29
It's actually been pretty interesting.
17:31
Just the wording of the badging, or how many points you
17:33
get for doing something, we see on the system-wide basis
17:36
tens of thousands of fifth graders
17:37
or sixth graders going one direction or another, depending
17:40
on what badge you give them.
17:43
[LAUGHTER]
17:44
BILL GATES: And the collaboration you're
17:46
doing with Los Altos, how did that come about?
17:49
SALMAN KHAN: Yeah, Los Altos was kind of crazy.
17:52
Once again, I didn't expect it to be used in classrooms.
17:55
Someone from their board came and said, what would you
17:57
do if you had carte blanche in a classroom?
18:00
And I said, well, I would just-- every student
18:02
work at their own pace on something like this.
18:04
We'd give a dashboard.
18:05
And they said, oh, this is kind of radical,
18:06
we have to think about it.
18:08
And me and the rest of team were like, they're never
18:10
going to want to do this.
18:11
But literally the next day they were like,
18:13
can you start in two weeks?
18:15
[LAUGHTER]
18:17
BILL GATES: So it's fifth-grade math
18:19
is where that's going on right now?
18:20
SALMAN KHAN: It's two fifth-grade classes
18:22
and two seventh-grade classes.
18:23
They're doing it at the district level.
18:24
And I think what they're excited about
18:26
is they can now follow these kids.
18:27
It's not an only in-school thing.
18:29
Even on Christmas, we saw some of the kids were doing.
18:31
And we track everything.
18:32
So they can actually track them as they
18:34
go through the entire district, through the summers, as they
18:36
go from one teacher to a next.
18:37
You have this continuity of data that, even at the district
18:41
level, they can see.
18:42
BILL GATES: So some of those views
18:43
we saw were for the teacher to go in and track actually
18:46
what's going on with those kids.
18:49
So you're getting feedback on those teacher views
18:51
to see what they think they need?
18:53
SALMAN KHAN: Oh yeah.
18:53
Actually, most of those were specs by the teachers.
18:57
We made some of those for students
18:58
so they could their data.
18:59
But we have a very tight design loop
19:01
with the teachers themselves.
19:02
And they're literally saying, hey, this is nice.
19:05
But that focus graph, a lot of the teachers
19:07
said I have a feeling that a lot of the kids are jumping around,
19:10
and not focusing on one topic.
19:11
So we made that focus diagram for them.
19:13
So it's all been teacher driven.
19:15
It's been pretty crazy.
19:16
BILL GATES: Is this ready for prime time?
19:18
Do you think a lot of classes next school
19:21
year should try this thing out?
19:22
SALMAN KHAN: Yeah.
19:23
It's ready.
19:25
We've got a million people on the site already.
19:27
So we can handle a few more.
19:28
And no, no reason why it really can't
19:33
happen in every classroom in America tomorrow.
19:36
BILL GATES: And the vision of the tutoring thing.
19:38
The idea there is, if I'm confused about a topic,
19:41
somehow right in the user interface,
19:43
I'd find people who are volunteering,
19:45
maybe see their reputation.
19:47
And I could schedule and connect up with those people.
19:50
SALMAN KHAN: Absolutely.
19:51
And this is something I recommend everyone
19:53
in this audience to do.
19:54
Those dashboards the teachers have, you can go log in right
19:57
now.
19:57
And you could essentially become a coach
19:59
for your kids, your nephews, your cousins, or maybe
20:02
some kids at the Boys & Girls Club.
20:05
And you can start becoming a mentor or tutor really
20:08
immediately.
20:09
But yeah, it's all there.
20:10
BILL GATES: Well, it's amazing.
20:12
I think you've just got a glimpse
20:13
of the future of education.
20:15
Thank you.
20:16
SALMAN KHAN: Thank you.
20:17
[APPLAUSE]
SALMAN KHAN: The Khan Academy is most known
0:17
for its collection of videos.
0:19
So before I go any farther, let me
0:22
show you a little bit of a montage.
0:24
[VIDEO PLAYBACK]
0:25
-So the hypotenuse is now going to be five.
0:27
This animal's fossils are only found
0:29
in this area of South America, nice, clean band
0:32
here, and in this part of Africa.
0:35
We could integrate over the surface,
0:37
and the notation usually is a capital sigma.
0:40
National Assembly, they create the committee
0:42
of public safety, which sounds like a very nice committee.
0:44
Notice this is an aldehyde, and it's an alcohol.
0:48
Start differentiating into effector and memory cells.
0:52
A galaxy, hey, there's another galaxy.
0:54
Oh look, there's another galaxy.
0:56
And for dollars is their 30 million plus the $20 million
0:59
from the American manufacturer.
1:01
If this does not blow your mind, then you have no emotion.
1:06
[END VIDEO PLAYBACK]
1:13
SALMAN KHAN: We now have on the order of 2,200 videos
1:17
covering everything from basic arithmetic all
1:20
the way to vector calculus and some of the stuff
1:22
that you saw up there.
1:24
We have a million students a month using the site,
1:27
watching on the order of 100,000 to 200,000 videos a day.
1:31
But what we're going to talk about in this
1:33
is how we're going to the next level.
1:36
But before I do that, I want to talk a little bit about how
1:39
I got started.
1:41
And some of you all might know, about five years ago,
1:44
I was an analyst at a hedge fund.
1:46
And I was in Boston.
1:49
And I was tutoring my cousins in New Orleans remotely.
1:52
And I started putting the first YouTube videos up, really just
1:55
as a nice to have, just kind of a supplement, for my cousins,
1:58
something that might give them a refresher, or something.
2:01
And as soon as I put those first YouTube videos up,
2:04
something interesting happened.
2:05
Actually, a bunch of interesting things happened.
2:08
The first was the feedback from my cousins.
2:11
They told me that they preferred me on YouTube than in person.
2:16
[LAUGHTER]
2:22
And once you get over the backhanded nature of that,
2:26
there was actually something very profound there.
2:28
They were saying that they preferred the automated version
2:32
of their cousin to their cousin.
2:34
At first it's very unintuitive, but when you actually
2:36
think about it from their point of view,
2:38
it makes a ton of sense.
2:40
You have this situation where now they can pause and repeat
2:43
their cousin without feeling like they're wasting my time.
2:47
If they have to review something that they should have learned
2:50
a couple of weeks ago, or maybe a couple of years ago,
2:54
they don't have to be embarrassed and ask
2:56
their cousin.
2:56
They can just watch those videos.
2:58
If they're bored, they can go ahead.
2:59
They can watch it at their own time, at their own pace.
3:01
And probably the least appreciated aspect of this
3:07
is the notion that the very first time, the very first time
3:10
that you're trying to get your brain around a new concept,
3:13
the very last thing you need is another human being saying
3:16
do you understand this.
3:18
And that's what was happening with the interaction
3:20
with my cousins before.
3:21
And now they could just do it in the intimacy of their own room.
3:28
The other thing that happened is I put them on YouTube
3:31
just for the-- I saw no reason to make it private.
3:36
So I let other people watch it.
3:37
And then people started stumbling on it.
3:40
And I started getting some comments, and some letters,
3:42
and all sorts of feedback from random people around the world.
3:46
And these are just a few.
3:50
This is actually from one of the original calculus videos.
3:53
And someone wrote on YouTube, it was a YouTube comment,
3:56
"First time I smiled doing a derivative."
4:02
Let's pause here.
4:04
This person did a derivative, and then they smiled.
4:09
And then in response to that same comment,
4:11
this is on the thread.
4:11
You could go on YouTube and look at these comments.
4:14
Someone else wrote, "Same thing here.
4:15
I actually got a natural high and a good mood
4:17
for the entire day, since I remember
4:20
seeing all of this 'matrix text' in class.
4:23
And here I'm all like, I know Kung Fu."
4:26
[LAUGHTER]
4:30
And we got a lot of feedback along those lines.
4:32
This clearly was helping people.
4:34
But then, as the viewership kept growing, and kept growing,
4:38
I started getting letters from people.
4:41
And it was starting to become clear
4:42
that it was actually more than just a nice to have.
4:44
This is just an excerpt from one of those letters.
4:48
"My 12-year-old son has autism, and has
4:51
had a terrible time with math.
4:53
We have tried everything, viewed everything, bought everything.
4:56
We stumbled on your video on decimals, and it got through.
5:00
Then we went on to the dreaded fractions.
5:01
Again, he got it.
5:03
We could not believe it.
5:04
He is so excited."
5:06
And so you can imagine, here I was,
5:09
an analyst at a hedge fund.
5:12
It was very strange for me to do something of social value.
5:15
[LAUGHTER AND APPLAUSE]
5:24
But I was excited.
5:26
So I kept going.
5:27
And then a few other things started to dawn on me.
5:30
That not only would it help my cousins right now,
5:32
or these people who were sending letters.
5:34
But maybe that this content will never go old.
5:37
That it could help their kids or their grandkids.
5:40
If Isaac Newton had done YouTube videos on calculus,
5:45
I wouldn't have to, assuming he was good.
5:50
We don't know.
5:51
[LAUGHTER]
5:54
The other thing that happened, and even at this point, I said,
5:56
OK, maybe it's a good supplement.
5:58
It's good for motivated students.
5:59
It's good for maybe homeschoolers.
6:01
But I didn't think it would be something that would somehow
6:04
penetrate the classroom.
6:05
But then I started getting letters from teachers.
6:07
And the teachers would write saying,
6:09
we've used your videos to flip the classroom.
6:11
You've given the lectures.
6:13
So now what we do-- and this could actually
6:15
happen in every classroom in America tomorrow-- what I do
6:18
is I assign the lectures for homework.
6:21
And what used to be homework, I now
6:23
have the students doing in the classroom.
6:26
[APPLAUSE]
6:33
I want to pause here for a second
6:34
because there's a couple of interesting things.
6:36
One, when those teachers are doing that,
6:38
there's the obvious benefit.
6:40
There's the benefit that now their students
6:42
can enjoy the videos in the way that my cousins did.
6:45
They can pause, repeat at their own pace, at their own time.
6:48
But the more interesting thing-- and this
6:50
is the unintuitive thing when you talk about technology
6:52
in the classroom-- by removing the "one size fits all"
6:55
lecture from the classroom and letting students have
6:58
a self-paced lecture at home, and then when
7:00
you go to the classroom, letting them do work,
7:02
having the teacher walk around, having the peers actually
7:05
be able to interact with each other,
7:07
these teachers have used technology
7:11
to humanize the classroom.
7:13
They took a fundamentally dehumanizing experience,
7:15
a bunch of 30 kids with their fingers on their lips,
7:18
not allowed to interact with each other.
7:20
A teacher, no matter how good, has
7:21
to give this kind of "one size fits all"
7:23
lecture to 30 students-- blank faces, slightly antagonistic.
7:27
And now it's a human experience.
7:29
Now they're actually interacting with each other.
7:31
So once the Khan Academy-- I quit my job.
7:35
And we turned into a real organization,
7:37
or a not-for-profit.
7:39
The question is, how do we take this to the next level?
7:42
How do we take what those teachers were
7:44
doing to their natural conclusion?
7:46
And so what I'm showing over here,
7:48
these are actual exercises that I
7:51
started writing for my cousins.
7:53
The ones I started were much more primitive.
7:55
This is a more competent version of it.
7:59
But the paradigm here is we'll generate as many questions
8:01
as you need until you get that concept,
8:03
until you get 10 in a row.
8:05
And the Khan Academy videos are there.
8:07
You get hints, the actual steps for that problem,
8:09
if you don't know how to do it.
8:11
But the paradigm, it seems like a very simple thing.
8:13
10 in a row, you move on.
8:15
But it's fundamentally different than what's
8:16
happening in classrooms right now.
8:18
In a traditional classroom, you have
8:21
a couple of-- homework, lecture, homework, lecture,
8:24
and then you have a snapshot exam.
8:26
And that exam, whether you get a 70%, an 80%, a 90% or a 95%,
8:31
the class moves on to the next topic.
8:33
And even that 95% student, what was the 5% they didn't know?
8:37
Maybe they didn't know what happens
8:39
when you raise something to the 0-th power.
8:41
And then you go build on that in the next concept.
8:43
That's analogous to-- imagine learning to ride a bicycle.
8:47
And I give you a bicycle.
8:48
Maybe I give you a lecture ahead of time.
8:50
And I give you that bicycle for two weeks.
8:51
And then I come back after two weeks.
8:53
And I say, well, let's see.
8:55
You're having trouble taking left turns.
8:56
You can't quite stop.
8:58
You're an 80% bicyclist.
8:59
So I put a big C stamp on your forehead.
9:04
And then I say here's a unicycle.
9:06
But as ridiculous as that sounds,
9:08
that's exactly what's happening in our classrooms right now.
9:12
And the idea is you fast forward.
9:14
And good students start failing algebra all of a sudden,
9:18
and start failing calculus all of a sudden,
9:20
despite being smart, despite having good teachers.
9:22
And it's usually because they had these Swiss cheese
9:25
gaps that kept building throughout their foundations.
9:27
So our model is learn math the way you would learn anything.
9:31
Like the way you would learn a bicycle.
9:32
Stay on that bicycle.
9:34
Fall off that bicycle.
9:35
Do it as long as necessary until you have mastery.
9:38
The traditional model, it penalizes you
9:41
for experimentation and failure.
9:43
But it does not expect mastery.
9:45
We encourage you to experiment.
9:46
We encourage you to failure.
9:48
But we do expect mastery.
9:51
This is just another one of the modules.
9:53
This is trigonometry.
9:54
This is shifting and reflecting functions.
9:57
And they all fit together.
9:59
We have about 90 of these right now.
10:01
And you could go to the site right now.
10:02
It's all free.
10:03
Not trying to sell anything.
10:04
But the general idea is that they all
10:06
fit into this knowledge map.
10:07
That top node right there, that's
10:09
literally single-digit addition.
10:11
It's like 1 plus 1 is equal to 2.
10:13
And the paradigm is, once you get 10 in a row on that,
10:15
then it keeps forwarding you to more and more advanced modules.
10:20
So keep-- this is further down the knowledge map.
10:22
We're getting into more advanced arithmetic.
10:24
Further down, you start getting into
10:26
pre-algebra and early algebra.
10:27
Further down, you start getting into algebra one, algebra two,
10:31
a little bit of precalculus.
10:33
And the idea is, from this, we can actually teach everything.
10:36
Well, everything that can be taught
10:39
in this type of a framework.
10:40
So you can imagine.
10:41
And this is what we are working on--
10:43
is from this knowledge map, you have logic.
10:45
You have computer programming.
10:47
You have grammar.
10:48
You have genetics.
10:49
All based off of that core of, OK, If you know this and that,
10:52
now you're ready for this next concept.
10:56
Now that can work well for an individual learner.
10:58
And I encourage one, for you to do with your kids.
11:00
But I also encourage everyone in the audience to do it yourself.
11:03
It'll change what happens at the dinner table.
11:05
But what we want to do is use the natural conclusion
11:08
of the flipping of the classroom that those early teachers
11:11
had emailed me about.
11:12
And so what I'm showing you here,
11:13
this is actually data from a pilot in the Los Altos school
11:16
district, where they took two fifth-grade classes, and two
11:19
seventh-grade classes, and completely gutted
11:21
their old math curriculum.
11:22
These kids aren't using textbooks.
11:23
They're not getting "one size fits all" lectures.
11:25
They're doing Khan Academy.
11:26
They're doing that software for roughly half
11:28
of their math class.
11:30
And I want to make it clear.
11:31
We don't view this as a complete math education.
11:33
What it does is-- and this is what's
11:34
happening Los Altos-- it frees up time.
11:36
This is the blocking and tackling.
11:38
Making sure you know how to do the system of equations.
11:40
And it frees up time for the simulations, for the games,
11:43
for the mechanics, for the robot building,
11:45
for the estimating how high that hill is based on its shadow.
11:49
And so the paradigm is the teacher walks in every day.
11:51
Every kid works at their own pace.
11:53
And a teacher-- this is actually a live dashboard from Los Altos
11:56
school district-- and they look at this dashboard.
11:58
Every row is a student.
12:00
Every column is one of those concepts.
12:02
Green means the student's already proficient.
12:04
Blue means that they're working on it, no need to worry.
12:06
Red means they're stuck.
12:08
And what the teacher does is literally just says,
12:12
let me intervene on the red kids.
12:13
Or even better, let me get one of the green kids who
12:16
are already proficient in that concept
12:17
to be the first line of attack and actually tutor their peer.
12:22
[APPLAUSE]
12:29
Now I come from a very data-centric reality.
12:32
So we don't want that teacher to even go and intervene and have
12:35
to ask the kid awkward questions.
12:37
Oh, what do you not understand, or what do you understand,
12:39
and all of the rest.
12:40
So our paradigm is to really arm the teachers
12:42
with as much data as possible.
12:43
Really data that, in almost any other field, is expected.
12:46
If you're in finance, or marketing, or manufacturing.
12:48
And so the teachers can actually diagnose
12:49
what's wrong with the students, so that they
12:50
can make their interaction as productive as possible.
12:53
So now the teachers know exactly what
12:55
the student's been up to, how long they've
12:57
been spending every day.
12:58
What videos have they been watching?
12:59
When did they pause the videos?
13:00
What did they stop watching?
13:01
What exercises are they using?
13:03
What have they been focused on?
13:04
The outer circle shows the exercises they were focused on.
13:07
The inner circle shows the videos they're focused on.
13:11
And the data gets pretty granular.
13:12
So you can actually see the exact problems
13:14
that the student got right or wrong.
13:15
Red is wrong.
13:16
Blue is right.
13:17
The leftmost question is the first question
13:19
that the student attempted.
13:20
They watched the video right over there.
13:22
And then you could see eventually they
13:23
were able to get 10 in a row.
13:25
It's almost like you can almost see
13:26
them learning over those last 10 problems.
13:28
They also got faster.
13:29
The height is how long it took them.
13:30
13:33
So when you talk about self-paced learning,
13:37
it makes sense for everyone-- in education speak,
13:39
differentiated learning.
13:40
But it's kind of crazy what happens when you actually
13:42
see it in a classroom.
13:44
Because every time we've done this,
13:46
in every classroom we've done, over and over again, if you
13:49
go five days into it, there's a group
13:51
of kids who have raced ahead.
13:52
And there's a group of kids who are a little bit slower.
13:55
And in a traditional model, if you did a snapshot assessment,
13:57
you say, oh, these are the gifted kids.
13:59
These are the slow kids.
14:00
Maybe they should be tracked differently.
14:02
Maybe we should put them in different classes.
14:04
But when you let every student work at their own pace,
14:06
and we see it over and over and over again.
14:08
You see students who took a little bit extra time
14:11
on one concept or the other.
14:13
But once they get through that concept, they just race ahead.
14:16
And so the same kids that you thought
14:18
were slow six weeks ago, you now would think are gifted.
14:21
And we're seeing it over and over and over again.
14:23
And it makes you really wonder how much
14:26
all of the labels a lot of us have benefited from
14:29
were really just due to a coincidence of time.
14:31
14:34
Now, as valuable as something like this
14:36
is in a district like Los Altos, our goal
14:40
is to use technology to humanize,
14:42
not just in Los Altos, but kind of on a global scale, what's
14:45
happening in education.
14:47
And actually that brings an interesting point.
14:49
A lot of the effort in humanizing the classroom
14:52
is focused on student to teacher ratios.
14:55
In our mind the relevant metric is
14:57
"student to valuable human time with the teacher" ratio.
15:01
So in a traditional model, most of the teacher's time
15:03
is spent doing lectures, and grading tests, and whatnot.
15:06
Maybe 5% of their time is actually
15:08
sitting next to students and actually working with them.
15:10
Now 100% of their time is.
15:12
So once again, using technology, not just
15:14
flipping the classroom, you're humanizing the classroom,
15:17
I'd argue, by a factor of five or 10.
15:20
And as valuable as it is in Los Altos,
15:22
imagine what that does to the adult learner who's
15:24
embarrassed to go back and learn stuff that they should have
15:27
known before, before going back to college.
15:28
Imagine what it does to a street kid in Calcutta who
15:35
has to help his family during the day.
15:37
And that's the reason why he or she can't go to school.
15:40
Now they can spend two hours a day
15:41
and remediate or get up to speed and not
15:44
feel embarrassed about what they do or don't know.
15:47
Now imagine what happens where-- we talked about the peers
15:50
teaching each other inside of a classroom.
15:54
But this is all one system.
15:56
There's no reason why you can't have that peer
15:58
to peer tutoring beyond that one classroom.
16:01
Imagine what happens if that student in Calcutta
16:04
all of a sudden can tutor your son.
16:06
Or your son can tutor that kid in Calcutta.
16:09
And I think what you'll see emerging
16:11
is this notion of a global one world classroom.
16:19
And that's essentially what we're trying to build.
16:22
Thank you.
16:22
[APPLAUSE]
16:31
[SIDE CONVERSATION]
16:34
[APPLAUSE]
17:04
BILL GATES: I've seen some things
17:06
you're doing in the system that have to do with motivation
17:08
and feedback-- energy points, merit badges.
17:12
Tell me what you're thinking there.
17:14
SALMAN KHAN: Oh yeah, no, we have an awesome team
17:16
working on that.
17:17
And I have to be clear.
17:18
It's not just me anymore.
17:19
I'm still doing all the videos.
17:20
We have a rock star team doing the software.
17:23
Yeah, we've put a bunch of game mechanics
17:24
in there, where you get these badges.
17:25
We're going to start having leader boards by areas,
17:28
and you get points.
17:29
It's actually been pretty interesting.
17:31
Just the wording of the badging, or how many points you
17:33
get for doing something, we see on the system-wide basis
17:36
tens of thousands of fifth graders
17:37
or sixth graders going one direction or another, depending
17:40
on what badge you give them.
17:43
[LAUGHTER]
17:44
BILL GATES: And the collaboration you're
17:46
doing with Los Altos, how did that come about?
17:49
SALMAN KHAN: Yeah, Los Altos was kind of crazy.
17:52
Once again, I didn't expect it to be used in classrooms.
17:55
Someone from their board came and said, what would you
17:57
do if you had carte blanche in a classroom?
18:00
And I said, well, I would just-- every student
18:02
work at their own pace on something like this.
18:04
We'd give a dashboard.
18:05
And they said, oh, this is kind of radical,
18:06
we have to think about it.
18:08
And me and the rest of team were like, they're never
18:10
going to want to do this.
18:11
But literally the next day they were like,
18:13
can you start in two weeks?
18:15
[LAUGHTER]
18:17
BILL GATES: So it's fifth-grade math
18:19
is where that's going on right now?
18:20
SALMAN KHAN: It's two fifth-grade classes
18:22
and two seventh-grade classes.
18:23
They're doing it at the district level.
18:24
And I think what they're excited about
18:26
is they can now follow these kids.
18:27
It's not an only in-school thing.
18:29
Even on Christmas, we saw some of the kids were doing.
18:31
And we track everything.
18:32
So they can actually track them as they
18:34
go through the entire district, through the summers, as they
18:36
go from one teacher to a next.
18:37
You have this continuity of data that, even at the district
18:41
level, they can see.
18:42
BILL GATES: So some of those views
18:43
we saw were for the teacher to go in and track actually
18:46
what's going on with those kids.
18:49
So you're getting feedback on those teacher views
18:51
to see what they think they need?
18:53
SALMAN KHAN: Oh yeah.
18:53
Actually, most of those were specs by the teachers.
18:57
We made some of those for students
18:58
so they could their data.
18:59
But we have a very tight design loop
19:01
with the teachers themselves.
19:02
And they're literally saying, hey, this is nice.
19:05
But that focus graph, a lot of the teachers
19:07
said I have a feeling that a lot of the kids are jumping around,
19:10
and not focusing on one topic.
19:11
So we made that focus diagram for them.
19:13
So it's all been teacher driven.
19:15
It's been pretty crazy.
19:16
BILL GATES: Is this ready for prime time?
19:18
Do you think a lot of classes next school
19:21
year should try this thing out?
19:22
SALMAN KHAN: Yeah.
19:23
It's ready.
19:25
We've got a million people on the site already.
19:27
So we can handle a few more.
19:28
And no, no reason why it really can't
19:33
happen in every classroom in America tomorrow.
19:36
BILL GATES: And the vision of the tutoring thing.
19:38
The idea there is, if I'm confused about a topic,
19:41
somehow right in the user interface,
19:43
I'd find people who are volunteering,
19:45
maybe see their reputation.
19:47
And I could schedule and connect up with those people.
19:50
SALMAN KHAN: Absolutely.
19:51
And this is something I recommend everyone
19:53
in this audience to do.
19:54
Those dashboards the teachers have, you can go log in right
19:57
now.
19:57
And you could essentially become a coach
19:59
for your kids, your nephews, your cousins, or maybe
20:02
some kids at the Boys & Girls Club.
20:05
And you can start becoming a mentor or tutor really
20:08
immediately.
20:09
But yeah, it's all there.
20:10
BILL GATES: Well, it's amazing.
20:12
I think you've just got a glimpse
20:13
of the future of education.
20:15
Thank you.
20:16
SALMAN KHAN: Thank you.
20:17
[APPLAUSE]