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Tom: From WBUR-Boston, I'm Tom Ashbrook
and this is On Point.
Salman Khan is one of the most influential
teachers in the country.
His short 12 minute video lectures
are watched by more than a million-
Watched more than a million times a month,
yet Khan doesn't have a teaching degree
or a classroom.
What he has is a widely popular, simple,
online method of teaching the basics
of math, physics, biology, history,
and a dozen other subjects.
Because at the Khan Academy, and it is turning
classroom thinking upside down.
This hour On Point, Salman Khan, online instruction
and the future of education.
You can join the conversation, is that you out there,
watching, learning from Salman Khan?
Has he become your online teacher, tutor,
your child's?
Is this the education fix we've been looking for?
We're at 1-800-423-8255.
That's 800-423-TALK and you can comment
at our website, onpointradio.org or
on Twitter and Facebook @onpointradio.
Later this hour, we'll talk with Peter Norvig,
who co-teaches a free online course
on artificial intelligence at Stanford University,
which has already signed up 58,000 students
for it's delivery this fall.
But first, to Salman Khan.
He is making big waves in the world of education
with some pretty simple, at least on the surface,
video online.
He got his start making videos
about math and science.
Did a lot of them with a $25 headset and microphone
in a little set-up in a closet, just churning them out.
Here's a video from last year where he explains
something pretty simple compared to some of his work,
how to calculate the square root of 100.
Khan: 100 is the same thing as 10 times 10.
Then you know that the square root
of something times itself, that's just going
to be that something.
This is just equal to 10.
So, the square root of 100 is 10.
Or another way you could write, I guess,
this same truth is that 10 squared,
which is equal to 10 times 10, is equal to 100.
Tom: Sounds simple?
Maybe so, if you can figure it out,
if it works for you, it's great.
These videos have been watched, at this point,
more than 70 million times.
Joining me now is Salman Khan.
He's the 34-year-old founder of the Khan Academy.
He has three degrees from MIT in electrical engineering
and computer science and a master's in business
administration from Harvard.
He was working as a hedge fund analyst,
when his young cousin needed help with her math homework.
His tutorials for her went up on YouTube
and became so popular that he quit his job in 2009
to run the Khan Academy full-time.
Salman Khan, welcome to On Point.
Khan: Great to be here Tom.
Tom: You're really shaking it up out there.
I mean, well I heard they call you a nerdy south Asian Seinfeld,
south Asian-American Seinfeld. (laughing)
Khan: I assume the nerdy was an endearing form ...
Tom: Absolutely. The highest praise ...
Tom: Highest praise these days.
Nerds are exactly what we need.
You got SO many people tuning in to you.
I know you told this story a million times,
but tell us once more, what were you doing
when your cousin called up for some help?
Khan: Yeah, she was actually visiting me
in Boston from New Orleans and she was in 7th grade
and I remember we were watching the fireworks
over the Charles River and she was doing all
of these brain teasers that I was giving her
to kill time, so I was really impressed.
And I was telling her the next day,
that she should think about going to MIT
when she applies to colleges
and her mom actually said,
"Well, thanks for saying that."
When Nadia was away, but she said,
"Nadia is actually having trouble with math."
So, I chatted with Nadia.
She apparently had bombed a placement exam
and she had trouble getting units, you know,
converting kilograms to grams and all the rest.
And so, I said, "Hey Nadia, how about
I tutor you remotely?"
So we started doing that as soon as her family
went back to New Orleans and that worked out.
Then I started tutoring her brothers and a couple
of other cousins and family friends and then in 2006,
so that all started in 2004.
In 2006, I had a buddy and I was just telling him about,
you know, I'm just having a lot of fun
doing this, kind of, volunteer tutoring with my family,
but I have trouble scaling it now that I have
a lot of family friends that I was tutoring ... (laughing)
Tom: Right.
And he said, "Why don't you put some of
your lectures on YouTube?"
And I said, "No, that's for dogs on skateboards.
That's not for real math."
But I gave it a shot and I guess the rest is history.
Tom: History, in a way, give us a visual picture
of these lectures.
This is not you standing up there in a cardigan
like Mr. Rogers. In fact, we never see you.
Wired Magazine said like the Wizard of Oz,
Khan never steps from behind the curtain.
It's just you, your voice, and scrawling equations
on a kind of like electronic white board
on whatever it might be.
Khan: Yeah, no. You know, after that first day,
when I was attempting to make videos,
I literally looked around my closet and I had
no video camera, had no real recording equipment
to speak of.
I did have a USB headset and I did a few web searches
and there's this kind of software called
screen capture software, where it just captures
what happens on your screen and it turns it
into a video and your voice.
And, I said, "You know, that's probably good enough."
Because that's what I was doing with Nadia
when we did our live sessions.
We'd get on a speaker phone and we'd use
Yahoo Doodle, which is this little shared notepad
and, not only did it seem to work,
but it seemed to, in some way, be a little bit more
intimate than someone standing at a white board
and kind of talking to a class.
So, I tried it out and, you know, in those early days
I was just like, "Look, it's just for my cousins.
They're not paying me. Who cares of the quality."
(laughing)
But as soon as I did that, I just got a lot of feedback
from both my cousins and random people on YouTube
saying that they really liked that form factor.
That it allowed them to focus on the content.
They didn't have a distracting phase.
It felt personal. It felt like we were sitting
next to each other at the kitchen table
and staring at the same content.
Tom: That was with cousin Nadia in 2004
and then a few more cousins and relatives.
We're just talking 6 or 7 years ago.
Give us a sense of the scale of students
around the world who are now interacting
with these videos online with Khan Academy.
Khan: Yeah, we're now at about 2 million
unique students a month.
I mean, as you've mentioned, they've been watched
70 million times and yeah.
That number has grown-
The number of students watching it per month
has grown tenfold in the past year,
so it's, kind of, on this-
It's this surreal growth trajectory. (laughing)
Tom: And it's not just the square root of 100.
I was checking out your little mini-video lecture
on Tailor's Polynomial this morning.
I mean, you're taking it in all kinds of directions
and it's not even just math anymore, Salman Khan.
Khan: Yeah, you know what?
When I started this off I was making videos
roughly in, kind of, the pre-algebra,
algebra area, mainly for my cousins,
but the one thing that started to dawn on me
is that once I had, maybe 100 or 200 videos
for my cousins, is you know, that's a pretty good
scaffold of algebra and I said,
"Oh! I wonder if I can do trigonometry?"
So, another 100 videos later I was like,
"Hey, that's a pretty good scaffold.
You can always do more, but that kind of gets
the job done for a lot of people."
I said, "Let me try to do calculus.
Let me try to do physics. Let me try to do chemistry.
Let me try to do organic chemistry." (laughing)
So part of the fun of this has just been
seeing what we can do and the really neat idea here
and it seems obvious now in hind sight is that
most of these subjects do not change in
a dramatic way from year to year, so once
you make a descent collection of algebra videos,
they're kind of good forever.
I still redo videos just to make them nicer
or to touch on a point in a different way,
but for the most part, they're kind of evergreen content.
Tom: You've got 2000 or 3000 of these
mini-lectures up now, these tutorials.
Give us the range of subjects that you're in
at this point.
Khan: Yeah, there's literally a video
on basic addition and the mindset there is to have,
so that everyone can feel like they have
a starting point on that site and literally,
the videos go incrementally from basic addition
through vector calculus and differential equations
and college level chemistry, biology and physics.
There's a little bit on art history, not art,
on American history.
So, yeah. It's a pretty broad set of content.
A lot of it on eco-, finance and economics as well.
Tom: Now, and at this point, is this just
a little nice, free tutorial for people
who happen to stumble on it or are you
orchestrating something that may be bigger,
something different?
Is this just the Salman Khan's favor to the world
or is this a game changer for education?
Khan: Well, you know, we'll see what it can do
in terms of being a game changer, but what we are
is an organization, is much more than me now.
I quit my job in 2009.
Last year we got significant funding from
The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation
and from Google and other private donors.
Tom: $1.5 million from Bill Gates.
I think something like $6 million in total
has come your way now.
Khan: Yes, yes. And so, we have a team of 14 people.
I'd say about two-thirds of those people
are focused on the software side.
Khan Academy now is, the videos are there
and that's probably where most people's first
experience happens, but what we're trying to do
is turn it into a full, for lack of a better word,
virtual school where anyone can go there.
They have the videos on demand, but they also
have exercises and the exercises start them
at basic addtion.
There's these game mechanics around it.
It keeps track of their progress, gives them feedback.
If they have a teacher or a parent that can act
as a coach, it can give them data and analytics on it
and so, the idea is, if you have nothing,
if all you have is access to the site,
you can get a pretty solid grounding
in a lot of core concepts and if you do
have access to a teacher, this has the potential
to really super-charge what happens in the classroom.
Tom: And it's all free.
We'll talk about how it works for individuals,
how it works in the classroom.
Salman Khan is with us from Palo Alto California.
Founder of Khan Academy, Salman Khan.
We've got lots of listeners calling for you already.
Channel in Hampton, Virginia.
Channel, thanks for calling. You're on the air
with Salman Khan.
Channel: Hi, good morning.
Tom: Hi.
Channel: How are you?
Tom: Great.
Channel: Hi, Mr. Khan.
Khan: Hi, Channel. What's up?
Channel: How are you? I love you.
You're such a life saver.
I love, I love all your lectures.
I mainly go to the organic chemistry lectures
and I'm a college student and they're very informative.
You're such a life saver.
I've gained all the methods in such a short
number of time.
It takes, I mean, your videos is about 9-10, 12 minutes
and my lectures are about an hour and 45 minutes,
3 times a week.
(laughing)
Tom: So, what are you doing?
Are you skipping your lectures and just
taking Salman Khan's 10 minute pop?
(laughing)
Channel: You know, I could actually do that.
I could actually do that because, you know,
I understand it much, much more.
When you use PowerPoint, it's just
that when Khan does it, he uses a lot
of colors, he- I don't know.
It's just something that he does and I'm just,
it's so much easier to grasp and even
organic chemistry itself is not one
of the easiest subjects.
Tom: Organic Chemistry?
Khan: Well, thank you. I'm flattered.
Tom: Across the country, in Hampton, Virginia,
Channel is on it with your 10 minute videos.
Channel, thanks for calling.
We're going to learn a lot more in this hour.
Salman Khan is with us. Founder and executive director
of the Khan Academy.
Listeners, you can join us.
Are you, your kids, hooked on Salman Khan?
Khan Academy?
And what has made is simple, online math videos
and now a lot more,
such a sensation? 800-423-8255 is our number.
800-423-TALK
Salman Khan, stand-by. I'm Tom Ashbrook.
This is On Point, we'll be right back.
(music)
Tom: I'm Tom Ashbrook. This is On Point.
And we're talking this hour with the,
but now rock star, famous video math teacher
and more, Salman Khan, founder of Khan Academy,
a one-man, online education sensation.
He has kids, millions of them, eating up math,
and physics, chemistry and learning.
You can join the conversation this hour.
What do you think? Is this all we've needed
all these years?
A compelling guy online with a white board
explaining it again and again?
Students, has Salman Khan helped you?
How? Why? What's it about?
Is it about the way he does it and what about it?
Parents, has this been your salvation?
Your good, free tutor for the kids?
Teachers, what do you think?
We're at 800-423-8255, 800-423-TALK.
Salman Khan found out he had one, pretty well placed fan.
About a year ago in July 2010 at the Aspen Idea's Festival
here was Microsoft founder Bill Gates,
suddenly talking about a golden age for online learning
and Khan Academy.
Bill Gates: If you're motivated to learn,
if you really, really, really want to learn,
this is an amazing time for everyone
because if you have access to Wikipedia,
if you have access to the latest information on the web,
there's a new-, a website that I've just been using
with my kids recently called Khan Academy,
K-H-A-N, just one guy doing some unbelievable
15 minute tutorials.
There's great college lectures out
on academicgroup.org, so if you're motivated,
now you can go to the very best lectures.
Tom: (laughing) There it is.
Bill Gates talking about Khan Academy,
spelling out your name, Salman Khan, K-H-A-N.
How did you find out that suddenly Bill Gates
had your work on his lips?
Khan: Yeah, it was someone in the audience.
Actually, our first major donor, Ann Doerr,
had sent me a text message while that was happening.
Tom: This is wife of John Doerr, huge venture
capitalist in California.
Khan: Right, right. And, you know,
I got that text message and actually I was
running a little summer camp for 7th graders
at the time and had all of these 7th graders
running around, I was doing this, kind of,
public trading, markets experiment
and I got this text saying,
"Bill Gates is talking about you in front
of 2000 people."
And my first reaction was that Ann
just sent the text to the wrong person.
Tom: (laughing) Yeah.
Khan: She probably knows people who Bill Gates
would talk about and that wouldn't be me.
Tom: Here you are with these lectures.
What is it supposed to be?
Is it a tutor essentially that you amount
to online who supplements the teacher?
Is it, or for students who don't get it
or is it an entire learning path in and of itself
where students can just kind of latch on
to your sequential lectures and run through
all of math or you name it if they're ready
to do that?
How do you picture this being used
because you're talking a mass scale here?
You've got 2 million unique users a month now,
you're talking maybe reaching tens,
hundreds of billions of students around the world.
Khan: You know, at least for us it's kind of
an open question, what it is.
We're not 100% sure. I think, to some degree,
all of those use cases apply.
There's definitely a lot of students like Channel
who are in a formal education system, taking a class
and they use this as, either a supplement
or maybe this is where they're actually
getting the information from and they're
really using the class as a way of showing
that they know the information.
We have use cases where it's being used
with the classroom, where the teachers
are actively using the videos as a way
to give students, kind of, the first pass information
and then that allows, that frees up the teacher
to, kind of, do higher order interactions with the student.
We have adult learners who are learning calculus
just for fun, so it's really an open question
on what this can be.
Tom: We got all kinds of response here on Facebook.
Danny Leiss says, "My 3.92 would not be possible without Khan."
Marcy says, "The way teaching ought to be.
Thanks to Salman Khan, my 6th grade son loves math."
Now you've got a school system, Los Altos
in California who's taken this on in some
of their grade years in a pretty big way
and from what I'm reading, Salman,
it has ended up, kind of, flipping the normal
classroom routine in a lot of ways.
That students would get their lecture on the subject
from you at home and then in the classroom,
essentially would be doing their homework
with the teacher there to help them out.
Is that right?
Khan: To some degree, we kind of view that
actually, as a first order thing that can happen.
And that was happening independently of us,
probably 2 or 3 years into me making the video
I started getting letters from teachers
saying that they were doing exactly that.
They're saying, "Hey, why do I have to give the lecture?
You already have that lecture and the students
can pause and repeat and watch it at their own pace
and move ahead or back-up and review things."
What we're doing with Los Altos, I would say,
is even a step deeper where they're using the videos
and they're using our software platform
where every student in these classrooms
is working at their own pace and whether
they're at home or in the classroom,
they might, at that moment, watch a video
or they might do exercises and it's all self-directed
and what happens when they go into the classroom
is that the teacher gets a dashboard
seeing where every student is and it highlights
the students who look like they really need help
and so the teacher, every moment of a teachers time,
instead of lecturing or grading papers
or any of the rest, is spent doing direct
one-on-one interactions or small group interactions
with students or even better, getting students
to help each other.
It's pretty amazing when you look at the classrooms.
They're these super interactive experiences
where these kids are walking around, helping each other,
teaching each other and the teacher
is actually sitting next to students,
pretty much the entire class time.
Tom: And in many ways, going at their own pace,
whether that means catching up to where they ought to be
grade level or in some cases, going far, far beyond.
I'm curious how classrooms and teachers handle that.
Salman Khan, stand-by if you would, in Palo Alto
for a minute. We have a teacher from
the Los Altos California School System with us.
Courtney Cadwell joins us now from Los Altos.
Courtney Cadwell, thanks very much for being here.
Courtney: Hi, Tom. Thanks for having me.
Tom: You teach 7th grade remedial math, I think,
there in Los Altos in junior high?
Courtney: Yes, that's the class that we piloted
the Khan Academy with last year.
Tom: And you've been teaching for 17 years?
Today is the first day of school there
in Los Altos. Welcome back to work.
Courtney: It is, thank you.
Tom: How are you using Salman Khan's videos
with your classes?
What's it look like, Courtney?
Courtney: Everyday looks differently in my classroom.
I like to try new things.
I keep calling my students my guinea pigs
and I'm trying to differentiate instruction
for them and do what's best based on their needs
and so, sometimes we'll do the videos for homework
or the practice modules for homework.
Sometimes we'll integrate them into class time.
I'll do a lot of stations where students, maybe
watch a video or work on the online modules
for a little bit and then they'll do
some group problem solving or project based
learning activities and then I'll have time
to sit with them, look at the Khan Academy data
and really target my intervention strategies
and my instruction based on the data I'm receiving
from their practice modules.
Tom: So, it's not just these lectures?
It's exercises at this point.
Lots and lots and lots of problems
that your students can do and you see
on this kind of dashboard how they're doing
with those problems, essentially as they do them, Courtney.
Courtney: Exactly. I get the data in real time,
so I know exactly who's struggling, at what time,
with what they're struggling.
I can go look in and see the types of problems
where they're missing it, how much time they're spending,
those types of things, so I can really go
to that child and tell him or her, you know,
"Hey, let's work on this together.
Let's figure this out."
And so instead of guessing, it takes a lot
of the guess work out for a teacher.
I can really go in there and figure out
who I need to meet with, what we need to talk about,
how I can get them back on the right track.
Tom: Now, a lot of your students have not
been real keen on math historically, right?
They come into this, they're with you
because math was not their favorite subject.
How is this working?
Courtney: It's been amazing.
I've just seen a great attitude adjustment
in my students. They love coming to math class now.
The online modules, the way they have the modules
set-up, it's kind of like a game and they earn points
and they earn badges and the kids are very
motivated to work these problems.
I could never get them to work this many problems
on their own and they want to do this
and they look forward to it and it's just changed
their entire impression of math.
They've also started to take ownership of their learning
because as they're moving at their own pace,
they can get hints and they can watch
one of Sal's videos and get a lot of help there.
And in the past they've been very passive learners.
Just waiting for the teacher to instruct
them and tell them what to do and now
they're becoming active learners and taking
more responsibility with their education
and really going for it and trying new things
and they know where to go to get help now.
And it's been a great change in them as learners.
Tom: And you're speaking as a pretty experienced teacher.
You said they earn badges.
This is sort of video game style,
where you get, you know, little images
and icons to mark your success as you
go through these exercises.
Courtney: Exactly and the badges aren't just
for getting things right.
It's for perseverance and trying and not giving up
and things like that, so even struggling students
are continually earning these badges
and they're motivated to move forward
and not to give up.
Tom: This helps in your classroom.
Does it also blow up the traditional classroom?
I mean, I'm reading here about some students
using this in 5th grade and they're racing ahead
to sort of, I don't know, a high school
or college level trigonometry.
What happens when the classroom, sort of,
en-fallow the threads wherever they go here
at their own speed and they're all over the map?
Courtney: Well, I think it does blow up
the traditional classroom and I think
that's very exciting.
It's a very active class.
The kids are going at their own pace.
The teacher, you know, kind of has to have
a good working knowledge of math so you
can intervene at multiple levels at any one time.
You never really know what the day is going
to look like when you're using the Khan Academy
in your classroom, but the kids are motivated.
They're moving ahead. They're doing well.
We're getting great feedback from the Khan Academy,
but also from our other testing situations as well.
So, it's a very positive thing and I think
it's stretching us as educators starting
to think about how we do math education
in our classrooms, what those classrooms will look like
and I think the Khan Academy is a step
in the right direction and it's a good bridge
between, you know, the past and the future
of education with this online platform.
Tom: There's an awful lot of online material
and digital material available today.
Why this one? I know they came to Los Altos
and so your whole school system is involved in it,
but is it because it's free, not a small thing?
Is it somehow because of, I mean, Salman Khan
does most of these himself and he's got this
kind of, forgive me Salman, but it's a little bit
doofisey, or it's a real casual, sort of,
presentations, it's not polished up.
(laughing)
Is it because it's free, Courtney?
Is it because you've got Salman just
kind of laying it out there?
What is it?
Courtney: I think it's definitely a little bit
of both. Free is very nice for our school district
and this financial climate and then having
the access to Salman and his crew over there
at the Khan Academy is very helpful as well,
but it's, you know, it's very simple.
It's very engaging.
His videos are straight forward.
They're very conversational.
You can sit down and learn something
just in a short period of time and really
get a good handle on it.
It's the online modules, are very engaging
for the kids.
There's a lot of stuff out there and I think
in Los Altos, you know, different teachers
use a lot of different things and we're really
trying to create blended learning environments in our
classrooms and Khan Academy is one of those tools
and it's a tool that I've really enjoyed using
this past year and look forward to using more.
And I think the other teachers in the district
will buy into it as well, but definitely the free part
and then Sal is a very good teacher online
and so that definitely boosts his credibility with us.
Tom: Courtney Cadwell, it's great to have you
with us on this first day of school
in Los Altos California and thank you very much
for your time and thoughts.
Courtney: My pleasure, thank you.
Tom: Salman, stand-by for just a second.
I want to get you back in here, but we've got
a lot of listeners.
Jacque, in Charleston South Carolina,
you're on the air with Salman Khan, Jacque.
Jacque: Okay, thanks. Hello.
Tom: Hi.
Jacque: I have only some comments and no questions.
First, I took organic chemistry in college
and continued to have an interest in physics,
particularly quantum mechanics, strong
and weak nuclear force, electromagnetism
and other obtuse subjects.
I read Scientific American to try to follow
these topics, but I do that with difficulty.
Tom: Mm-hmm.
Jacque: And about a year ago I found
Khan's lectures on these deep, dark, mysterious
subjects and his lectures made everything clear to me
and he beats the heck out of Scientific American
and that's all I had to say. (laughing)
Tom: That's an endorsement right there, Jacque.
And let me get one more, Rainer in Nashville.
Rainer, you're on the air.
Rainer: Hi, Tom.
Tom: Hi.
Rainer: Hi, I'd just like to say I'm a senior
in college and I've always had an interest
in the science and math, but around 8th grade
I kind of missed a couple of key lessons
in probably pre-calculus and so it made it
really difficult for me to keep following along
in algebra, but this past year I decided,
you know, I'm kind of cocky, "Hey, you know,
why am I so bad in math now?
It can't be my intellect."
And I went on and found the Khan Academy
and started taking the videos, but my question
actually has to do with user interaction
on the Khan Academy website.
Tom: Okay.
Rainer: I was wondering if, this is a question
for Sal, if they plan on developing anymore
in that arena?
Tom: You mean like the ...
Rainer: ... for the trivial points that you get
when you sort of complete challenges
and watch videos, but I was wondering
if they planned on developing that more
and really what I had in mind was, sort of,
challenging other users to competitions
or to math-offs or mini math competitions?
Tom: So, sort of, community or social use
of the site, Rainer?
Rainer: Right.
Tom: Salman Khan, how about it?
Khan: Yeah, yeah. No, that's on our pipeline.
Something we want to do very seriously.
You know, right now we have 2 million students
and they're kind of each individually working
on their own unless they have a coach
or a teacher to work with and we think
it could be fun to have some of these challenges
and have some, a little bit of a competitive
framework in place and a little bit of a game,
kind of multi-player gaming framework
and we're just going to try to balance it.
So, we don't want it to turn into
an overly competitive environment.
But, no. Completely agree and we think
that definitely speaks to something
that I would also enjoy participating in. (laughing)
Tom: Rainer ...
Khan: So, expect to see some of that in the next six months.
Tom: Thanks for your call from Nashville, Rainer.
Sal, you're on the record here talking about not just
2 million students, but 10 or 20 or 50 or 100 million students.
It's free now and you got a lot of, kind of,
foundations supporting here, Bill Gates
and the Google and others.
Does it stay free or are you building
a gigantic business here?
Khan: Yeah, so the simple answer is yes.
It'll stay free. This was set up as a
not-for-profit, not that not-for-profits can't charge.
Obviously, most universities are not-for-profits
and they're very good at charging for things,
(laughing) but the reason why,
honestly why I wanted to make it not-for-profit
is so that I, or the rest of the organization
is always focused on the mission, which is
educating a world class education for anyone
anywhere for free and so, that is core
to what we're doing.
It's possible, with that said,
we need to sustain ourselves somehow
and so we are looking for ways to do it.
I hope that foundations continue to believe
that this is probably the most scalable way
to educate people and have a high social return
on investment, but at the same time
there's other possibilities.
You know, corporations have come up to us and said,
"Hey, can we use this for our corporate training?"
Maybe there's a way to sustain ourselves.
Maybe, and who knows? That's kind of
an open question still, but the core to
our mission is keeping our content
that people get at khanacademy.org completely free.
Tom: It's obvious that you have a knack for this.
A lot of people, millions, responding to it.
What are the implications of that?
That we-, what? Do we end up?
I mean, Courtney, we didn't get to this,
but she used your stuff in Africa,
in Kenya last summer.
Are we going to have 1 math teacher in America?
1 math teacher in the world who happens
to be good at getting the concepts across?
What are the implications of that?
Khan: What I suspect is you'll have a handful
of lecturers who make these types of videos.
It won't just be me. In fact, we're already
starting to talk to some other groups
about making other videos and especially
in topics that I'm not competent to give lectures in,
but what I think it does, is it doesn't replace
teachers, it actually lets them go
up the value chain.
I mean, you heard Courtney talk about
how it's changed what happens in the classroom.
She can now intervene.
She's actually using her, the fact
that she's a human in a human way.
She's not doing things like giving
the same lecture every year or every class period.
And so, what I hope happens is that what you see
in classrooms is no longer lecture.
What you see in classrooms is no longer
kids just sitting passively.
What you start seeing in classrooms around the world
is kids starting to interact with each other,
kids doing more projects, kids doing a lot
of the higher order types of things that
most teachers, I think, dream about.
And before, they never had the time to do it
or a way to address it or a way to cater
to every student in a meaningful way.
(music)
Tom: So, you give the kind of rudimentary
material, even when it's-
or the sort of base lecture and they take it from there.
Salman Khan, it is fascinating.
Stand-by, if you would, in Palo Alto.
We got to take a short break here.
We're talking with the now rock star famous,
video math teacher and more, Salman Khan of Khan Academy.
Listeners, you can join us.
Teachers, have you checked it out?
Are you using Khan Academy with your students?
How's it going? Is this the magic bullet
to get us back in the game on math and science?
800-423-8255, I'm Tom Ashbrook. This is On Point.
We'll be right back.
(music)
Tom: I'm Tom Ashbrook. This is On Point.
We're talking this hour with Salman Khan,
founder of Khan Academy, and a one-man, kind of,
education sensation these days.
His, what now? Thousands of online videos
on math and chemistry and now beyond.
Napoleonic wars, history, you name it
has kids, millions of them, eating up math
and chemistry and learning online.
It's being taken into classrooms as a supplement
to the teachers, sometimes turning classrooms
upside down, joins us today from Palo Alto, California.
You can join the conversation.
Is this a piece of the answer to America's
education challenge and how will, or should this
change the way we educate?
800-423-8255 is our number, 800-423-TALK.
Maxine, in Lancaster, Kentucky.
You're on the air with Salman Khan.
Maxine: Good morning.
Tom: Hi.
Khan: Good morning.
Maxine: Yeah. (laughing) Sorry.
Tom: Hi, Maxine. You're on. What do you know?
Maxine: Yes, I am an elementary teacher.
I have a tutoring service now that I tutor
kids that my heart goes out to.
Those who are falling between the floor planks
of the public schools.
One of my buried frustrations from when I
was doing my student teaching was learning
that it was all about the paperwork,
which was back when, but I see today,
such a necessary change in how we, as teachers,
are performing in the classroom
and what really excited me about listening
to your program and the Khan Academy
is how it touches so many different elements
that are frustrating to the teachers in the classroom
where they're getting more paperwork
of tracking kids rather than teaching kids
which takes our time away from teaching
and knowing what our students are really doing
and so this provides documenting of what they are doing.
It also, really addresses the fact that
every child is an individual learner
and they really need to learn at their own pace,
their own maturity level
and how income in coming in, so in tutoring
I have a picture up of when I'm talking
to the kids and their parents and helping
them understand how important it is in
the elementary level that if they're sick one day
and they miss that learning lesson in math that day,
how much it affects the whole foundation
of building a house on math.
Tom: Yeah. Miss one piece and you're in trouble.
Here you can go back and get it.
Do you think this will put you out of business
with your tutoring service, Maxine?
Maxine: No. I would totally use it and
this reason I don't think we're going
to lose our teachers because we still need,
in our humanity, is that real person there
to help the student say, "Yes."
It's wonderful and I have not looked at your program
but I know that just to have the awards
and I love it! That it's not that you got
the correct answer, it's the fact that you
keep on persevering.
When I was in college I had a science class.
It was on ecology and it was one of the questions
and we were on the computer and the first time
I did it I got the answer wrong and it says,
"Try again. Try again." The computer did
because the teacher had programmed that into it
because it was like real daunting to me
because I'm not a science person.
Tom: Yep.
Maxine: But then the next time, you know,
I did it again and I got it wrong and he says,
"Try one more time for dear old mom."
(laughing)
And it had just stuck with me my whole life going,
"Yeah, you just keep working at something."
Tom: That little bit to get you over the hump.
Maxine, I appreciate your call very much dear.
Khan: I think we might incorporate
the dear old mom idea.
(laughing)
Tom: One more time for dear old mom.
You know, there have been so many people
working on this digital future for education, Salman.
You know that. My friend, Art Bardage,
with the Naval Learning at Cambridge, Massachusetts
doing great work on this.
A big admirer of what you're doing.
He says, "Your format is perfect. Your timing
is perfect." But his question to you and
it's kind of implicit, you get a call there
from Kentucky or, you know, not all schools
have all this technology in them.
In big urban areas, in rural areas, not everybody
has figured out how to use technology
in the classroom yet.
I mean, how do you envision the future
of technology in the classroom. What does it look like?
What's your vision?
Khan: Yeah, no. It's a very legitimate point.
I think what's happened and this is
since I was a kid in the 80's, you know,
we had computer labs then and even then
they were completely un-utilized because no one
really knew what to do with them.
We'd go in for like 20 minutes and they'd say,
"Hey, put a diskette in it. Okay, you've booted it,
now go back to math class." Or something like that.
Tom: Right.
Khan: And so, what we think is now
we are getting a very tangible thing to do
with the technology and it's not technology
for technology's sake. It's about technology
to enable humanity and the rest of the curriculum
and so, what we think is, is that now this exists
there's actually now a reason to do it
and it's actually not expensive when you compare it
with other things.
Right now you can get a kind of a handheld PC
for $200 that can last 4 years.
That's $50 a year and it can be shared
by multiple students, so it actually goes down to
only $10 or $20 per student per year,
which is super cost effective even compared
to textbooks or, and especially the $8000-$10,000
a year that a lot of public school systems
might spend on, per pupil.
Tom: Well, take it from there though.
Let's say, I don't know, Bill Gates gives you
$50 or $100 billion, you got all the money
in the world to work on this and here's
the American education system.
Let's say you can get your technology in everywhere.
What is the actually education look like
in a fully technology empowered American
education system? What's it look like?
Khan: I think what you'll see and, you know,
we want to see more and more of this, is the school
of the future is going to be, it's kind of
going to revert back to the one room school house
where you have kids of all ages at all
different skill levels. They might not even be kids.
Even college students, they're all in that one room
and they're all learning at their own pace.
It frees up time for them to do things
that are actual expressions of their creativity,
so actually writing computer programs,
building robots, composing music, whatever it is.
There's time freed up to do that and they have
mentors and teachers that are constantly walking around
and mentoring them in these projects
and getting them past the hurdles the way
that Courtney is doing in her class
and I want to point on, this is the interesting
thing, there's no reason why it's just the US.
It's really a world wide phenomenon here.
We're actually right now translating the content
into 10 languages and the idea is that
we also want to eventually localize the software
so that a student anywhere can start to
get a pretty good scaffold.
And as important as a self-paced learning is
in the US and it's super important here,
it's even more important for a kid in India
who has to work half the day or who has
never learned to read or has been out of school
for 5 or 6 years.
Tom: So tech powered, self-paced? Is that
a systemic change that can fix our problems?
You've heard the news out today, you know,
the new ACT scores for college admissions
showing that just one in 4 American graduates
in the class of 2011 who took the exam, met their
4 key benchmarks. Can you put self-pacing
and this kind of, you know, series of tech lectures,
technology in the classroom and fix that
or does it take something else?
Something more?
Khan: It's an open question. We'll find out.
The unfortunate thing is right now based on things
like ACT scores or some of these state exams
to graduate, a lot of students, I mean, if you just look
at the stats of how many students have to take
remedial math or college algebra when
they get to college, if they even get there,
it's a huge number. I mean, it's a majority
and it makes you think, well what has happened to them
over the course of their last 7, 8 years
in high school and in middle school and the
answer isn't, it's actually not a problem with the teachers,
it's not a problem with the students.
It's exactly what the teacher from Kentucky
was pointing out is that, if you miss one day
of school in third grade or you don't learn
your multiplication tables properly or you don't
100% master negative numbers, that's going
to be a gap in your foundation that's going
to last with you your lifetime and at some point
that gap is going to allow something to crumble
when you get to algebra or calculus.
And we're seeing that across the board.
So, we hope that what we're doing here
can really address that and really allow people
to go back and make sure they have 100% foundation
so that they can stay on a track.
Tom: Wired Magazine says you never intended
to become an education revolutionary.
Are you an education revolutionary, Salman Khan?
Khan: You know, we don't want to-
The one thing that we shy away from
is trying to make more of it than what it is.
We hope it can be as much as possible, but
our focus on our team, we generally just want
to keep building stuff, seeing how it works,
looking at the data, getting feedback from users
and making it better and better, and exploring
where it can be used and really avoid
getting into, kind of, the more political debates about it.
Tom: Well, I don't know if you're going to
be able to avoid that in the world of education.
Khan: (laughing) That's what I'm thinking.
Tom: You're making a pretty good whack at it so far
and it's been great to have you with us today.
Salman Khan, he's produced more than 2400 videos
on topics from math and chemistry to history.
You can find a selection of those videos
at our website, onpointradio.org.
Founder and executive director of Khan Academy.
Salman Khan in Palo Alto, thank you very much
for being with us today. Great talking with you.
Khan: Thanks for having me, Tom.
(music)
Tom: In a moment, a free online class
in the basics of artificial intelligence.
This is On Point.
(music)
Tom: When Stanford University announced
a free online class this fall in artificial intelligence,
word got around. Now, more than 58,000 students
from around the globe have signed up to take the class
taught by 2 leading experts from Silicon Valley.
Students won't get credit, but they will be taught
by 2 of Google's stars and leading AI experts,
Sebastian Thrun and Stanford Peter Norvig.
Joining me now from Mountain View, California
is Peter Norvig, director of research at Google,
who with Stanford research professor,
Sebastian Thrun is teaching Introduction
of Artificial Intelligence at Stanford this fall.
Peter Norvig, welcome to On Point.
Thanks very much for being with us.
Peter: Hi, Tom. Great to be here.
Tom: So, what exactly is the course going to cover?
What's the range here? Is it an introductory course in AI?
Peter: It's the introductory course
in Artificial Intelligence.
The standard course is taught at Stanford
and it does require prerequisites in mathematics
and programming, so it's not an introductory
course for anyone, but for somebody who has
that kind of background.
Tom: So, how do you determine who has
the prerequisite background to show up
and take, very remotely, your free online course.
Peter: Well, we've offered it for anybody
to sign up and we've made clear of what
the syllabus is, what we're going to cover
and tried to describe what's required,
what background is required and then it's
up to the students to do their work.
We wanted to make the course, such that,
it's as similar as we can make it to a live course
taught on campus. There's lots of materials online.
You know, I've heard about Sal. I've talked
with Sal before and he's one of the inspirations
for what we've done.
But he has an approach where it's up to the student
to do their work or it's supplemental to a course.
We wanted to see, can we provide the experience
of a real course online where homework's due
every week, so the students will quickly find out
can they do the homework or not and
we'll expect them to keep up.
Tom: So, that raises a couple of questions,
but the first one is, just this 58,000
and maybe it's more than that by now, but this ...
Peter: Yeah, but we're just about at 85,000 now.
Tom: 85,000? Did you have any expectation
when you stepped up to offer this course,
Peter Norvig, that you would attract
that kind of audience?
Peter: No, but Sebastian and I thought about this.
We thought, we taught the course at Stanford before,
just for Stanford students and we said,
"We want to open it up. We want to do this experiment
to see if we can reach more people in the world."
And Sebastian said, "We could reach 10,000 people."
And I thought he was exaggerating, but
we'll definitely get a couple thousand.
We had no idea that we were going to get this many.
Now, so far we only have their email addresses,
so that's not a work to ask out of them.
Tom: Right.
Peter: So, when they start having to do
the actual homework, we expect some of them will drop.
Tom: Interest from 175 countries around the world,
85,000 now signed up. What do you make of that?
How do you interpret that, what seems like enormous
amount of interest and people, as you say,
you'll see what happens, but so far,
willing to put their hand up and say,
"I want to study artificial intelligence with
you guys maybe thousands of miles away
at Stanford University."
Peter: Yeah, it's a tremendous response.
I think it just shows that there's lot of interest
out there that people want to have access
to this type of material. They want to learn.
They think this is an interesting topic,
interesting set of teachers, maybe?
And Stanford is a well-known university
and bringing all those things together and making
them available for free in a real course
where you can be evaluated, it's just something
that's a little bit novel.
Lot's of people have done similar types
of approaches before, but we've put all the pieces
together in just a slightly different way.
Tom: And you talk about a small world.
Here, you're out, presumably as director
of research at Google, former NASA scientist.
You're out on the cutting edge of AI.
You're going to be instructing people literally
from around the world.
I'm trying to take on board what this trend
that you're part of, means about global understanding
at the cutting edge of high science?
Does this speed the creation of a real, sort of,
homogeneous global community of scientific insight.
Peter: I hope so. That's what we're trying to do.
You know, we're trying to make it easier
for more people to get access to this type
of information, so you don't have to get a PhD
to study AI, you can try it out in a format
that's easier and see if it makes sense for you.
Tom: Who is AI useful too?
Do you have to be an engineer in a high tech
company for this to be useful?
What's the range of profiles of people
for whom you think this might be valuable?
Peter: I guess, to apply all the techniques
to make more sense to be in some type
of a company. I think that it's broader
than just the computer industry so you're seeing
applications in biology, in finance, sort of
across the board in any type of profession
that's dealing with interpreting data,
interpreting uncertainty, these techniques are useful.
Tom: And does Google, you're a director of research
there, do they have any concern that you're
giving away the store to the world?
Peter: No, Google's been extremely supportive.
It's always been our mission to provide
accessed information and this is just one more
way to do it and they're behind it 100%.
Tom: Okay, we've got a lot of listeners right now.
What's a, or the, key insight that you hope
people come away from a semester of AI with?
A, sort of, is there some fundamental orientation
toward artificial intelligence or fundamental
piece of understanding you hope people get?
Peter: I guess, to try to demystify it,
so people have visions of robots
from science fiction stories without quite
understanding how they got there, so we want
to show that by analyzing, using mathematical
techniques, using programming techniques
that you could understand what it is that
a robot could do or not do, understand
how to interpret data in the world and make sense of it.
Tom: And will computer's intelligence outpace
our own? Has it already when you add it all up?
Peter: I don't really think about it as outpacing.
I think of it as augmenting.
So, there's already places where a computer
outpaces us. My computer is much better
at multiplying 10 digit numbers than I am
and there's places where people are better
than computers, so I think how can we work together?
Tom: Peter Norvig, director of research at Google,
guest lecturer at Stanford University.
He'll be teaching with Sebastian Thrun,
a free online course in artificial intelligence
this fall 85,000 people already signed up for that
from right around the world.
Peter Norvig in Mountain View, California.
Thank you very much for being with us today.
Peter: Thanks, Tom.
Tom: Listeners, thanks for joining us.
I'm Tom Ashbrook. This is On Point.
(music)
Voiceover: On Point is a production of WBUR-Boston
and NPR.