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Voiceover: These are questions from the Independent in the UK.
The first question is how does he, I'm assuming that's me Sal,
how does he see the development in video conferencing?
Particularly new services like Google Hangouts
as affecting the provision of distance learning.
Is that something that he sees the Khan Academy using and in what kind of time frame?
Interesting question, so there's a couple of layers here.
First of all, just kind of the idea of distance learning
and this is where I think right now everything that's online learning
kind of gets grouped to into distance learning and online learning
and all the same.
Most people kind of don't really differentiate between what they are.
Right now, what's happening with distance learning
is that they are for the most part
very similar what happens in physical classes.
It's just the people aren't in the same room.
Distance learning fundamentally, they still involve
when someone is participating in the learning there is a live professor
or teacher on the other side of that,
and they still are kind of signing up for courses.
They still meet at a certain time to do their courses
or to do their interactions.
I would call it much more in the domain a synchronous learning
which means that all the parties have to be there at the same time
and that all the students are also kind of moving along at the same pace.
It really is exactly as the physical model,
it's just they've taken the idea that you have to be in the same place.
Khan Academy isn't the only version of this
but Khan Academy, we kind of view it as more of asynchronous model.
Asynchronous which really just means
that things aren't necessarily happening at the same place.
Which is the idea that I can record this video right now
and you don't have to be listening to it right now.
You might listen to this video an hour later or a day later, or a year later.
You can really go through things at your own pace.
We don't view video conferencing as maybe our main delivery mechanism
although distance learning, vendors or companies or schools
might view video conferencing as their main way to get to people.
We think, we can record videos, people can consume those at their own pace
and we can give people exercises and feedbacks
that they can do at their own pace.
Where we do think video conferencing could be
really, really, really interesting, this is something that we have not done yet.
We've kind of thrown around the idea
and we just really have to get the bandwidth to address it,
is I think video conferencing is an amazing way to have peer to peer interactions.
Peer to peer, I'll just do the acronym, peer to peer interactions.
Right now in a lot of the classrooms that are piloting Khan Academy
or even the ones doing it on their own, and this is what we really advocate
is every student works at their own pace
but when they're stuck either this teacher intervenes
based on the data the teacher sees
or even better a student intervenes and helps their peer.
There's no reason why that has to be sit just in a physical classroom
but you can actually transcend a physical classroom
and that's where something like video conferencing could be really valuable.
If two people could share a blackboard that looks very similar like this
and they have either a tablet device or a pen tablet
like what I'm using right now, they can run a tutoring session with each other.
Would even be cool if they could record it and they could be archived
for other people to use it in the future.
That is really powerful and that's mainly in the tutoring space,
so that you can have peer to peer tutoring.
Tutoring or really teaching or mentoring even.
The other interesting place where peer to peer actions could be interesting,
I think this is completely untapped, is the whole idea of assessment.
Right now, Khan Academy the assessment piece happens,
you're doing exercises, it keeps track of how you're doing.
In a traditional classroom assessments are some form of paper exam.
It could be multiple choice, it could be free answer, it could be essay exam
but I think what most of us have always realized is that the most,
the highest form of assessment is either the practical assessment
or the oral assessment.
Practical would literally mean if you're studying to be a nurse
someone observes you while you're trying to insert an IV into someones arm.
Oral examination, and this is really the goal standard
for what we see in the academia.
Is when you're going to your qualifiers,
there's an oral part of that examination
and then essentially you'll sit in front of a room full of faculty members
and they'll grill you on and make sure you really, really, really do understand
a concept deeply.
What we think we could do, we're on the peer to peer side is eventually have -
not only just a kind of assessment that we already have in place of Khan Academy
but maybe an oral assessment.
Where right now maybe you are a, we don't have the proper words for,
but maybe you are a level one in Trigonometry or level one in Algebra
and you want to become level two in Trigonometry.
You want to get into this, like a smaller circle,
there's more a lead circle of people
who've gotten to this deep level of trigonometry.
To do that, maybe at a baseline you have to do some,
you have to show that you've done something kind of the traditional exercises
on Khan Academy at your own pace and you've been able to prove competency there.
But to really make it, then you would have an oral examination
with maybe five people from level two.
If maybe four of the five say that you are ready for level two
then you will be bumped up to level two.
Then one of your responsibilities as someone in level two
is assess future people from level one, coming from level one.
Then of course your next aspiration is to go to level three
or going to become a master of all of the Math
or whatever you might want to say.
I think peer to peer interactions could be really, really powerful
when it comes to the assessment part.
I'd be hard pressed to see how this isn't more rigorous
than really all the assessment that has in place.
Because you're not just being assessed by arbitrary peers,
you're being assessed by peers who've already really proven themselves
to really deeply understand the concept.
The other things when you say,
is that something he sees the Khan Academy using and what kind of time frame?
Once again we do see ourselves using it but we don't know the time frame,
it's just a bandwidth issue.
That reminds me, so the other area I think video conferencing
could be really powerful is in the idea of foreign language.
Once again the goal standard in foreign language is really immersion
but that's obviously not always possible or economically possible.
The second best thing to immersion is actually having live interactions
with people on the other side of the world
or maybe even not on the other side of the world.
One thing I want to do with my two and a half year old
is maybe get him a Skype or maybe a Google+ buddy or whatever it is
in different countries so that he can start chatting with kids
maybe his own age or little older, little younger.
They can just start to at least get the basics of each others languages
and start to teach each other.
I think it can have a lot to be done, not full immersion
but some immersion for foreign language learning.
Then a lot of the core for the foreign language
like the vocabulary and the grammar, we could probably do our exercise platform
but this is really what gives you that deeper understanding of it.
The next question is, is there a possibility of Khan Academy's qualifications,
achievements being externally validated at some point
such that they're recognized internationally
as a measure of academic achievement?
There definitely is a possibility
and we are exploring to see how can we validate
that when someone does something on Khan Academy,
that it is really coming from them.
We think there are ways to do it.
We could even have places where you could go and you could show your ID
or whatever and say, "Hey look this is me."
"I'm not going to do the Khan Academy there."
Then we could validate that yes this was definitely the person who did that.
Then once you do that, we could give badges or validations
that "Look this person really does know that information."
Then it's a matter of making sure that they are accepted broadly.
I think this actually touches a generalized problem.
In that right now you and I have talked about this in other videos,
in other lectures.
Right now education is kind of a mixture of you have the learning part,
you have the credentialing part,
and then you have a little bit of a socialization part.
You have a little bit of socialization.
When you go to a university and you pay the big tuition
you're kind of getting all of these stuff and depending who you ask,
different people think they're paying for or providing different things.
If you ask most students at most universities,
they're probably most focused on the credential.
But if you ask most of the universities
they'll say, "Hey no, all of our resources are going to this right over here."
"The credential is just to make sure that people are learning the things,"
"but actually spending the resources over here."
That question I think about whether Khan Academy can get credentials,
so frankly where the third party can get credentials
I think is just the whole issue of can we decouple this?
Can we separate, can we create a line of separation
between the learning side of education and the credentialing side?
I think if you do that generally something really powerful happens.
If we can create, and it doesn't have to come from Khan Academy.
It can come from a government, it can come from NGOs,
it can come from who knows where it comes from.
If there is an internationally recognized battery of examinations, assessments
and deep assessments they can be practical, they can be oral,
they can be paper based, all of the above.
If you have something like this that is internationally recognized
then all of a sudden the rest of the education world
will compete right over here
and then there students will just try to get this thing right over here.
What's exciting about something like that
is then Khan Academy could compete on equal footing.
Because if students who choose to go through Khan academy for free,
perform just as well on that as a student
who's spending tens of thousands of dollars
or maybe certain students who say, "We know this just works better for me."
Or maybe some students will just learn on the job
or they'll learn from textbooks
but allows students to learn the best way they can,
the best way that fits their career and even their economic situation.
The other good thing is, this is internationally recognized
it solves the problem that right now there are some big name schools
that if you're lucky enough to attend one of those schools
you do have something on your resume
that anywhere in the world or anywhere in the country
someone might recognize it.
The problem is most universities aren't internationally recognized
or aren't recognized broadly beyond one region,
and so you have students who are doing this really, really well right now.
They're learning or they're potentially learning really well
maybe at their regional university or their community college
and then they get this credential.
Then they get this credential right over here
but this credential is not universally recognized.
It's not the goal of the neighboring state or the neighboring country
and people don't know how to assess that credential.
This way those students who really do learn their material well
will be able to take this external assessments and prove
that they know just as well as the student who went to Oxford or Harvard.