Khan Academy

= project for free virtual school, now consisting of 12+ million views and 1200+ 10-minute "videos on YouTube covering everything from basic arithmetic and algebra to differential equations, physics, chemistry, biology and finance".

URL = http://khanacademy.org/

Description

"Today Khan Academy (www.khanacademy.org) has more than 1,400 videos, with an average of 200,000 unique student visitors every month. It is rated by YouTube as its most-watched open course – more than those of MIT and Stanford. Khan says students like his conversational style and the opportunity to learn at their own pace in a stress-free way. He is grateful that feedback shows the videos support multiple learning styles and have found favor with gifted students as well as students with learning disabilities. He also makes a point that while he started doing 20-minute videos due to YouTube restrictions, that has turned out to be an important selling point – the idea of bite-sized learning.

I decided to review one of his videos. I chose a lecture on entropy, a subject that I wanted to learn about. In about 17 minutes, I had a very good grasp of the second law of entropy. Khan’s easy style makes him seem almost like an elder brother teaching his siblings. The course is just the right pace, simple to understand, with good diagrammatic and real-life analogies to teach the concept. Khan’s face does not come on screen; he says this makes the video less distracting because it keeps attention on the blackboard (apparently this was because he did not own a video camera when he started doing these videos).

Khan Academy is an excellent example of what a committed teacher can do, leveraging the power of the Internet. I think the online portal I described earlier is still a good idea, especially to provide a funding model for teachers or even college students. If a teacher makes 100 videos a year, and 1,000 students pay 50 cents each to watch it, that’s $50,000 per annum – a figure that may incentivize many teachers to participate. This model would allow many poor students to access videos free of cost." (http://www.thenewconstructs.com/constructdetails.php?id=177)

2.

"Khan Academy began in 2006 as a tidy collection of math and science tutorial videos from its founder Salman Khan, a hedge-fund analyst who had posted the material to help friends and relatives. Its popularity snowballed, and in recent years Khan has beefed up the software that sits behind and around the video lessons, delivering interactive practice exercises and enabling conversation and remote teaching. From just two programmers at the beginning of 2011 and five programmers a year ago, Khan is up to 20 coders now, not counting 15 summer interns. It could use more engineers, but has deliberately slowed its hiring to preserve its laid-back workplace culture, which includes group outings for bowling, movies, and board games.

In many ways, Khan Academy resembles a software startup more than a traditional nonprofit. Workers say the pace of software development can be intense – “I am working as hard as I was at Facebook, if not harder,” says Juan – and the salary is calibrated to match that intensity.

“We compensate extremely well, especially for this area,” says Ben Kamens, who quit Fog Creek, a well-regarded New York software boutique, to join Khan as lead developer, bringing a programmer coworker along with him. “Life here is pretty good and we wouldn’t be able to hire the team we’ve hired if that wasn’t the case.”

Khan is constantly peppered with unsolicited overtures from people interested in helping to improve the academy’s code base, Kamens says, a wide spectrum of developers including the very seasoned and very young. That’s partly because Khan invites contributions to its source code, freely available on GitHub, but also because the organization is at the center of the hot, fast-emerging online education movement." (http://www.wired.com/business/2012/06/khan-academy/)

Interview

Interview and details at http://www.worldchanging.com/archives/011039.html

Excerpt:

"Hassan Masum: Salman Khan, thanks so much for joining us today. First of all, tell us what Khan Academy is, and why it is significant.

Salman Khan: Well, its current incarnation is twelve hundred videos on YouTube - and other places, but YouTube is its main source of people connecting with it and finding out about it.

And there is a whole software piece that generates problems for people, and starts them off with one plus one equals two. The software piece will take them up to about Algebra II, but the video piece will start them at the most basic one plus one equals two level and take them well into college level calculus, linear algebra, differential equations, physics, chemistry, and biology.

The goal is to create the world’s free virtual school. Right now it's more content, but there is a kind of community forming around it. And between the community that is forming around it, the video content, and the software, we can do data manipulation and understand how we can keep tweaking it and making it a better platform for people to learn on. I envision it as the world’s free virtual school.

HM: Interesting. Do you have any metrics for its success so far?

SK: In terms of raw numbers...if you go to any YouTube channel you can see total video downloads. Some of the university open courseware efforts are older than the Khan Academy...if you just look at the raw numbers, only one of them is a little bit higher: MIT had 12 point something million cumulative views as of today, while Khan Academy had just over 12 million. All the other university open course efforts, whether it's Stanford or Berkeley or Yale, they're all a good bit lower than that.

What I have started to do is keep track of the daily change, and on the daily change Khan Academy is getting about 50% more views per day than even MIT which is considered the standard-bearer for open courseware. So the first metric is that I think I can legitimately now say that it is the most widely used open course video content, despite being one person's effort as opposed to a major research institution's.

I think what these universities are doing is tremendous, but Khan Academy has got a lot of traction that way. It has as I mentioned reached 12 million video views, it has about 80 or 90 thousand unique students a month using the site, and that's growing by 15 to 20% per month.

So that's just in terms of the raw numbers. For me personally, I think the bigger impact is the testimonials that I get, and if you go to the site you will see a lot of them.

HM: It is rather amazing that this site which has been around for not too long, and is more or less the effort of one person so far, has achieved this success. One really wonders what the "secret sauce" is. In other words, why is the site so successful, and what do you personally think makes your videos so enticing to watch?

SK: I am always trying to answer that question for myself, because I don't ever want to lose the secret sauce! (laughter) I think it’s a combination. First, it's the length of the videos: the fact that they're ten minutes makes them very digestible. They are almost like the Dan Brown Da Vinci Code type novels, where you feel like you can almost read another chapter and then go to bed.

And I think it’s this notion that you don’t have to sit through a 90 minute lecture to get to exactly what your weak point is. You don't have to sit through a 90 minute lecture on calculus if you just don’t understand implicit differentiation. The way a lot of the other content is categorized, you don't even know which lecture to watch to really hone in on your weak point.

The format, even more than the time limit, is probably what people find engaging. It’s very informal - they can tell it’s just me, probably at my house, doing these. They started off for my cousins...it feels like someone's older brother or family friend who is with them tutoring.

I started off with no fancy equipment. You don’t see my face - you just hear my voice. You have a black background, and I use bright colors to get some nice contrast to make it visually interesting. I've had a lot of feedback from users that hearing the voice with the black background kind of feels like it’s happening in your head. It feels like the voice in your head. And it’s very conversational - it’s not your traditional slightly cold or stilted lecture that you might normally get.

I got one note a couple of days ago saying that “you teach like a friend, not like a teacher". I think that lowers the stress level when you learn mathematics. You can compare it to the offline medium - the notion of being able to pause and repeat, and watch whatever you want.

I think that the other element is its breadth. For a lot of older learners that are going back to school, their main intimidation is jumping into a class and being completely lost. But when you go to a site and see "okay, there are some videos on calculus and whatnot, but the videos go all the way back to one plus one equals two" - you know that there is a point you can jump in. Or even if you jump in at a higher point, and get a little bit confused with exponents, there is a video that can help fill in the gap.

So I think it's also the breadth of the content. People feel very good about going there, and knowing that there will be something that they can connect with.

HM: So granularity, format, and breadth. It seems like those three elements have the common feature that they all make the energy barrier to getting involved lower.

SK: Yes, absolutely! I think the format, the tone...if I had to guess one, it would be the tone of the lectures.

Actually, I’ll add one more, not to throw too many out there: the focus on intuition and retention and connections, as opposed to the mechanical memorization side that many students often find themselves doing. I get letters time and time again where they're almost angry - they say "our teachers think that they need to teach us this at a superficial level so it will be easier, but it actually becomes a lot easier when you learn why you are doing it, or why this formula actually makes sense intuitively".

And so I think people appreciate the idea that they are getting the real deal. They are getting a deep understanding, as opposed to something superficial.

HM: Absolutely! So, not to get you into trouble, but I wonder if you could speculate on why it is that those elements are in relatively short supply in formal education.

In other words, if you think about Khan Academy, it's one person - and you were actually doing this part time for quite a while, though now you're full time. And you've created this resource which, as you said, is now getting the same number of hits as some of the world's best-known institutions.

On the other hand, you have this huge formal apparatus with many dedicated people in it - probably tens of billions if not hundreds of billions of dollars per year of investment, and there hasn't really been this kind of resource created. What if any lesson does that hold for future educational efforts?

SK: The simple answer is to put stuff out there and iterate, and not have a bureaucratic team that are better at shooting down each other's ideas and constraining teachers. I understand the need to constrain teachers, because you want to have quality control and make sure everyone is being reached. But the negative side is that you're also constraining very good teachers, and you're taking a lot of the humanity out of the lesson.

This happens at the textbook level as well, and the state standards. I think to some degree there are so many cooks in the kitchen that the final product that the student gets is extremely diluted. There's something to be said for fewer cooks in the kitchen - and if they're good cooks, the food will be a lot more fun to eat. (laughter)

That's my best answer. Several states apparently have had efforts along the same lines. The idea isn't mind-blowing: get your best teachers in the state, or in the country, and put a camera in the room - I don't use a camera, but you could put a camera in the room, or use a format like me - and have them teach. And put those videos online, and make them free for the world.

The expense is almost ridiculously low to do something like that. But time and time again, some of these states have contacted me and said "well, you know, it's getting stuck in meetings..." - and they really haven't produced any videos.

The best way to think about it is that it becomes very corporate. There is this view that it has to be very polished, and have computer graphics, and that the teacher has to have a script so that they don't say "um" or make any mistakes. And I think what that does is it takes all of the humanity out of it, and the humanity is what people connect with.

HM: Hmmm, yes. Let's talk about your motivation for a second. You quit a career in finance to do this. Tell us what your motivation was - both looking backward, and also how you think you'll stay the course looking forward.

SK: When I started, the only thing I had to give up was a little bit of my time after work. As you mentioned, I didn't start doing this full time until about four months ago, so I was doing this essentially as a significant part-time activity for about 4 years before that.

My initial motivation was this notion - if you read the website, I started with my cousins and all of that. And that's just tremendously satisfying. When you work at a hedge fund, it's a fun and intellectually stimulating job on a lot of levels, but it's tough to answer that question of "what did you do for the world today?" or "what value did you create for the world, other than for your investors?"

Just in a small way, it made me feel good to start with my cousins. Eventually, when I realized that I could "scale myself up" through YouTube and the software, I'd get notes from random strangers saying how their lives had changed, and how they're going to become an engineer now, and how they loved math for the first time in their lives. When you get those things from people all over the world, I don't think you have to be a Mother Teresa to feel pretty good about it.

When I first started, I thought it was a nice thing to have out there - something that my or your great grandkids could learn from, and it's fun. But over the last 6 months to a year, it started to be pretty obvious that not only is it a nice thing, but it's transformational for a lot of people out there. It's already reaching hundreds of thousands of people, and it could be reaching hundreds of millions.

And it was getting traction. As we discussed earlier in the conversation, it's getting traction above and beyond what major research institutions are being able to accomplish. Even though there is no obvious way in the short term to necessarily give me the type of standard of living that I might have been getting in my career - especially because I was at the point in my career where, if I would have stayed in it, I was at a kind of inflection point there too - it will never provide that type of livelihood. But it's been pretty clear to me that the value is definitely being created. And I just have to figure out some way for society to recognize some small fraction of that value, and at least be able to pay my rent and put food on the table.

I have YouTube ads on, which do revenue sharing at about $2000 a month right now. I'm pretty convinced in the worst case that just that, at the rate the site is growing, would be enough in about a year for me not to have to dip into my savings or my checking account to fund my family and this effort. But I don't want people to have ads for non-educational things while they're trying to learn algebra, or calculus or chemistry or whatever. So I am talking to some foundations, and I'm always open to sources of foundational support. Donations are coming in - I'm actually getting about $1000 a month in donations, and that's growing with the viewership.

So Plan B is donations and advertising - if I were to be really obnoxious about advertising, I could probably be there today, but I just don't want to do that. But if I got foundational support, then I could hire a team of five or ten people, and could really fulfil that idea of a full-service virtual school." (http://www.worldchanging.com/archives/011039.html)