The Gates Notes: Sal on Khan Academy

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The Gates Notes: Sal on Khan Academy Salman Khan on the future of learning.

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The Gates Notes: Sal on Khan Academy

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In 2004, my cousin, Nadia, was having trouble with math.
She was in New Orleans; I was in Boston.
I decided to virtually tutor her. It worked out.
So I said "Oh, let me tutor some other family members".
It became pretty obvious pretty quick that it was hard to scale that.
It was hard to schedule all the times.
So, I essentially just started putting videos on Youtube.
In 2009, I started doing Khan Academy full time.
In the fall of 2010, we got funding from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation,
and from Google.
And now, we’re a real organization.
Right now, in a traditional classroom, a teacher has to deliver essentially
a "one size fits all" lecture,
pretty much guaranteeing that some of the students
are going to be lost, or some are bored.
Students have to do problems in a vacuum.
They come back. You kind of repeat that process.
Then you get a snapshot exam.
And then, on that exam, whether you get 70%, 90% or 95%,
you’re moved on to the next concept.
And its almost guaranteed to leave gaps in your knowledge.
At some point, your foundation's going to be so weak that it will essentially crumble.
There’s gotta be a better way to do this.
Going through the high school experience, when we would train for math competitions,
we had a completely different way of teaching each other.
Everyone was learning math a lot better in this kind of extracurricular setting,
where the peers were teaching each other, everyone was learning at their own pace --
it was really interactive, really social --
people were starting to make the connection across subject areas,
because you had to have a holistic understanding
when you went to a competition.
The ideal interaction is one-on-one. You have a tutor. You have a student.
And the tutor can kind of adapt to the student.
And the reason why that doesn’t exist in the school system, is that that’s not economic.
How do you reduce that? How do we give more resources,
so it’s a lower student-to-teacher ratio?
In my mind, the relevant metric is student-to-actual-productive-time-with-the-teacher ratio.
We see the Khan Academy as essentially the world’s free, virtual school.
We have the videos -- literally covering everything from the basic arithmetic,
all the way through college level math, and science, and economics.
So the lecturer frees up the teacher, so that all of their time is now
spent on these kind of focused interventions.
We have the software platform,
and we have a way for students, and teachers, and parents to get data on what’s happening;
and for students, and teachers, and parents to actually communicate with each other,
and maybe actually even teach each other.
So we actually see it as a real, virtual school for the world.

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At 5:31, how is the moon large enough to block the sun? Isn't the sun way larger?

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When naming a variable, it is okay to use most letters, but some are reserved, like 'e', which represents the value 2.7831...

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At 2:33, Sal says "double bonds" but should say "single bonds."

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