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Talks and interviews
Course: Talks and interviews > Unit 1
Lesson 1: Conversations with Sal: Talks and presentations- Salman Khan: Let's use video to reinvent education | TED Talk | 2011
- Radio interview: Sal on AirTalk talking about his new book
- Salman Khan on Charlie Rose 2013
- Sal Khan on Digital and Physical Learning
- Year 2060: Education Predictions
- The Gates Notes: Sal on Khan Academy
- Khan Academy Computer Science Launch
- MIT 2012 Commencement Address
- Harvard Business School Class Day 2014
- Salman Khan at Rice University's 2012 commencement
- A Conversation with US Secretary of Education Arne Duncan
- Authors@Google: Salman Khan
- Khan Academy Vision and Social Return
- Using Khan Academy
- The learning myth: Why I'll never tell my son he's smart
- Sal Khan: Let's teach for mastery -- not test scores | TED Talk | 2015
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Radio interview: Sal on AirTalk talking about his new book
Sal talks with Larry Mantle about The One World School House (http://www.amazon.com/dp/1455508381?tag=khanacad-20). Created by Sal Khan.
Want to join the conversation?
- Greetings,
How can I as a parent & council member get this program into our schools? We have numerous schools failing in our district. I'm aware of the success it brings to the Kipp students. Please contact me at your earliest convenience. Thank you.
Great success,
Ms. McGlothin(59 votes)- Visit http://www.khanacademy.org/toolkit/classroom-uses and watch the videos there.(38 votes)
- You are doing digital education, so I am surprised that there is no Kindle version. Why is that?(13 votes)
- I'd guess that "finite resources" is the main answer. At the moment the Kindle is still a bit of a niche market, so Khan Acadamy's resources are better put to use expanding the general Acadamy rather than porting things to specific devices.(8 votes)
- How much does the book cost?(4 votes)
- how is everybody today?(4 votes)
- i'm feeling guud(1 vote)
- Hello what are energy points(3 votes)
- ohh...yeahh i can't see the viedo why??(3 votes)
- How often do people talk about Khan Academy on the radio?(3 votes)
- Here is a little tip on how to get energy points while doing school. So you go on a video and you mute it and the video is going on and that way you don't get distracted, check back every time to see if the video is over(3 votes)
- Is Khan a different language then American?(2 votes)
- Thank you for helping all of of us Sal(2 votes)
Video transcript
(pop music) Larry: It started with just a
few little videos on algebra to help out a cousin who
needed assistance in school, and, from there, it grew
and grew and grew into more than 3,200 YouTube videos,
giving all kinds of instruction. It's known as the Khan Academy,
but, more than just that, it's leading to a rethinking
of how education is delivered in the nation's
classrooms and at home. Salman Khan's new book, The One World School House: Education Reimagined. Sal, thank you for joining us. We appreciate it very much. Sal: Thanks for having me. Larry: Take us back to what was going on. Here you are, you're doing your hedge fund management and research, and you have a cousin who needs some help. How does it all spring from this? Sal: Yeah; she needed help. She's 12 years old. She was in New Orleans,
which is where I grew up. I was in Boston at the time. I offered to tutor her
everyday after work for me, after school for her; she agreed. It worked out. We just work out, do it
over the phone, and we used a little bit of this Yahoo
Chat to kind of communicate. She eventually got into the kind of the more appropriate math track for her, and I start tutoring her brothers. Word got around in the family
that free tutoring was happening. So, you fast forward about 18 months, and I was tutoring about
10 or 15 family members everyday after work; and it was a friend- By this point, I had moved
out to Northern California, and a friend said, "Well,
to help yoursef scale, "why don't you put some
of these on YouTube?" and I thought it was a silly
idea, that YouTube was for cats playing piano, but I gave it a shot. >From there, it just caught on, I guess. Larry: How long did it take
for the word to get out and for people to start
using these videos? Sal: It was just this I
think word of mouth thing, that starting in 2006 a parent
would tell another parent, a student would tell another student, a teacher would tell another teacher. By 2009, there were several
hundreds of thousands of people using it on a regular basis. That's when I quit my day
job to start this as a not for profit and work on this full time, and then, by 2010, it had grown. By that point, we started to get
a little bit of press as well. We're now at about
almost 7 million students every month are using it. Larry: Wow. There's a criticism from
The Washington Post, where this teacher has his
own company, I guess it is, and was featured in a blog
in The Washington Post, and part of the knock was
that you said you spend a couple of minutes researching and do it, but I thought part of the
appeal of the videos is there is a sort of a naturalness there. It's the less formal aspect of
it I think is part of the appeal. Sal: Yeah. I think there's two
dimensions to preparation. I think one dimension is
preparation of your mind, which is hopefully happened
over your entire lifetime, but obviously if I go
into a topic that I'm not expert in at the moment,
I will spend hours on it. But I agree with you. I think what people connected to
was it was very conversational. They could tell it was some guy
making this for his cousins. I didn't edit out my thought processes. You could kind of hear
me thinking in real time. Sometimes I would go down one avenue, that was a logical avenue, but say, "Well actually, this isn't working out. "Let's back up." Too often in math and science, you just get the final
solution, and it seems so easy and perfect, but
it seems impossible to you. I think people appreciated
that it felt much more human, much more approachable in this way. Larry: Much like it is
in a show like this, which is unscripted and a conversation, or a program like Morning Edition, where it's all scripted
and you have two anchors. Both have their place. They're just different approaches. Sal: Exactly. I think when I talk to a lot of
... and I've had the privilege of working with a lot of amazing
teachers, and they tell me. I mean, the things that
connect with students more are the ones that are unscripted. Your mind has to be very
clear and very distilled about what you want to talk
about and how you might communicate it, but
humans realize when you're reading something versus
when you're actually thinking and communicating
from your heart. Larry: Let's talk about
taking this as a model and incorporating it into
the classroom in Los Altos, up in the Bay Area, where you reside. They're actually incorporating this. How does it work? Sal: They first reached out to us 2010, when we got our first real funding from Google and the Gates
Foundation to work on this. At the time, we thought it was
a completely supplemental thing. Khan Academy is your free tutor out there. But, as I write about in the book, they kind of reached out to us and said, "What would you do with a
5th grade math classroom, "now that you exist, your tools exist?" I said, "I don't think
it makes sense to use "class time to give lectures anymore. "Lectures might be useful, but now you can "pause and repeat and
watch them on demand. "Let's use class time for
something more constructive. "Why don't we ask student
teaching each other? "Why don't we have more one
on one time with the teacher?" And as soon as you also remove
lectures from the classroom, now, all of a sudden,
you don't have to have every student working at the same pace. You could have them all kind of mastering concepts then moving on. They thought it was an interesting
idea, so they gave it a shot. This was two years ago, and since
then it's been district-wide, and they've been seeing some
pretty interesting results. Larry: You know the
criticism that some have, the concern is that for the students who don't have much parental support, have difficult time
getting access to computer, they're going to be left behind, and the whiz kids are going to do great because they can go at their own pace. Sal: Well, I think this addresses that more than the traditional model does. The traditional model
that we all grew up in, you go home, you have homework, and that's where frankly
a lot of the learning should happen, when you're
doing the problem solving. It's the educated kids
who have older siblings, or who have parents who might be able to help them on the
schoolwork, or whose parents are even home and they're not at work, and then they go to class
and they do something very passive and they get frustrated. What we're advocating is
that actually doing the problem-solving, which is
a much more important part, in class, where they're
surrounded by peers and they have a support network, so you don't have the child whose parents aren't home from work or
whose parents don't have a high school diploma, who can't help them on an algebra homework,
getting frustrated. Now they're in class; they're surrounded. They have the teacher, the
peers, there's a ton of help. There's one classroom
where there was a student who spoke very little English. In a traditional classroom,
that kid would just be left behind, even though
actually we found out he was quite good at mathematics. What allowed to happen
in this model is that the teacher was able to
spend extra time with him. The teacher didn't speak Spanish, but several of the students
did, and so the students were able to be peer tutors and make sure that the student could keep up. I think there is an issue
about access to technology, and we are working at
charter schools in San Jose and Oakland, places that
are more underserved, but actually they were seeing
some of the biggest gains. The trick is how do we give
access to the technology? But you could do it by keeping
computer labs open longer, by having after school
programs and other things. Larry: So even if they're
not a quiet space at home, there's another place that kids can go to see those lectures. We're talking with Salman Khan. He's the founder of the
nonprofit Khan Academy, and author of The One World School House: Education Reimagined;
and part of the case that he makes in this book is that the kind of low cost delivery of
education in this model could revolutionize
underdeveloped countries, those that just don't
have access to education, that this could be a huge
way of addressing that. How would you, though, deal with that kind of problem
solving, the in classroom, the need for the educated professional? Sal: Yeah, well, in the developed world, where students have access to a teacher, I think this supercharges
that physical part of it. This isn't about virtual versus physical. It's not Amazon.com
versus Barnes and Noble's. This is about let's take
lecture off the table, because lecture, and we have
in the book a study that proved that lecture is probably the
worst possible use of time and very little learning actually goes on, make that on demand, at a student's time, they can remediate and not be embarassed, and make class time all
about problem solving, all about interaction with the teachers. So, in our mind, if you have a teacher, they become that much more valuable because you get to interact with them. In the developing world, you
have a different problem. Even if you have the
resources, you might not have a teacher in the village
who can address that topic. Even if you do, the students are
at all different skill levels. Some might be illiterate. Some might be somehow roughly
at their own grade level. What we say is, in those context, and there's an orphanage in Mongolia, actually several that
are using us in this way, it's better than nothing. It can give you a very
strong academic scaffold. You have a community of learners
online who can help you. And sometimes you're getting help from a teacher on the
other side of the planet, or another student on the
other side of the planet. Or some of these kids are actually helping kids in the developed world. So, for us, it's not an either/or. The ideal is you have amazing teachers, but if you have nothing,
like these orphanages in Mongolia, you're getting something. Larry: You can use
webcams, things like that to be able to make a two-way, interactive followup to online lectures? Sal: Yeah, that's stuff
that we have planned. I talk a lot about it in the book. I think Khan Academy is in
very, very early stages, and we set it up as a not for profit, so it really has this potential
to be this institution to deliver education
for the world for free. I hope in 50 or 100 years, well after ... well, hopefully I'm around in 50 years, but even after I'm gone,
people will still be working on the problem
of how can we make this more interactive, more engaging, and connect more learners
around the world? Larry: Salman Khan,
author of The One World School House: Education Reimagined. I'd love to hear from you
your questions or comments about Khan Academy, about the more than 3,200 YouTube teaching
videos that are there, how it's being used by school districts, by individual schools as well. We're at 866-893-KPCC, 866-893-5722, or the AirTalk page at KPCC.org. TR asked an interesting
question he has on the page, "Are there tests that an
adult can take to assess their math shortcomings
on the Khan Academy site?" Sal: Yeah. That's what we're working on right now. We already have a significant exercise. Anyone can go to Khan Academy, log in. Actually, our team now, we're
36 people; it's not just me. Most of them are software
engineers and educators who are working on exactly
what's being described. You get as many problems as you need. It assesses you. It keeps progressing you forward. You get feedback on what you're doing. What we want to do is
broaden that to well beyond mathematics, so you can
get assessment on things, diagnostics, and then show what you know, and if you're having
trouble in a certain domain, there are these tutorials
that can help you out. Larry: One thing I forgot to mention, because this is really a
central part of your approach, is that everybody needs to be able to show that they've mastered a step before they move on to the next one, and schools are in a tough
spot trying to do that. Sal: I talked about in
the book pretty heavily is all the debate about education
essentially misses the point. It's all kind of on the fringes
of this model that we have that few people realize we
inherited from the Prussians, a country that does not
exist anymore, 200 years ago. The Prussian model was based on how do we educate a lot of people cost effectively? Well, it was the beginning
of the industrial revolution, so we'll do the same thing. We'll bash them together
in these age cohorts. They go to the same pace. They go to these stations,
which are these classes. Knowledge is applied to them. Some, it sticks; some, it doesn't. Then you sift out the product,
and some become doctors and some don't become
doctors or engineers. What we're saying is we think we can break out of that
Prussian model now because that Prussian model
pretty much dooms people to hit walls in their understanding. Right now, in the model,
you get a C on your exam on basic exponents, it moves you
to the next topic the next week, where you go to negative
exponents or logarithms, somehow expecting you to master that, even though you had that weak foundation. And so, we say no. Master that concept, at least
get a basic proficiency in it, and only then is it realistic
for you to be able to understand something
that builds on top of it. Larry: It's funny, when I was in
6th grade, it was way pre-Internet, I was in an experimental
classroom public school in Inglewood here in Southern California. They were trying something
where they combine 5th and 6th grade, so it
was a joint classroom, and there was almost no lecture. The teacher sat in the middle of the room, and we had work stations in
different subject areas, again, so there are no videos, essentially,
but all kinds of stations. You work at your own pace. There were tests along
the way to make sure you had mastery before you moved on; and it was my favorite
year of school, because in areas where I was good,
I could go really fast; in areas where I needed more
help, I had the teacher available, one on one, to be able
to help me through it. I don't know how long that ever
last or what happened to it, but for me it was perfect
for my learning style. It just seems like those
kinds of experiments were often very hard to
come by when you've got such disparate student
level of achievement. Sal: Yeah. I think what you're describing,
it's not just for you. I think almost any human being would say that is how
they naturally learn. In the book, I talk about that
is how people naturally learn, through activity, through personalization, through interaction
with other human beings. What I think is special
about this time in history is that there are many
experiments like the one you were a part of in your childhood. There are a lot of schools that are moving in that direction, but
it's not mainstream. What we're seeing now is
because of the technology, because of this broad
adoption that things like Khan Academy are seeing, it's
starting to be mainstream. The coordination is starting
to empower teachers to do that. Larry: We still do group projects, too, which I know your summer camp, that's a big part of it, right? Sal: Right. One thing I talk a lot about
in the book is everyone's all paranoid about are we
falling behind Estonia or South Korea or Finland because
of our algebra test scores, and it's worth not being
complacent about that, but what I emphasize
is America is becoming more and more the center
of the world's innovation, and that's because we have
this culture of creativity. Failure isn't stigmatized. What I see, instead of
making our Prussian model more like the one in
Finland or South Korea or Singapore, let's make ours more American, where it's more personalized, more time with other human beings,
and time for creativity. Creativity is probably the single most important thing today,
but our current model completely squeezes time
for it out of the equation. Larry: Bill in Huntington
Beach, you're on AirTalk. Bill: Hi. I want to express my
gratitude for the Khan Academy and all the tapes that are out there. I'm a 55-year-old grad student,
returning to civil engineering. It's been 30 years since I first
took calculus and I'd lost it all. And so, I really literally
relearned the subject over the span of a few months. Thanks to Sal and his great tapes. Larry: Wow; so not just kids? Sal: No. We see that in the data. Stories like that is what
keep our whole team motivated. Larry: Maurice in San Dimas, welcome. Maurice: Hi, Larry. My wife is a teacher
in San Gabriel Valley, teaching chemistry, and
she loved the videos, and actually uses it
as homework assignments as a review, more than anything. The main problem that I see
is that the school district doesn't let her actually play the videos in the classroom because it's on YouTube. Sal: Yeah. That's a very real issue. A lot of classrooms block YouTube. Some countries block YouTube. On Khan Academy, there's
like a little link where you can acces it on mirrored
sites, some of the videos, but I think school districts are ...
and that's a short term solution. The school districts
are starting to realize that YouTube does have educational value, and YouTube is starting
to realize that as well. I think collectively we're
all working on solutions to address exactly what you described. Larry: Roxanne in West Lake Village says she's a math tutor, refers students to Khan Academy all the time. Then parents ask, "Why do
I need to hire tutors?" But there's still a great need because kids need to practice the hands on, just like when learning baseball. Sal: Once again, Khan
Academy is not there to replace humans; it's there
to supercharge humans. All of this started off as me
being a tutor, and it wasn't to replace myself, it was
really to allow my ... and get the half an hour
that I had with Nadia to be more constructive,
so I didn't have to lecture for things for her and
she didn't have to be embarassed to ask a
question from 4th grade. She could get it on demand. And so, yeah, that's what
you've got to tell parents, that the tutor is now more valuable and can take things to
another level with students. Larry: Jennifer in Fullerton, wondering about translation
for other countries. You're looking at new videos to serve in other languages or dubbing yourself? Sal: We actually have a
fairly extensive project. We've translated and
redone 7,000 videos into other languages, the 12
major languages of the world. If you go to the bottom of the
site, you see a little drop down. We have actually 1,000 in Spanish, 1,000 in Portuguese,
and a bunch of others. Larry: Wow. Jonathan in Long Beach says, "The technology really
streamlined the college system." He's a student at Long Beach City College. He says, "Lectures go on and on, "regurgitation and inefficient." Salman Khan, thank you for being with us. Appreciate it very much. We'll see how much your
ideas make their way into mainstream American education. Sal: Thank you. Larry: The One World School House: Education Reimagined, by the founder of the nonprofit Khan Academy, Salman Khan. It's AirTalk on 89.3 KPCC. Have a great afternoon. BBC News Hour comes up
next, and then The World-