The Gates Notes: Sal on Khan Academy

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 and so I said oh let me tutor some of other family members it became pretty obvious pretty quick that it was hard to scale that it was hard to schedule all the time so essentially just started putting videos on YouTube 2009 I started doing Khan Academy full-time in the fall 2010 we got funding from Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and from Google and now we're a real organization right now 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 it's almost guaranteed to leave gaps in your knowledge at some point your foundation is going to be so weak that will essentially crumble there's got to be a better way to do this going through like the high school experience when we were trained 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 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 connections across subject area 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-teacher ratio in my mind the relevant metric is student to actual productive time with the teacher ratio we see the Khan Academy is essentially the world's free Virtual School we have the videos literally covering everything from basic arithmetic all the way through college level math and science and economics the lecture frees up the teacher so that all of their time is now spent on these kind of focus 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 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 you