Aligning extrinsic and intrinsic motivations of our learners

- Yeah, you know, this notion of intrinsic and extrinsic motivation is an interesting one, and just to give a very quick primer, intrinsic motivation is people learning or engaging in something because they find it interesting. It gives them some fundamental joy, in some way. While, extrinsic motivation is you're doing it for some external factor. It could be for a grade, it could be for social acceptance, to impress your teachers, your parents. It could be to get a job, to get into college. It could be you're trying to, you have project that you're working on, and you're trying to build a robot, so you need to learn signal processing so that your robot can stand up and balance itself. Those are all extrinsic motivators. In my mind, it isn't a intrinsic versus extrinsic. It is how do you align the two. Almost everything we do, if you talk to me, I intrinsically love mathematics. I feel like it's answering truths about the universe to me, fundamental questions we all have as human beings. But, I first engaged in math, for extrinsic reasons. In the early day, I went to a school. I was forced by law to go to school. I had teachers guide me through exercises. I had homework to do. And, I became intrinsically motivated because it was exposed to me in a way that clicked with me. I got, frankly, positive reinforcement around it. I was told at an early age that, hey, this is your thing. And so, that got me interested in it. So, the key isn't intrinsic versus extrinsic. The key is, people come to something, usually because of some type of extrinsic motivation. But then, once they go there, what do we do? A lot of times, in a traditional system, you're extrinsically motivated to understand something, but then it kills you, in some way. You feel like you have to memorize things. It feels like either the class, or the subject, is somehow judging you. It makes you feel not smart. You don't have agency over it. But, if you're able to consume that exact same thing, in a way that you don't feel judged, in a way that you have agency, in a way that you can experience the passion of it, you can see the connections. I firmly believe that all human beings want to understand the universe, and are in awe of things that are beautiful. And so, if we can give that to someone when they come for whatever reason. They want to build a project. They want to impress their peers. They want to get a good grade. Then, we can increase the total aggregate, intrinsic motivation in the world. So, it's all about, if we did purely for intrinsic motivation, if we didn't tie in to the things that are motivating most students, well then you're just going to get a small segment of very precocious students who are already intrinsically motivated, who frankly, even if we didn't exist, will find ways of learning what they want to learn. We might be able to make it a little bit easier, or let them go a little bit further, but our goal is for everyone. And, if we want to reach the 95 or 99% percent of students who, right now, if you ask them, do you like math? They might say oh yeah, not really, I feel like it's intimidating, or this or that. How do reach them? Well, they're gonna come because of a grade or because of college admissions, or SAT. But, when they experience the math, they should feel, oh my God, this is interesting! This is fun! This isn't as hard as I thought! I kind of like this. Maybe I want to do this with my life. Maybe I want to go make something out of this. And, if you look at the testimonials from Khan Academy, you see a lot of that. And, it's important to realize that it could come from some very deep project. But, it literally could come from a video, or an article, that connects the dots in a certain way, or reminds someone of the beauty of something. I can't tell you how many times in videos where I just feel in all honesty, this is beautiful! And, people say, hey, just you telling me that made me look at it in a slightly different way. So, I see Khan Academy as leveraging all of the extrinsic motivators, which are 99% of the motivators out there, to bring people to the content. But, once they're there, it should be beautiful, and it should be compelling, but it should also be tied to the things that they care about.