Salman Khan: "The One World Schoolhouse: Education Reimagined" | Talks at Google

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ERIC SCHMIDT: Well, good morning or good afternoon, or
good evening, depending on where you are in Google.
This is a familiar venue for me, and I hope for
all of you as well.
We occasionally get to visit with people who are probably
more consequential than anybody else in the world or
pretty close.
And in my career, I've had an opportunity to visit and know
one or two or three or four of such people--
Vint Cerf, for example, who invented the internet.
It may very well be that Salman Khan becomes the most
important educator in the entire world.
We will see.
[LAUGHTER]
ERIC SCHMIDT: But to imagine the potential that this
gentleman has, in terms of changing the world ahead of
us, literally gives me goosebumps, to think of the
impact that his invention and his approach can have for
billions of people.
It is an honor and a privilege to have you here at Google.
SALMAN KHAN: Well, it's great to be here.
And I like the low expectations that
you've set for me.
ERIC SCHMIDT: So I think this audience pretty much knows
Sal's story.
But for those who may not know, this is a gentleman who
should have done something else.
Brilliant mathematician, physics,
everything you could imagine.
On his way to the most lucrative possible job,
running hedge funds here in New York.
SALMAN KHAN: I think second most lucrative after--
well, anyway.
ERIC SCHMIDT: And somehow, right at that point, he made a
decision that changed his life, his family's life, and I
think, literally everyone else's.
You want to talk about how you got into the video YouTube
business big time?
SALMAN KHAN: Yeah so a lot of you all might know the
initial, genesis story.
I was working with my cousins remotely.
Initially, I was in Boston.
Then, the firm that I was working for, it was me, my
boss, who was our portfolio manager, and his dog.
The dog was the chief economist.
His wife became a professor at Stanford Law.
So then, we moved out to Silicon Valley.
And then, while I was tutoring all of my cousins remotely,
and I started working on the interactive part, which is the
questions and the quizzing and keeping track of students.
And I didn't think about the video it all, at that point.
This was Fall of 2006.
I was showing this to a friend in Silicon Valley.
You know, the software part I was showing him.
And he said, oh, this is great.
I said, but my problem is I'm having trouble keeping up with
all these cousins.
And he's the one that recommended, well, there's
this thing called YouTube.
And I was like, yeah.
I've kind of heard of it.
And why don't you make some tutorials and put it on that.
I was like, no, no.
YouTube is for cats playing piano.
It's not for math.
But I got over the idea that it wasn't my idea.
And I gave it a shot.
And I think a lot of stories that you all are familiar with
on YouTube--
I'm not quite at Justin Bieber scale yet--
but a lot of people started watching it.
I had set it up as a not-for-profit in 2008.
And in 2009, as you described, it was already
taking over my life.
At that point, there was no way I could do anything else.
ERIC SCHMIDT: So this is really all about YouTube.
SALMAN KHAN: It is.
ERIC SCHMIDT: OK.
SALMAN KHAN: Yeah, I don't think--
ERIC SCHMIDT: I think, frankly, you
should just thank YouTube.
SALMAN KHAN: I should.
I should just thank YouTube.
That's right.
ERIC SCHMIDT: So content--
if it had not existed, you would be like nothing.
SALMAN KHAN: I would just be one of those--
ERIC SCHMIDT: You would be making lots of
money in hedge funds.
SALMAN KHAN: Yes, exactly, exactly.
ERIC SCHMIDT: So what happened was, we had this wonderful
scenario where YouTube created a platform.
And then, you decided to start working on math.
How did this idea go from the first, with your cousin?
And how did it go to being all of high school, all of
everything?
SALMAN KHAN: Yeah, it's interesting question.
When I started this--
Fall of 2006, early 2007--
like everyone else, Wikipedia was already out there.
And you're like, anything substantive is
going to be the crowd.
Or it's definitely going to be multiple people.
When you just think about a K through 12 review.
Khan is actually more K through 14, or
even goes into college.
But it seems like this huge amount of content.
If you look at the textbooks, each of these courses are like
these 1,000 page textbooks.
And so I immediately started.
Well, I'm just going to do these as a proof of concept.
And I will then get my friends or people I know, to
kind of join in.
We can do this together.
Then, maybe collectively, 20 of us might be
able to tackle Algebra.
But once I started doing it, I made
about 80 videos initially.
I was like, it's not 100% comprehensive.
But if someone watches those and understands those, that's
a pretty good scaffold of algebra.
ERIC SCHMIDT: And it's important to-- those of you
who are not studying high school algebra at the moment.
But these are in fact very simple videos.
They're shot with just a little white board.
SALMAN KHAN: When I started doing it.
I said, well, these are for my cousins.
I don't feel like buying a video camera.
And I didn't feel like buying anything fancy.
So I literally used a USB headset and Microsoft paint.
I didn't even look to see if there was something.
ERIC SCHMIDT: We have better products.
SALMAN KHAN: I've learned that.
I've learned that.
I now use another free program.
ERIC SCHMIDT: Everything at Google is free.
Trust me.
SALMAN KHAN: Oh, yes.
That is pressure--
But anyway, I started making them.
And they were really just you saw my little scrawls.
And the first few ones, I actually cringe when I look at
the older ones.
But some people said, oh, I really like that.
It felt very homespun type of thing.
But yeah, they're kind of the shaky handwriting.
And you hear my voice-over.
But it became clear.
A lot of people think content goes stale fast.
And it's true.
If you're writing a blog, if you're doing a news site,
every day you've got to have--
and people say, content doesn't scale.
But with was stuff like algebra, those 80 videos, it
took me like a month to do them.
That's kind of algebra.
And then, I kept going.
And it eventually became like this Forrest Gump type--
can I race across America type of adventure.
And I said well, I'm going to do all of mathematics.
ERIC SCHMIDT: And so we're clear, he didn't stop when he
did all of mathematics.
Yes, what's next after mathematics?
SALMAN KHAN: Yeah, the physics was close to my heart.
ERIC SCHMIDT: OK, that was easy for you.
What was the next one?
SALMAN KHAN: Then, I was an analyst at a hedge fund.
And it was funny because everyone--
ERIC SCHMIDT: So how about--
you did this "Origins of the Financial Disaster" video?
SALMAN KHAN: Yes.
And people should look at--
ERIC SCHMIDT: Who was the target for that one?
SALMAN KHAN: It was for people I meet at cocktail parties.
Because people say, you're an analyst at a hedge fund.
And I was actually like a huge housing bear in like 2005,
2006, 2007.
And everybody says, how come you haven't
bought a house yet?
They could only go up.
And you could--
and I would say, let me explain it to you.
Actually, that used to be my interview questions, when I
used to interview someone at a hedge fund.
I would say, should I rent or buy?
And they would say, you should buy.
I was like, I haven't even told you the price yet.
And they were like, OK.
And you just keep going.
And they're like, the rent is this.
This is that.
This is the house.
It's a $1 million.
Should I rent or buy?
Oh, you should buy that.
OK.
Now the house is $2 million.
The rent hasn't changed.
Should you rent or buy?
And so I felt that needed some explanation to the world that
there is a way of thinking about this type of a problem.
And then, I did a whole thing about the--
ERIC SCHMIDT: My guess is none of the hedge fund managers
have actually watched your seven minute video.
They're too embarrassed to learn from YouTube and you.
SALMAN KHAN: Some of them have actually been more forthright.
During the financial crisis, I did get a letter-- and I won't
say which bank--
from someone who said, thank you for the video on
mortgage-backed securities.
I now know what I do for a living.
Which I thought, better late than never.
ERIC SCHMIDT: By the way, it's important to know that Sal has
just organized a computer science program.
So those of you who are computer scientists, you have
an opportunity to learn about computer science.
SALMAN KHAN: I don't think.
Yes, I think the folks here will-- well anyway.
ERIC SCHMIDT: There's a very interesting story that is the
transition from you.
At some point, you ran out of USB camera time.
And the time sitting in your apartment.
And you wanted to found--
And Khan Academy is a non-profit, by the way.
So tell us.
How did you go to being a significant organization?
How did you get funded?
How did you get your board set?
SALMAN KHAN: Yeah.
So there was one foundation that in 2008 was saying, oh,
are you a not-for-profit.
I'm like, what's a not-for-profit.
That's my intention.
And they told me.
No, it's a thing.
You'd have to file it-- become a corporation then
file with the IRS.
And I said, I'm going to do it.
And originally, I called up some law firm.
And they said it was $20,000 to do that.
Then I found some people in Tennessee who did it over the
internet for $2,000.
They're actually very good.
Actually, I'll be a referral for them at any point.
So they set it up.
That foundation didn't end up supporting Khan Academy.
Then, in 2009, when I'd quit my job, I started to think
about it more seriously.
ERIC SCHMIDT: Because you didn't have
money for the rent.
SALMAN KHAN: Because I didn't have.
ERIC SCHMIDT: You had failed to purchase a house.
SALMAN KHAN: Yes, I didn't have a house.
And not having money makes you take things seriously.
And I started pitching to a bunch of foundations and
philanthropists.
And it was in May of 2010 that, famously, Ann Doerr sent
that $10,000 check.
And I immediately emailed her back saying, if we were
physical school, you would now have a
building named after you.
That was the largest donation ever gotten.
The rest before that, it was like $50
was the biggest donation.
And then, we famously met in downtown Palo Alto.
And she said, well, what's your vision?
I said, it's a free world-class education for
anyone anywhere.
And she said, that's a modest ambition.
And what does it envision?
And actually, around the same time, I had some initial talks
with Google as well.
And this is what I was telling everyone.
I was like, I want to keep making these videos.
We can translate them into the languages of the world.
We can create an interactive platform.
We can have a community of learners.
And she said, well, that's interesting.
And how are you supporting yourself?
And I said, I'm not.
And then, when I went home, she wrote that first--
she sent a wire over text.
You should be supporting yourself.
I've just wired you $100,000.
So it was a good day.
And then, it was really later that summer
that it all came to--
I was talking to Google this entire time.
And I didn't realize it was all about this
10 to the 100 Project.
And it was really at the end of that summer that the Google
folks said, what would you do with $2 million?
And I said, is this an open question?
Because I could buy some pets.
ERIC SCHMIDT: I was like that interview question.
SALMAN KHAN: But it was really the same
pitch that I told Ann.
So by that fall, they were really the first.
At that point, it was the largest
donation is the $2 million.
ERIC SCHMIDT: And Bill Gates Foundation was also a
significant--
SALMAN KHAN: Yes, right out the gate, in that fall of
2010, it was Google $2 million, Gates Foundation,
same order of magnitude.
You know, get our first office space.
At the time, it was to hire a team of five people and start
translating into the different languages and
build a software platform.
So thank you.
ERIC SCHMIDT: And I want to credit Ann Doerr.
Ann, who I've known for many, many years, is John Doerr's
wife-- he's on our board--
saw this and immediately understood the scale of what
this could be.
And I've told her, I think this may be the single most
important professional thing she ever does, at the scale
that you're now operating.
And she's been fantastic as a supporter.
And I've recently joined the board, in the spirit of full
disclosure.
And obviously, I'm a supporter.
The interesting thing is that there was a point at which you
went from hey, I'm making really interesting videos.
What happened in the US was that moms and dads, mostly
moms, who had preteen kids started watching these videos.
And it was completely word of mouth.
And so you'd hear this.
And you'd hear it in your corner.
Who's Khan Academy?
There's a different Khan.
That's like a politician.
SALMAN KHAN: There's a Bollywood actor.
He's somewhat well known.
ERIC SCHMIDT: OK.
So it's one of those underground
kind of viral things.
And it worked.
And that was where, I think, the word of
mouth really started.
And then with the Google grant, you got this
opportunity to the international thing.
But then something interesting happened.
Somehow, you decided to change the way education works or at
least run the experiment.
And you showed up in Los Altos.
This is where you live, in Los Altos.
And you sort of say, hey, I want to change the school
system in my little district.
SALMAN KHAN: I live in Mountain View.
But obviously, I live literally 100 meters away.
So they're the adjacent school district.
And when we got the first grants from the Gates
Foundation and Google, we still viewed this--
none of that initial pitch was about thinking about
transforming physical schools or thinking about what
education could become or what happens with higher education.
We were just like, no.
Through virtual means, we're going to do the best we can to
see how we can deliver knowledge and interactivity
and whatever else.
But right when we did that, Los Altos came to us and said,
we heard some stuff about what you're doing.
Maybe it could be used in a physical school.
So what would you do?
ERIC SCHMIDT: Was it really your idea or really sort of a
joint idea?
Or is it some superintendent who was clever?
SALMAN KHAN: Actually, it was Mark Goines, who's a fairly
prominent angel investor in the valley, who was on the
board of Los Altos.
And we were introduced by I think some at the Gates--
he's an interesting guy to talk to, a good adviser.
He's a great guy.
We met at that Pete's Coffee on Castro.
And at the end of it, he's like, I'm on the
board at Los Altos.
I'd love to have you meet the superintendent and the
assistant superintendent.
And then when we chatted, they said, well, what would you do
with a fifth grade classroom?
And I said, now that there are ways to get lecture other than
a traditional, physical lecture, now that there are
ways to get interactive problem solving and give
teachers data, I wouldn't have classroom
based on lectures anymore.
And as soon as it's not based on lecture, then it doesn't
have to be at the same pace anymore, either.
So we'll have every student working at their own pace.
Teachers get information about it and are able to intervene
in a very personal way with students or have the students
intervene with each other in a personal way.
And I thought this was a very theoretical conversation.
It's let me dream big.
And they came back, literally three days later, and said,
this is a great idea.
Let's try it.
We want to try it in four classrooms.
ERIC SCHMIDT: By the way, this never happens.
This is like a meteorite hit.
That's how rate random this is.
SALMAN KHAN: No, it was funny.
Because right when they said that, I was
like, oh, that's great.
ERIC SCHMIDT: You must have done a pretty good job of
pitching this.
SALMAN KHAN: Perhaps.
I don't know.
I don't know what they saw.
I guess it was good.
ERIC SCHMIDT: Some random guy walks up and
says, let's redo the--
I mean, come on.
SALMAN KHAN: We had been recently validated by some
well known--
but it's true.
It was funny.
Because right after they told me that, I was like, by the
way, can we lease some office space from you?
We ended up going to downtown Mountain View.
But we didn't even know.
That was, I think our president now, Shantanu,
either was about to join or had just joined from McKinsey,
to kind of help out.
But we didn't know where our office space was.
We hadn't hired our team yet.
But yeah, it was very early days.
And we were shocked because it's a public school district.
ERIC SCHMIDT: So Sal came to Google and actually sort of
explained his model.
And a number of us were part of it.
And the most interesting thing that has become the overall
narrative is the inversion of the classroom.
Can you explain that idea?
And does it really work?
SALMAN KHAN: Yeah, so this Los Altos thing ended up working
wonderfully, especially in the early days.
We didn't have the data in the early days,
the test score data.
But anecdotally, famously, the kids didn't want to go to
recess anymore.
It was super interactive.
The teachers were enjoying themselves.
ERIC SCHMIDT: This also never happens.
SALMAN KHAN: And it was in that April
invited to TED to speak.
And so I was like, look.
We're going to talk about this interesting thing that's
happening at Los Altos.
And during that TEDTalk, kind of in the run up to talking
about Los Altos, which was really taking it a lot further
than the flipped classroom that I think is
being alluded to.
I talked about, even in 2007, 2008, I did get emails from
teachers who were saying--
you've already given a competent lecture or an
interesting lecture about factoring polynomials.
Or how does meiosis work?
Or why does borrowing make sense, or who knows
what it might be.
I don't need to give that lecture anymore.
Students can watch it at their own time, their own pace.
They get the benefits that my cousins had.
If you're in algebra class, and you forgot how to add
fractions, you will not raise your hand and say, excuse me,
I forgot how to--
now, you can do it without any shame.
And then, they could use class time for
actual problem solving.
So it used to be homework.
Problem solving can now be done with the context of peers
and your teacher.
You have people to help you.
By helping other people, you'll learn more.
And that used to be one pace, very passive lecture could now
be a somewhat more active lecture.
You could pause if you don't understand a term, watch
another video, remediate.
What we hope now--
and that's what the TEDTalk, the next few minutes of it,
went into well, that's great.
Now we can take it even further, with every student
learning at their own pace.
ERIC SCHMIDT: What was interesting
about the first results--
and I remember this very clearly.
You gave the example of a little Johnny or whatever, who
got stuck on a particular kind of fractions and loses the
rest of the year.
Because that building block is needed for
the subsequent work.
And so there's evidence that, in traditional learning, the
kid gets stuck.
And they never catch up.
SALMAN KHAN: Yeah.
ERIC SCHMIDT: Whereas, in your model, they take a little bit
of extra time because it's hard or for whatever reason.
And there is data that indicates that they ultimately
do better than the median.
That's extraordinary.
SALMAN KHAN: Yeah, it's blown our minds.
And on some level, it's been like oh, my God.
This is an amazing thing.
But on a whole other dimension, it's completely
common sense.
You know, I write a lot of in the book about--
one example, this past year we've been working in Oakland.
And it's a charter school.
These kids are signed up for, essentially,
a Pre-Algebra class.
They're sixth and seventh graders.
And then, as soon as they started working on Khan
Academy, we were able to look at the data in real
time and say, wow.
Some of these kids don't know their multiplication tables.
Some of these kids don't know how to add decimals.
And in traditional model, they're in an Algebra class.
They're in a Pre-Algebra class.
You do algebra.
And the teacher knew this, too.
The teacher knew that there were these core weaknesses
because these students just kept being promoted along,
even though they had these gaps in their knowledge.
And then, at some point, when they're just not getting
algebra, it has nothing to do with the algebra.
It's just because they can't even understand
what's going on.
And so when we kind of did it the other way around, even in
this case in Oakland and earlier, in Los Altos, the
most interesting data came from a remedial math class.
When we let these students work at their own pace, right
in the beginning, there were these group of kids that just
raced ahead.
And you'd say, oh, those are the gifted kids.
They'll go work at Google one day.
And here are the slower kids.
There are other things that they can do.
And in a traditional school system, that's how you do it.
Usually around middle school, you track them.
But what we see is if you let this group over here work at
their own pace--
a lot of it was remediation, picking up stuff that they
really should have learned.
But in the old system, you get a C. That's fine.
That's passing.
You go to the next thing, even though you have a gap.
And they were able to fill in all those gaps and really get
mastery at them.
That's same kid that you thought was week six months
ago is now the best student in the class.
And we're seeing that, over and over again.
ERIC SCHMIDT: What I'd like to do is now is explore a little
bit about where this goes.
The first question is--
this is an analytical group, by any measure.
What are the provably true things that we could say
today, based on the activities you've done?
We know that there's a lot of anecdotal evidence that people
do better with your videos and parents around the world are
celebrating this.
What sort of science is behind your success?
SALMAN KHAN: So the provably true statements are the ones--
I could say this.
And it's very different depending on which schools.
So I don't want to make a blanket statement that Khan
Academy will always improve your test scores by 25% or--
I guess I could say, or your money back because it's free.
But in the ones that we've studied--
Los Altos, Oakland Unity, Summit, KIPP--
is that we've seen fairly substantial,
not 1% to 2% changes.
But in the case of Oakland, we saw an order-of-magnitude
change in the number of students who were performing
at a proficient level.
In the remedial class, in Los Altos, not just based on our
own data, I talk about that kid who was slow and speed up.
On the California test scores, clearly to be placed in a
remedial class, they were well below average, all of them,
some of them severely below average.
But then, after this, there were a few
kids that were advanced.
ERIC SCHMIDT: The next question has to do with the
educational establishment.
You're the classic example of the outsider who has the
benefit of not being aware that there's been 20 years of
data which says you're wrong.
And you've been pretty heavily criticized by people who, I
think, are more jealous than anything else that
you've done so well.
That's obviously my bias.
What's the legitimate response from the educational
institutions?
Do you ultimately think that they will embrace this model?
Do you think that they will reject you?
You have some experience.
And you need teachers.
SALMAN KHAN: Absolutely.
ERIC SCHMIDT: You don't replace
teachers in your model.
SALMAN KHAN: Yeah, and I think that hits
at a bunch of things.
One is some of the misperceptions that people
might have or are having that when anything virtual shows
up, that's going to be in competition for the physical.
It's Amazon.com versus Barnes and Noble.
And from the beginning, obviously, we were
working in Los Altos.
We talked about it in the TEDTalk.
If you have nothing else, it should be able to
stand on its own.
But how does that virtual supercharge what happens
inside of the physical.
And I think sometimes, the press narrative, they like
this one man in a closet story and he's fighting the
establishment.
And so that tends to be the narrative, no matter
what we try to do.
But the reality is, from day one, we were working deeply
with students.
I mean, in those early days, we had two people in the
organization.
And we were working with four teachers and a bunch of
administrators.
And a third of our team is either former teachers,
current teachers, and people who directly
interface with teachers.
We have 20,000 teachers using it in their
classrooms as we speak.
And so I think that's, one, just a misperception.
I think some of the fair criticism is-- we get these
great headlines because people like the story.
You know, "The Messiah of Math." One I liked in
particular, was "The Math of Khan," which I thought was
quite good.
But there are these grand headlines.
It's a revolution in education.
And at some point, we like that.
It gets people onto the site.
It gets them engaged.
It's kind of validation.
But it risks oversimplifying it.
And I think a lot of people come back.
No, so there's no silver bullet.
There's no panacea here.
It's just a possible tool.
And that's something we agree with.
We're at the very early stage of what we're doing.
It's literally two years since we got our first funding.
We're 36 people.
We're not a big organization.
And we're constantly iterating on top of that.
So yeah.
I think it's really healthy.
I think it's good that we're getting this feedback.
I call it.
ERIC SCHMIDT: So the current breadth of your classes is
what largely analytical subjects.
And you're sort of jumping a little bit
into first year college.
Where does it go, from a content perspective, over the
next five years?
What is your ambition?
SALMAN KHAN: So on the video side, it's already quite
comprehensive.
The videos actually go into even the financial crisis or
the Greek credit crisis, things like that.
I want to do a full MBA curriculum.
We actually have a gentleman who's a--
ERIC SCHMIDT: Did you hear that?
OK.
How long will it take you to do a full MBA curriculum?
I think you have an MBA.
SALMAN KHAN: Yes.
Yes, so I have a sense.
ERIC SCHMIDT: So you spent two years doing an MBA.
How long will it take you to do--
SALMAN KHAN: And I'll be fair.
I mean the informational part of an MBA curriculum.
There won't be the pub crawls and all of that.
No, I'm kidding.
What actually is really good-- and I cite that in the book,
about what's really good about business school is that is
actually isn't about information delivery.
It's actually about you show up to class to engage.
And you have these conversations.
And so yes.
You do learn a little bit of accounting and finance.
But the more important thing is you get all this experience
from your class and from the professors.
But yeah, when I say that, I'm saying Capital Markets,
Corporate Finance, Basic Accounting.
The tools that an MBA would have, I think would take about
a semester.
ERIC SCHMIDT: So what's the sort of event horizon?
Are you going to teach literature?
Are you going to teach fine arts?
Where's the limit of your model?
SALMAN KHAN: So I'm probably not going to be the person to
teach these things.
I might make a cameo, every now and then.
We actually have two art historians who are already
making videos.
They've made 300 videos.
And I actually was speaking at the Crest Foundation.
They're very big sponsors of art history.
And actually, I think we might be as influential on the
museum side of things.
The Google Art Project, our two art historians were two of
the primary voices on that.
And they have more credible credentials than I do.
One was a senior person in art history at the Pratt.
And one was at the MoMA.
And so they've made some incredible art history videos.
I've done a few history videos.
We're thinking about how could we do more things in the
humanities.
And a really interesting thing is how do we do the
interactive portion in the humanities?
It's one thing to do videos.
But we really want to do interactive
content, across the board.
And I think our computer science, ironically, is kind
of the direction that we would go in.
Our computer science platform--
you can go code.
You get feedback.
But you save a portfolio of your work,
just like any artist.
You would create a portfolio of you work.
You get feedback from everyone else.
Eventually, people would be able to rate your stuff.
And so we imagine doing the same thing for writing
assignments or for poetry.
Or you can even compose music on the site.
And then, other people can rate how good that music is
and give you feedback.
ERIC SCHMIDT: Your computer science app is an example
where you actually have little JavaScript programming
activities.
So that's a variation of your model already.
SALMAN KHAN: Yeah, exactly.
I mean, we're not just about videos.
We're not just about those original interactive exercise,
which we continue to build.
Computer science was to show we're serious about really
deepening the level of learning that
you can have here.
And it's not just lectures on computer science.
It's actually a project-y environment, where you can
fiddle around and play with things.
ERIC SCHMIDT: For everybody's benefit, I think many people
don't understand how much a role Google has played in a
lot of this movement.
And I'd let everybody know.
Because I'm very, very proud.
In the typical sort of Google, bottom-up kind of way, without
a lot of coordination, the following things occurred.
Peter Norvig and Sebastian Thrun catalyzed the entire
large educational thing, with a series of AI classes and so
forth, down at Stanford, at the university level.
We've been working with Coursera and helped her and
that whole team get going, at Stanford.
Of course, we helped you, financially.
And you were going to do well without us.
But we helped maybe a little bit.
We've done a bunch of these open courses on search and
developer things, for our kind of technical audiences.
And we're getting some experience with all of these.
We, of course, are quite horizontal, in terms of
infrastructure and so forth, for our kinds of things.
What do you think that the sum of you--
you and the five other very, in my
view, courageous groups--
how would you rate where you are?
It's only been a couple of years.
SALMAN KHAN: Yeah, and actually, the MOOC world,
these Massively Open Online Courses, this is very new.
I think those first courses were last year.
ERIC SCHMIDT: 150,000 students, and
universities go crazy.
They're not quite sure what to do about this.
People just love the information.
SALMAN KHAN: And I think there's some
really exciting stuff.
And actually, it should probably rewind back to--
I guess you'd call it web 1.0, in the late '90s.
people were thinking about online ed from then.
MIT, I think, was the first to step out and do
OpenCourseWare.
And to large degree, that inspired Khan Academy.
Khan Academy came out and said, look, there's a lot of
traction here, if the form factor is right, if it's
digestible chunks, if there's interactivity to it.
And that's been cited as inspiring some of this next
wave, Coursera, Udacity.
And also edX, MIT and Harvard are doing, and Berkeley.
ERIC SCHMIDT: Do you think that, 10 years from now, this
will all be old hat?
How much does it change, over the next decade?
This is version one.
Presumably version two, version three, version four,
of your work and their work, is quite different.
SALMAN KHAN: I think there's going to be elements of what
we're already seeing 10 years from now, but I think it will
be dramatically different.
I think what's going to be really exciting about 10 years
from now is that all of these things are going to--
right now, all of them are on the learning side.
Education is this mix of things.
It's not just learning.
It's the main focus of education.
But it's also socialization.
And it's credentialing.
And right now, all of them are tackling the learning side.
Some of these MOOCs are giving these certificates.
But they're not mainstream credentials that have economic
value or they're authenticated.
This MOOC stuff has been great for us.
Because we're like, OK, we're doing this asynchronous model,
where people can jump in.
If they want a full narrative, they can chain them together.
There's a community.
And we're able to reach--
we're at close to 7 million uniques right now per month.
But they're doing something slightly different.
They're doing a synchronous model,
which is around a classroom.
It creates these cohort effects.
ERIC SCHMIDT: It's a much more structured classroom model
than using the virtual.
SALMAN KHAN: But the 100,000, or sometimes 20,000 to 30,000
who finish, they're deeply, deeply, deeply engaged.
And they feel like they're part of something.
And so we're learning a lot by observing them.
I think it's going back.
We're saying, how can we get the best of that.
And I think they're saying, well, how can we get the best
of the asynchronous.
I think you're going to see things like Khan Academy where
you could take flights together.
Hey, there's a trip on algebra at this pace.
I think the different pacing is important because people
have other stuff to do in their life.
Or they just learn differently.
There's a cohort of 100 people leaving tomorrow.
You want to join?
If there's enough people, there could be a whole cohort
with 10 minutes.
ERIC SCHMIDT: To travel there.
SALMAN KHAN: Exactly.
And then you have that cohort effect.
ERIC SCHMIDT: I think the biggest thing we haven't
talked about is your impact internationally.
Google, of course, funded the localization work.
And you're busy expanding that to many different languages.
It must be very satisfying to feel that people who literally
have no textbooks are really reliant on you.
SALMAN KHAN: It's been incredible.
We've been doing this translation
project for a while.
And obviously, people have been consuming it
in English, as well.
And there's been these NGOs who have been taking the
content and at least just the video content, putting it on
DVDs and thumb drives and taking it into villages and
whatever else.
But the translation, we've just surfaced a lot of the
videos that were done, primarily funded with that
initial Google grant.
If you go to the bottom of any of the Khan Academy pages on
the footer, there's a little drop-down.
It says English.
You drop down.
There is, I think, 900 videos in Spanish, close to that in
Portuguese.
Arabic, Bengali, Hindi, Urdu, Russian, French.
And so we're starting to get the international side.
And probably the best story that we've heard, there's a
group from Cisco Systems who have been going and installing
computers with broadband in orphanages throughout Asia.
And they set up one in this orphanage in Mongolia.
And there's this 16-year-old girl, Zaya, who's started
using it on her own, super brilliant.
We've talked to them about Zaya.
And she's now our prime translator into
the Mongolian language.
ERIC SCHMIDT: My God, out of the orphanage.
SALMAN KHAN: Yeah, this is straight out of
like Diamond Age.
ERIC SCHMIDT: Wow.
The book is The One World Schoolhouse.
And it's coming out in the next week?
SALMAN KHAN: No, it came out Tuesday.
ERIC SCHMIDT: Tuesday, so it's just coming out.
We have it in the back.
And you're going to do a Google Hangout for us on the
17th, right?
SALMAN KHAN: That's right.
ERIC SCHMIDT: To try to promote this.
I think it'd be interesting, with this kind of an audience,
to ask people for their questions or comments on this
or anything else.
I hope you all understand why I think this may be the most
important person we meet, over the next
year or two, Sal Khan.
Go ahead.
AUDIENCE: By the way, just let me say thank you.
My daughter, actually, 3--
3 and 1/2 years ago, started using some of your stuff, when
she was in high school.
And it was great.
ERIC SCHMIDT: And is this because it was supplements?
AUDIENCE: Yeah.
There were questions.
She'd actually transferred from England.
I wasn't happy.
And she wasn't happy with what she'd learned in that school
system coming into the school system here.
And she was able to catch up on some things she didn't
understand by using Khan Academy.
It was marvelous.
There wasn't an alternative.
But let me ask a question here.
So the whole flipped classroom idea is a fascinating one.
And I think it's going to turn out to be a very important, as
we've already seen.
But I wonder if there isn't another kind of flipping that
we can do here, and a really important one.
The process that your system enables, essentially allowing
everybody to move at their own pace and then with the various
testing and monitoring systems, essentially sort of
getting us to the point where we can pretty much be sure
that if somebody goes in the program and stays in the
program, they will come out, after some amount of time,
knowing at least some minimum.
We'll be able just pretty much say, here's a goal.
Everybody's going to get at least that far.
Some may go farther.
But everybody should at least get so far, which is not the
way the systems work today.
But this introduces, I think, an interesting opportunity to
switch things.
And that is switching the grading or
switching the measuring.
Today, what we do is we focus a lot on measuring the kids,
the students, determining whether or
not they're any good.
But if we have a process that pretty much says that if you
follow the process, everybody gets to the same point, unless
there's something fundamentally wrong, it seems
that we ought to be flipping the grading and focusing more
on testing and grading the teaching system.
Because we know what the end result
will be for the students.
The students will all know the stuff.
The question now is, how effective is the teaching
system at getting them.
How quickly can I get them there?
How pleasant can I get them there?
So can we see, in the future, a flipping in the testing,
away from testing the students to testing the system?
SALMAN KHAN: Well, I think there will be interesting
things there.
Because you get a much richer data narrative, Pierre, where
it's not even just snapshot assessments of the students.
You can actually see how they're progressing.
You can statistically say, oh, these are similar cohorts.
This one seems to be progressing faster.
What are the variables that are--
or maybe, we haven't identified all the variables
that are different.
What are they?
And how could we make other cohorts perform the same?
On assessing, we haven't given deep thought to that.
But I guess it would be possible.
It brings up something that, early on, one of my friends
threw out, which at first seems like a
really crazy idea.
But when we thought about it, why not.
He's like, well, we should have up outcome-based tuition,
where instead of based on how a year, if we can get you to
this level of competency, you'll
pay 18 years of tuition.
And they're all better off because it
only took three years.
But it does lead to that interesting thing.
And to the first part of your comment about the flipping,
which in the book I talk about, we could go even
further than that.
The flip is still kind of within this Prussian model
that we inherited from a country that does not exist,
this assembly line model.
You literally put these students in these age batches.
It's literally an assembly line.
We don't think of it that way, but they're
moving at a set pace.
At every station, something is applied to them, a little bit.
It gets different grades.
And at different points, it's like, oh,
that's a good cranberry.
That's a bad cranberry.
And that's going to be for Whole Foods or whatever.
And that's going to go someplace else.
And we're saying this is silly.
Just get to that outcome where everything is a good outcome.
But yeah, I think that, in the near term, what I'm most
excited about, in terms of real-- and I think this is
actually going to happen, when we talk about five, 10 years.
It's the first sign that the cracks are
emerging in the old model.
But everyone's improving.
I think everyone, across the board, is fundamentally
questioning should they be giving a
lecture anymore, finally.
I was on a panel with John Hennessy of Stanford.
And we hadn't talked about it or anything.
But he onstage said, look, we're seriously looking at
whether we really need to give any lectures anymore.
It's not that they're going to say people
shouldn't gather together.
But when they gather together, it shouldn't just be like
taking notes.
And you don't know the other people in the room.
It should be interacting with each other.
It should be getting help from the professor in the TAs and
everybody else.
AUDIENCE: So teaching would no longer be a performance art?
ERIC SCHMIDT: Yeah.
SALMAN KHAN: Unless you have a YouTube channel.
ERIC SCHMIDT: I would encourage you to consult the
leader of the Chicago Teachers Union, as to timing.
Yes, sir.
AUDIENCE: It's very impressive, of course, what
you've done.
I had two questions.
The first is, your point about being able to look at remedial
stuff is great.
In your videos, do you have pop-ups or overlays that show
the topics that students might want to read up on, during
that topic?
Like when you're doing algebra and adding fractions with
unknowns, is there a quick link to
get to adding fractions?
SALMAN KHAN: The problem [INAUDIBLE].
And this is something that-- so the simple answer is yes.
And then, the more complex answer is, we think it's not
ideal, the way the site is set up right now.
The videos kind of took a life of their-- in the old days,
actually the videos were there to
complement the problem sets.
So the way I viewed it is, this thing generates
problems for you.
It can give you hints, if you need it.
And if you really need it, you might need a video.
Because I used to say, hey, the hints are probably good
enough for you.
That's how I used to tutor my cousins.
Give them a problem, if they had a little trouble, I'd give
them a little intuition or a little hint.
And then later, the videos took a life of their own.
And then later, when we got resources, we started
investing again in the problem generator.
And so our problem has been the
connections and the narrative.
And where do people go?
And we're starting to do that curation process.
You can do it already.
Both already exist.
And there are linkages.
They're not ideal right now.
What we're launching to kind of get the best of the MOOC
world and the asynchronous world is we're
calling them tutorials.
So a tutorial, in our mind, is not a semester commitment.
It's a collection of things that is roughly a one-hour to
one-week commitment, that's around an idea, like
photosynthesis or entropy or whatever it might be.
It'll be video, video, exercise; computer science
simulation; video, video, exercise; community or
open-ended thing.
And so yeah, the goal is exactly that.
But things like fractions already are connected.
If you do the fraction exercises,
the videos are there.
The video is there with the fraction exercises.
ERIC SCHMIDT: Yes, sir.
AUDIENCE: So thanks for a great interview.
To expand on one of the previous questions, one of the
biggest impacts a teacher can have on students is not
delivering information but to inspire them, to actually make
them interested in the subject.
How do you envision your work helping them do that?
SALMAN KHAN: There's a couple of dimensions here.
On the simplest dimension, what we saw a Los Altos even
two years ago, is we did it just by giving them
the room to do it.
You take that lecture out of the room.
And you actually take a lot of the administration out of the
room in terms of grading homework.
And you take that out of the room, Now> all of the sudden,
the teacher has what they want to do with the classroom.
And some of those teachers that we worked with were
incredible.
They had a list of things that they really wanted to do.
They were doing these really interesting
projects that were inspiring.
They were like, for the first time, I'm able to spend some
time with every student in the classroom.
Literally, just talking to someone on a personal level is
inspiring them, as opposed to being distant from them.
But on top of that, we do realize--
we've been saying, class time should be used for
interaction.
It should be used for projects.
Projects are not a trivial thing.
It's very easy to have bad projects, cookbook projects.
And so that's why we wanted to put resources into this
computer science.
Because it's so general.
It can be used in anything.
I just made a video for--
LeBron James literally reached out and said, I want to help
make math videos.
ERIC SCHMIDT: This never happens.
SALMAN KHAN: This never happens.
ERIC SCHMIDT: It's like the fifth
thing that never happens.
SALMAN KHAN: This is the fifth thing that never happens.
ERIC SCHMIDT: Did he call you?
Or did you call him?
SALMAN KHAN: No, he called us.
I mean, his people called my people.
[LAUGHTER]
SALMAN KHAN: But he asked these interesting questions
related to math.
One of them is, you have 30 seconds left, down by three.
Is it better to shoot the three or take the two, foul,
hope for another possession?
ERIC SCHMIDT: These are problems that have occupied
him for some time.
SALMAN KHAN: Well, it a core problem.
And it's funny.
Because at first, I was like, I'm going to
make a video for it.
And I started doing a decision tree for it.
And actually, there's a second scenario that gets quite
complicated, based on the did they make one free--
how much time went off the clock, and all that.
I said, I have this great computer science tool now.
So I did a Monte Carlo simulation, for LeBron James.
ERIC SCHMIDT: This has also never happened.
SALMAN KHAN: This has also never happened.
But it's exciting.
Because then, we've gotten all these letters
from very young kids.
A Monte Carlo simulation is a very simple thing, actually.
And immediately, it started sparking their imagination
about a million different things.
There's so much sports statistics out there.
You could leverage those sports statistics.
And now that you have a pretty easy-to-use coding platform to
do some really, really interesting kind decision
analysis, and frankly, stuff that I don't think even some
of the people in the head offices of some of the sports
teams have actually done.
ERIC SCHMIDT: Go ahead.
AUDIENCE: So you've done some amazing things helping people
actually learn stuff.
And that's mostly what schools do.
But they do one other thing that's important, which is
they certify that this person has a reasonable knowledge of
this topic.
I was wondering if you had an thoughts on fixing or
improving the system of standardized testing.
SALMAN KHAN: Yeah.
Really, what you're talking about is credentialing.
How do people prove to the world that they've learned
something now that there are all these great resources to
actually learn?
And I think there's a bunch of interesting things here.
I mean there's a big movement.
And a lot of these things have always been out there.
People have talked about it.
But now, there seems to be some traction.
It's generally called competency-based learning,
instead of it being based literally on seat time.
And then, you just get promoted.
Look, you can take as long as you need.
And when you feel you're ready, you go
take a proctored exam.
It should be a rich exam.
It could be even an oral exam.
And you prove that you actually know it.
And I frankly think that's going to be especially
powerful at the higher education level.
And one thing that I'm particularly excited about--
and I'd be interested in collaborating with any of you
all that want to work on something like this--
I think computer sciences is actually the
ripest fruit there.
Because we hire on a much smaller scale than you guys.
But we are also looking for incredible people.
And when we look GPAs, great universities, it's a filter.
And we probably have a lot of false negatives.
There's a lot of great people.
John Resig, he's the world's most known JavaScript
programmer, wrote jQuery.
In his cover letter, he literally wrote I started
jQuery project or whatever.
And I was like, I guess we should interview him.
But later, I asked him.
I said, where did you go to school?
He said, Rochester.
I said, oh, that's a good school.
But what was your GPA?
1.9.
ERIC SCHMIDT: He was too busy programming in JavaScript.
SALMAN KHAN: It might have been 2.0.
Don't quote me.
I think it was 1.9 or 2.0.
It might have been a little bit higher.
But it was not a resume that would typically make the cut
at a Google or Khan Academy.
But it pointed to me what's wrong with our process.
He's an off-the-charts brilliant guy, fun to work
with, everything.
What happened?
He said, well, I was working on jQuery.
And so we're missing those people, unless they do
something really off-the-charts,
like what he did.
And so I think there should be independent processes.
And then, when you go and actually get an interview
here, we all make you go to the whiteboard and write
bubble sort.
Or how to do sort this?
Or how do you find the edge of this boundary or whatever.
And it's inconsistent.
Some are hard.
And some are easy.
There might be some great people who just having anxiety
coding at a white board while someone's watching them.
And so I think there is something that could be done
where people go take maybe a proctored, or at least
authenticated, series of challenges.
And that's used as really a credential or a filter, for
people like us to see where talent is.
ERIC SCHMIDT: Did you have a question?
AUDIENCE: Hi, Sal.
Thanks for everything you do.
So at Google, we get to work with a lot of great teachers
who are forward-thinking and not afraid of your model, not
afraid of employing the flipped classroom and being
more of a guide on the side.
But there are a ton of teachers who are afraid of
what you're doing.
They feel like if this happens, they're all going to
take away our jobs.
And they're the gate keepers to the kids.
So how do you reach those teachers?
And how do you reach, by extension, those kids?
SALMAN KHAN: I think the main point is kind of-- actually,
that was one of the main hopes of this book, to make it clear
that it's not about--
because, as was talked about before, teaching was viewed as
a performance art before.
And so it was kind of ingrained in people that's
where the value was.
And to kind of, I think, get more people thinking in this
direction is for everyone to realize that isn't
where the value is.
And this isn't just lip service.
The value really is on working deeply with students,
mentoring them, forming connections with them.
And I think when you phrase it that way, most
teachers really get it.
And whenever I talk to people, this isn't an assault on you.
I think, unfortunately, most of the public debate is an
assault on teachers.
And they group them all together.
And they make all sorts of sweeping statements.
This is an assault on a system that has been
constraining you.
It's whenever people get worried.
The US is right behind Estonia when it comes to factoring
polynomials.
All going to fall apart now.
The reaction from government is, let's put
more tests on it.
And there is a rationale to that.
And it might de-risk some of the worst performing
situations.
But it also completely handicaps everyone else.
And it makes our system, frankly, more Prussian.
It makes it more rigid, more controlled.
And everything that we're trying to promote-- and this
is what I tell every teacher.
And I think when they understand that, they get
really excited about it.
It's about going back to the teacher really being able to
define the experience in really interesting, creative
ways but have tools that make sure that the academic rigor
is still being achieved.
You know, when I was a tutoring my cousins, this is
what I wanted.
There's all sorts of fun stuff I want to do with my cousins.
I want to teach them about a Monte Carlo simulation.
But at the same time, I also want to make sure that they're
reaching certain achievement goals.
And so I can keep track of that asynchronously.
I can manage the chaos so to speak.
ERIC SCHMIDT: Yes, sir.
AUDIENCE: Thank you.
This is inspiring.
And it's inspiring to the extent that I've taken on a
challenge to really change the way that I do a little bit of
my own teaching.
I have taught a citizen schools class,
for some time now--
since before I got to Google, actually--
trying to teach sixth graders computer science and algebra
at the same time, since the
fundamentals are really together.
SALMAN KHAN: There's some good tools for that now, too.
AUDIENCE: Really very core--
And in particular, to try to motivate them with gaming
context, creating video games.
The challenge that I have, that's not so much like the
normal classroom challenge, is the kids have to be really
motivated on their own.
Because there's no credit.
There's no nothing.
This is an after school activity.
If they're going to watch anything at home, they have to
do it because they want to.
And two is I don't know that some of these kids from the
Bronx have tools at home with which to go and view videos,
to go and play with the computers, et cetera.
One, I'd like to sort of ask your advice on those kinds of
challenges.
But also I'd like to ask your advice really on just how to
prepare videos that are that engaging for
a sixth grade audience.
What are the things I should be paying attention to?
SALMAN KHAN: I'll take the first.
In terms of access issues, that's a real issue.
There has even been a few charter schools where the
school was able to get laptops or computing
devices to the students.
But then, they get beat up on the way home and someone takes
it from them.
And so the near-term solution seems to be keep the school
open a little bit longer, have a computer lab, partner with
the Boys & Girls Club, someplace where
they can access it.
I mean, which is essentially saying it's actually hard for
them to be able to access it at home.
But that's OK.
They're accessing it.
And actually, that serves a double purpose.
And I write a lot about that.
It's crazy that school ends two hours before
parents come home.
It actually fills in that gap, especially where both parents
are working.
And so it also solves that need.
In terms of the motivation, I think you're right.
One thing I write about is getting rid of summer-- summer
vacation, not summer.
I like the season.
But getting rid of summer vacation.
And immediately, the people's rational, that's when I did my
most like creative stuff, really self-directed things.
Those are my best memories from childhood.
And when I point out those best memories, and a lot of
people just waste their summer.
But if you're lucky enough to have those experiences, that's
actually what your full school day should look like.
It should be much more--
you set your goals.
But you have mentors who are restructuring them--
really how a lot of environments
like this might work--
who are pushing you forward.
So there's not a simple solution, while
there's this hybrid.
While there's this separate thing, where it's like, if you
don't pass this test tomorrow, you're going to fail.
And there's all these repercussions.
And you're trying to do something interesting.
And it gets squeezed out, even though the students are
probably more motivated to do what your working on.
It's probably more important for them in
the long term, too.
But it's hard.
In terms of the videos themselves, this is the thing
I famously have gotten in a little trouble on a couple of
networks where I say-- well, I sometimes don't know what I'm
going to say before I make a video.
They say, oh, my God, how irresponsible.
That video is going to reach millions of people.
And I think what I was saying is that the video itself
should really be coming from you.
It should be really you thinking out loud.
It should be very conversational.
It shouldn't be scripted.
There are people actually who do good scripted videos.
They're able to read it very naturally, in a quirky way.
But my style is more conversational, down-to-earth,
thinking it through out loud.
But I do put a lot of time on the preparation, in terms of
thinking it through, just doing it in my mind.
ERIC SCHMIDT: Let's try to sort of speed
this up a little bit.
Yes, ma'am.
SALMAN KHAN: Just as one minor point, if there are a couple
of people who want to join us, it would be awesome.
We need one or two more.
ERIC SCHMIDT: Go ahead.
AUDIENCE: Hi.
So we had a chuckle about the Chicago teachers' union
reference, but between the teachers' unions and the
educational institutions, there are some serious
roadblocks in the system.
You're a small team of folks.
So I'm wondering how we, as parents and good community
citizens, can help further the cause of education reform.
SALMAN KHAN: I think we have been a grassroots
word-of-mouth story, like Eric introduced.
And so I think the more of that we get, the better.
I mean nothing is more powerful than one parent
telling another parent, or one student telling another
student, and one teacher telling another teacher, or
one parent telling a teacher.
So I actually think we are going to be a teacher and
parent-led grassroots thing.
So for us, I would just say more awareness.
ERIC SCHMIDT: Systems never self-reform.
It's a bad lesson of life.
They don't self-reform.
It requires external pressure.
So my blunt answer is the educational system is run for
the benefit of the adults and not the
children, in aggregate.
And that it's our responsibility as parents to
get that fixed, somehow.
Yes, sir.
AUDIENCE: I just want to say first
thanks so much for coming.
You're a huge inspiration to me.
And it's great to have people like you here at Google.
Before I started at Google, I was an educational consultant.
And one of things we really promoted was the use of
Chromebooks with Khan Academy as a cheap, effective way to
have an effective learning suite.
And the teachers were really into it.
Where we ran into problems was the actual institution itself
because schools get money from government, based on test
score results, et cetera.
What are the reforms that you think need to happen?
What do you think is the timeline?
Just help please.
SALMAN KHAN: I'm not an expert on the structural architecture
of what might keep--
there's weird things about things being
blocked or laptop carts.
And there's a lot times where we're like,
look, this is obvious.
You don't even need one laptop,
necessarily, per child.
Because they're not using them the whole day.
So there's some way that maybe two or three
could share one laptop.
But there's a lot of weird structural things about how
it's organized.
I'm not an expert here.
I think the best way is to really show exemplars that are
doing it really, really well.
ERIC SCHMIDT: And I want to thank the Chrome team for the
donation that you and the other members made.
It actually made a nice, big difference for the
Chromebooks.
And obviously, we'll be doing more of that.
AUDIENCE: I'm not on Chrome, but--
ERIC SCHMIDT: Well, thank you.
SALMAN KHAN: Thank you for what you do.
ERIC SCHMIDT: Let's run a little quickly.
Go ahead.
Yes, ma'am.
AUDIENCE: I'm from a rural town in South Carolina, and
I've been trying to find ways to improve the
school system there.
And I've looked into things like KIPP, but they require
just a complete overhaul.
And I was wondering--
they do have sort of a training process for how to do
this in places.
And I was wondering if, in implementing Khan within the
school, are you looking at having a training program for
how that this can be done and spread?
SALMAN KHAN: Yeah.
So we do have a team that is interfacing with schools,
learning from schools.
Their feedback comes back to our product.
But then, on top of that, they document what is working.
If you go to khanacademy.org/toolkit,
that's where it's kind of the place for teachers or anyone
who's going to be a coach really.
You run an after school program, or anything, how they
could use it.
ERIC SCHMIDT: She's exactly right.
You need to have a little subsection which is how to
implement this if you're the school.
SALMAN KHAN: No, that's right.
ERIC SCHMIDT: It needs to have that as its
title, just do this.
SALMAN KHAN: Exactly, step one, step two--
so we're trying to do as much as possible self-service.
And then, they also do run workshops.
ERIC SCHMIDT: Yes, sir.
AUDIENCE: Our education system, on all levels, is full
of really good teachers and also really bad teachers.
Have you considered reaching out to those exceptional
teachers, who actually reach out to students, who say, oh
wow, I love learning this stuff.
This guy makes it make sense to me?
Have you considered reaching out to these teachers saying,
OK, this is the guy who should teach biochemistry?
This is the guy who should teach maybe some subject that
you're not an expert in, something like that?
SALMAN KHAN: Are there any?
No.
There are many, most.
The simple answer is yes, absolutely.
So there's been a couple of short term
things that we're doing.
One, we do have this contest.
The close was October 2.
And we're in the process of kind of reviewing this Next
EDU Guru, with YouTube, which is to find--
I think it's gotten several hundreds of applicants.
So hopefully, we find some interesting people there.
And on our side, on our platform, one of the goals is
this platform has been built around my content and now a
few other people--
Vi Hart, and we have our art historians--
but it can be a generalized platform.
And so we want to allow, hopefully in the next six
months, anyone to start creating
tutorials on our site.
And then, maybe we can start to recognize the tutorials
that are resonating with people and maybe bring them
into the fold.
ERIC SCHMIDT: Let's have these be the last two questions.
Yes, sir.
AUDIENCE: First, thank you.
Khan Academy is the reason that my wife passed physics.
SALMAN KHAN: Oh, tell her to make a YouTube testimonial.
I'll put it in the slide deck.
AUDIENCE: I actually will.
SALMAN KHAN: No, I'm serious.
ERIC SCHMIDT: By the way, that's wonderful.
SALMAN KHAN: Yeah, yeah.
That's incredible.
ERIC SCHMIDT: That's wonderful.
Go ahead.
SALMAN KHAN: When you talk about the Prussian model, the
assembly line model of education and that the Khan
Academy tools free up educators to abstract away
that portion of things so that they can focus on interesting
projects and so on, how would you respond to the worry that,
if all the education system is interested in is that assembly
line aspect, they could replace the
entire school system?
You mentioned that there's a significant worry that
educators have that the entire teaching industry could--
we're all going to lose our jobs and so forth.
And completely divorced from any intentions that you have,
That by providing this really, really useful and wonderful
tool, this could be a negative impact.
How would you address that?
SALMAN KHAN: I actually think that's a fascinating question.
It's something we've thought about.
It's interesting because people always say, what about
this accrediting body.
And this is what the universities care about.
And this is what the state standards are, and all this.
But if you really think openly about the whole ecosystem, the
end consumer of whatever the system is are the Googles of
the world, are the Facebooks of the world, are the Goldman
Sachs, are the hospitals of the world, I mean the firms of
the world are the ones who are consuming it.
And I think they've, if anything, been screaming for--
yes, we want people that have shown competency in algebra
and have good SAT scores.
Yes, that's one dimension.
But I think all of you recognize that we are looking
for people who are capable of actually creating things.
And our current system--
this is the biggest problem.
We interview people with straight A GPAs from the top
universities.
And we say, what have you made?
And they haven't made anything because they were too busy
getting the really good GPA.
They're smart people.
They're capable, but they didn't do it.
And so I think the fact if we collectively, as an ecosystem,
start demanding-- and we are demanding it--
then these will be valued.
And there's two dimensions.
One dimension is the academic achievement
that's already there.
And I think, even there, the human component will always be
super, super important.
I mean, we can do one thing maybe for very
self-motivated student.
Just purely with virtual, they could do a lot.
But having peers in your classroom to bounce ideas off
and work with and having teachers that can mentor that
will only supercharge that even more.
But the other two dimensions which I think are equally or
more important than that, that are not measured today, are
how good are you at mentoring others and explaining to
others and having empathy for others.
And we can actually start to assess that, with peer-to-peer
review, ratings, how much time you're putting it
on behalf of others.
And that, hopefully, will be another kind of SAT score of
the future.
Another thing would be dimensions like perseverance.
Because now you have a data narrative.
It's not just a snapshot assessment.
You had trouble.
But did you persevere?
To some degree, I might want the kid who took two months to
learn negative numbers because he persevered, as opposed to
the person who just got it like that.
And the last dimension is a portfolio of creative works.
ERIC SCHMIDT: Thank you.
And our final question.
AUDIENCE: So you briefly mentioned internationalization
and translation.
I know it might be hard to get numbers or
information from here.
But what have you seen in terms of rural areas or areas
in the developing world where there might not be a classroom
or there might not be teachers?
Are you getting good usage there?
How is that changing things in those locations?
SALMAN KHAN: Yeah, what's hard there is that's obviously hard
to measure because a lot of those are offline.
But anecdotally, there's a lot of NGOs who are going out
there and taking the content.
And they tell us.
And they take pictures.
And that's all we can tell now.
What will be exciting, over the next four or five years,
as the broadband or at least some level-- it doesn't have
to be broadband.
It could be very low but at least enough to keep track of
what's going on.
For the last 100 years, people have wanted to set up schools
in a village.
And no one has any idea of what's happening.
I think what's exciting is, in the next five years, people
will start to know what's happening.
How are people engaging with the content?
ERIC SCHMIDT: My final question for you is-- we have
all of Google here and through our video conference, as you
know, around the company.
And obviously, Google is a huge supporter of what you're
doing for all the reasons that you see from the questions.
What is the list of things that Google could do that
would make you even more successful?
Obviously, continue the success of YouTube.
We're wiring up Kansas City.
Maybe even wire up some other cities.
SALMAN KHAN: We use App Engine.
ERIC SCHMIDT: You use App Engine.
Excellent, any complaints about App Engine?
SALMAN KHAN: No.
So far, so good.
ERIC SCHMIDT: So far, so good.
What are some other things Google could
do to support you?
SALMAN KHAN: I don't know how frank I should be on this.
There's a lot.
But I think awareness is a huge thing.
That's hopefully an easy thing.
I think feedback.
I think there are ways that we could work together.
I think some of these things like creating credentialing
architecture.
I think that's a game changer, if we could do it together.
And obviously, if we have people like Google, one, to
help develop the credentials themselves--
ERIC SCHMIDT: And we have a project called Course Builder,
which is underlying infrastructure.
So you might argue that would be an extension of a Course
Builder-type project.
SALMAN KHAN: And the course builds on the learning.
But this is really like, OK, even if you didn't get a CS
degree from anywhere.
This is something that-- if you get through this series of
things, Google will take a serious look at you.
Other software companies will take a serious look at you.
If you do, the rest of the ecosystem will as well.
ERIC SCHMIDT: We could sort of set that standard.
And then, everybody else would follow.
SALMAN KHAN: Every other company in the world would
take it seriously.
ERIC SCHMIDT: What do you want the parents or future parents
in this room to do to change the school systems?
Because most of these people in front of you don't really
have a school choice.
They have a public school.
They may or may not have access to a charter school.
SALMAN KHAN: As before, I think it's parents telling
parents, raising awareness.
If you each of you went and told 100 people, it would be a
pretty epic in terms of the awareness that's happening.
On top of that, I think there could be an element of, if you
can, talk to teachers that are in your
child's life about this.
And tell them this isn't about replacing you.
This is really, I think, something you're going enjoy.
ERIC SCHMIDT: And address their fears.
SALMAN KHAN: Address their fears.
ERIC SCHMIDT: Their fears are all obvious.
And I think we've discussed them.
SALMAN KHAN: Yeah.
And I think anything you can do to kind of
push people's thinking.
Show examples of what can happen.
Maybe you could self organize and make your own little
boutique school that really pushes the envelope of things,
but any of the above.
ERIC SCHMIDT: So the book of course is The One World
Schoolhouse coming out two days ago.
Not only have I read it, I've endorsed it.
You should read it, too.
Thank you very much, my true hero, Sal Khan.