This is the real joining of
teaching and technology. Without any
particular forethought, Khan simply made it work with his first student and
then chose to give it away on U-tube. What
he really did was to allow the student to absorb a unit of knowledge from the
best teacher available and then allowed the real teacher to work with the
student to implement the problem set associated with this bite of knowledge.
The program has begun in the
first several grades and can be readily extended into successive grades.
What has not been recognized yet
is that while the bottom third will be readily chivvied into making the extra
effort to keep up with the herd, and that is fantastic news, it also allows the
top third to stretch their legs and to speed up the learning pace. This is important because I suspect that we
will see far more crossing over between grades although it will take clever
work on the scheduling problem.
Talented children really need to
move ahead swiftly if it can be arranged without imposing too much of a social stress
on them as they shift back and forth between age groups.
In this environment, the teacher
becomes both a resource and a problem fixer which is surely a better use of
that person’s time.
Expect extraordinary things from
out education system in the next generation.
March 11, 2012 7:11 PM
With the backing of Gates and Google, Khan Academy
and its free online educational videos are moving into the classroom and across
the world. Their goal: to revolutionize how we teach and learn. Sanjay Gupta
reports.
(CBS News)
Sal Khan is a math, science, and history teacher to millions of students, yet
none have ever seen his face. Khan is the voice and brains behind Khan Academy,
a free online tutoring site that may have gotten your kid out of an algebra
bind with its educational how-to videos. Now Khan Academy
is going global. Backed by Google, Gates, and other Internet powerhouses, Sal
Khan wants to change education worldwide, and his approach is already being
tested in some American schools. Sanjay Gupta reports.
The
following script is from "Teacher to the World" which aired on March
11, 2012. Sanjay Gupta is the correspondent. Denise Schrier Cetta, producer.
Matthew Danowski, editor.
Take a moment and remember your favorite
teacher - now imagine that teacher could reach, not 30 kids in a classroom, but
millions of students all over the world. That's exactly what Sal Khan is doing
on his website Khan
Academy . With its digital
lessons and simple exercises, he's determined to transform how we learn at
every level. One of his most famous pupils, Bill Gates, says Khan -- this
"teacher to the world," is giving us all a glimpse of the future of
education.
35-year-old Sal Khan may look like a bicycle
messenger, but with three degrees from MIT and an MBA from Harvard, his errand
is intensely intellectual. In his tiny office above a tea shop in Silicon Valley , he settles in to do what he's done
thousands of times before.
[Sal
Khan: We've talked a lot now about the demand curve and consumer surplus. Now
let's think about the supply curve.]
He's recording a 10-minute economics lesson.
It's so simple - all you hear is his voice and all you see is his colorful
sketches on a digital blackboard.
When Khan finishes the lecture, he uploads it
to his website - where it joins the more than 3,000 other lessons he's done. In
just a couple of years he's gone from having a few hundred pupils to more than
four million every month.
Sanjay Gupta: Has it sunk in to you that you
are probably the most watched teacher in the world now?
Khan: I, you know, I try not to say things
like that to myself. You don't want to think about it too much because it can I
think paralyze you a little bit.
[Khan:
So if we get rid of the percent sign, we move the decimal over...]
He's amassed a library of math lectures...
[Khan:
12 plus four is sixteen...]
Starting with basic addition and building all
the way through advanced calculus.
[Khan:
We are taking limited delta x approach to zero. It's the exact same thing.]
But he's not just a math wiz, he has this
uncanny ability to break down even the most complicated subjects, including
physics, biology, astronomy, history, medicine.
Gupta: How much reading do you do ahead of
time?
Khan: It depends what I'm doing. If I'm doing
something that I haven't visited for a long time, you know, since high school
I'll go buy five textbooks in it. And I'll try to read every textbook. I'll
read whatever I can find on the Internet.
[Khan:
Let's talk about one of the most important biological processes...]
Sal Khan has
tackled so many subjects that if you watched just one of his lectures a day it
would take over eight years to cover it all.
[Khan (lesson montage): These are huge time
scales...magnetic north is kind of the geographical...and let's say this is
point x is equal to, basic introduction...light, if this does not blow your
mind, then you have no emotion.]
Gupta: Did you
ever think about putting yourself visually in the video?
Khan: Look, if
there's a human face there, especially a funny looking human face, than it's
actually hard to focus on the math.
[Khan: 4,000 is 2,000 times three is 6,000...]
Khan: I don't have
to shave. I don't have to comb my hair. I just press record, make a video.
There might be spinach in my teeth, who cares.
Gupta: The format
is so simple. Why, does it appeal to so many people?
Khan: I've gotten
a lot of feedback that is really does feel like I, I'm sitting next to the
person and we're looking at the paper together.
[Khan: Let me take my trusty calculator out...]
Khan: I'm 95
percent of the time working through that problem real time. Or I'm thinking it
through myself if I'm explaining something. And to see that it is actually
sometimes a messy process. That, you know, it isn't always this clean process
where you just know the answer. I think that's what people like, the kind of
humanity there.
It all started in
2004 when Sal Khan was working as a hedge fund analyst in Boston and his cousin
Nadia, a 7th grader in New Orleans, was struggling with algebra. He agreed to
tutor her remotely and wound up posting lessons on YouTube. They helped Nadia,
but then an odd thing happened - total strangers started using them too.
Khan: I started
getting feedback like, "You know, my child has dyslexia, and this is the
only thing that's getting into him." I got letters from people saying,
"You know, we're praying for you and your family." That's pretty
heady stuff. People don't say that type of stuff to a hedge fund analyst
normally.
So in 2009, Khan
quit his job and working from a desk set up in his closet devoted himself full
time to Khan Academy . It's a non-profit with a simple
but audacious mission: "to provide a free, world-class education for
anyone, anywhere." If that goal sounds far-fetched for a guy working in
his closet, consider what happened next.
[Bill Gates:
There's a new website that I've just been using with my kids recently called Khan Academy .
K-h-a-n. Just one guy doing some unbelievable 15-minute tutorials.]
[Khan: I was like those are just for Nadia, not Bill Gates.
I have to look-- take a second look at some of this stuff.]
That's right, Bill
Gates, one of the smartest and richest men in the world, was using Sal Khan's
free videos to teach his own kids.
Khan: Two weeks
later I got a call from Larry Cohen who is Bill Gates' chief of staff. And he
says, you know, "You might have heard Bill's a fan." And I'm like
shaking. I'm like, "Yeah, I heard." You know. And he was like,
"If you have time, you know, love to fly you up to Seattle ." And then I was looking at my
calendar right then for the month. Completely blank. And I was like,
"Yeah, you know, I think I could, you know, fly in, you know, between like
laundry and a bath and meet with Bill."
That was just two
years ago. Today, with the help of more than $15 million in funding, much of it
from the Gates Foundation and Google, Khan has been able to hire with
competitive salaries some of the most talented engineers and designers in the
country. The Khan Academy office has the intense vibe of a Silicon Valley startup. The team is working to create
software they hope will transform how math is taught in American classrooms.
We visited a class
in the Los Altos school district outside San Francisco where the new Khan Academy
software is being piloted.
[Teacher Courtney Cadwell: Grab your computer, log in and
then open Khan Academy ...]
Right away you
notice something different. There are no textbooks and no teacher lecturing at
the blackboard. Instead, students watch Khan videos at home the night before to
learn a concept, then they come to class the next day and do problem sets
called "modules," to make sure they understand.
If they get stuck
they can get one-on-one help from the teacher. Less lecturing, more
interaction. What you think of as homework you do at school, and school work
you do at home. It's called "flipping the classroom" and 7th grader
Laurine Forget says using Khan
Academy at home has given
her math a big boost.
Laurine Forget:
I'm not a big fan of textbooks. I thought that Khan Academy
was a lot easier 'cause it's on a screen. It's easy to find the concept you
wanna do.
Gupta: And now
with the videos, do you find yourself rewinding it? Playing it again if you
need to?
Forget: A lot,
yeah.
Gupta: Do that at
home?
Forget: Yeah,
usually when I watch videos it's because I'm having trouble on the practices.
So if I don't understand the video, I can always rewind it or pause it so that
I can go back to the module and do what I learned.
Gupta: But what's
the hardest part about learning this way?
Forget: I don't
really think there is a hard part.
Even kids who
don't have a computer at home can "flip the classroom." Eastside Prep
in east Palo Alto keeps its computer labs open until 10 p.m. so kids like sixth
grader Alex Hernandez can take as much time as they need to learn a concept.
Alex Hernandez: My
mom, she went to school in Mexico .
Some things she can explain to me, but some like she can't. So like, I take
long to, like, try to finish my homework.
Gupta: How did you
used to do in math?
Hernandez: Pretty
bad. Like at a third grade level math. So, you know, Khan Academy
has helped me. It's like, opened doors that I couldn't open. It's helped a lot.
Gupta: A lot of
people have talked about the idea that "flipping the classroom" is
sort of what's happening here. You take a little bit of issue with that.
Khan: I kind of
view that as a step in the direction. The ideal direction is using something
like Khan Academy for every student to work at their own pace, to master
concepts before moving on, and then the teacher using Khan Academy as a tool so
that you can have a room of 20 or 30 kids all working on different things, but
you can still kind of administrate that chaos.
Khan academy has
created a dashboard so teachers like Courtney Cadwell can monitor each
student's progress.
Gupta: So right
now, they're all working on things. And you can see that real time?
Courtney Cadwell:
Yes.
Gupta: So as you
sit here and look at the dashboard, you see how the students are doing
individually, you can see how they're doing as a whole class, and you can
figure out who you need to help?
Cadwell: Exactly.
And here I can track their progress over time. I can see who's rushing ahead,
who's lagging behind. I can see if they begin to stagnate.
A blue bar
indicates a student knows a concept, orange - they're still working on it. But
if a red bar pops up...
Cadwell: It's kind
of the red flag to tell me, "Hey, it's time to step in and
intervene." And I can see...
Gupta: Oh, so you
can see, not only it's red, but specifically what the problem is.
Cadwell: What they
missed. And you can see the number of seconds they spent on each problem.
Cadwell: I feel
like I'm using my time more effectively with my students because instead of
making the assumption that the entire class is weak in this area, and I need to
spend time reviewing this, I can really pull those three, four, five kids, do a
mini-workshop, address those needs, and allow those other students to move on
to problem solving activities, or project-based learning with their peers.
So far the
National Education Association has supported nonprofit technology like Khan Academy
in the classroom, as long as teachers are trained properly. But as with any new
innovation, Khan says there are always some skeptics.
Khan: I've seen
some subset of teachers who say, "Oh, well, what is this video thing? You
know, live human interaction is important." And the reason why that
bothers me a little bit is that I know that's exactly what we're saying. In
fact, we exactly agree with you. That what we're trying to do is take the
passivity out of the classroom. So that you, as a teacher, will have more
flexibility.
Gupta: Does it
minimize the role of the teacher? Does it make it less impactful?
Khan: No, I think
it's the exact opposite. We kind of view teachers playing the role of more like
a coach or a mentor. Which, once again, I personally believe is a much higher
valued thing than a lecturer.
In the meantime
Chief Operating Officer Shantanu Sinha says they're gathering massive amounts
of data, not just from American classrooms, but from every Khan Academy
user around the world.
Gupta: So you can
see how many problems were done over the last 24 hours? How many was it?
Shantanu Sinha:
Right now, in the last 24 hours we had close to 1.8 million.
Gupta: Wow! Not
total, but just one day?
Sinha: Yeah. Yeah.
Just in 20-- in a 24-hour period.
And when you take
a look at total users over the last 18 months...
Sinha: Forty-one
million visits from the United
States . We can look in from India at 1.7 million, Australia , 1.4 million.
Gupta: Right, it
is pretty amazing to think that millions of people all over the world are using
Khan Academy right now.
Sinha: Yeah, it's
a gold mine on how to understand, you know, what paths through learning are
most effective.
Khan says they
look at all that data and constantly make changes to their software platform.
Khan: We can start
fine tuning things the way that Amazon might fine tune the button to help you
buy that book or find the book that you want, or Netflix says, "What's the
right movie for you?" We now get to do with education.
Eric Schmidt, the
pioneering chairman of Google, says he's seen a lot of failed attempts to
integrate technology into education - but says what Sal Khan is doing is
different.
Schmidt: Many,
many people think they're doing something new but they're not really changing
the approach. Which with Sal, he said, "What we're going to do is not only
we're gonna make these interesting 10-minute videos but we're going to measure
whether it works or not."
Gupta: He was the
guy to sort of make this happen? What-- why do you think it was him and not
some person who was an educator or who had a background in this area?
Schmidt:
Innovation never comes from the established institutions. It's always a
graduate student or a crazy person or somebody with a great vision. Sal is that
person in education in my view. He built a platform. If that platform works,
that platform could completely change education in America .
[Khan: 17 over 9 is equal to 1.88...]
Inside classrooms
it's just Khan Academy math for now, but Sal Khan
believes his strategy can be used to teach subjects like history and science.
And not in just elementary schools, but high schools and even colleges. But no
matter how big or how successful Khan
Academy gets, Sal Khan
promises he'll never put a price tag on it.
Khan: The
"for profits" have to mold themselves much more to the education
establishment than we do. As a not-for-profit, we're just like, "What's
our mission?" To educate children, as well as possible. I've said it
enough times and it's in our mission statement: a free world-class education
for anyone anywhere.
And that's what
sixth grader Alex Hernandez says he needs.
Gupta: Has anyone
in your family ever gone to college?
Alex Hernandez:
No.
Gupta: So it's a
pretty big deal for you? Do you think you're going to be able to do it?
Alex Hernandez:
With help, or like with more like studying or like Khan Academy, I think I can
get there.
Gupta: I think you
can too.
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