SXSWorld
Issue link: https://sxsw.uberflip.com/i/456163
3 8 S X S W o r l d | F E B R U A R Y 2 0 1 5 | S X S W. C O M al Khan, founder of the online education website Khan Academy, believes that we are living at a privileged moment in time: "the eye of the hurricane." Some 1000 years from now, he told rising graduates of Harvard's 2014 B-School class, our era will be romanticized as "the time when human history went from being a fragmented, provincial, unconnected … proto-civilization, to being a multi-planetary, con- nected, sentient one; the time when the human species awakened." This extreme optimism fuels Khan's great hope and belief that Khan Academy, whose mission is to provide "a free, world-class edu- cation for anyone, any where," will be the catalyst that kicks humanity into this new realm of being. The mechanism by which Khan hopes to drive this next great awakening is to use technology to do away with a teaching and learning model that is driven by the clock (how much time do teachers have to deliver particular concepts?) and replace it with one driven by student mastery (how well have stu- dents absorbed each idea?). As the founder of an online education platform that has grown from a handful of users (all family members) in early 2006 to 144,000 monthly users at the beginning of 2010 to an estimated 10 million monthly users today, Khan has earned the right to dream big. His site and his vision have attracted many millions of philanthropic dollars, media plaudits galore, rave reviews from the likes of Bill Gates and interest from teachers, school districts and state education agencies. But can Khan Academy transform teaching and learning at scale and in the environments where it most commonly happens—brick and mortar schools? In some places, Khan has already become increasingly enmeshed within the traditional school sector. In 2011, the Los Altos school district in California began using Khan Academy resources in most middle school classrooms. In 2013, Idaho launched a statewide effort to integrate Khan Academy materials into school curricula. In early 2014, Khan released online math resources to support Common Core standards; the goal is to fill a major hole faced by teachers scrambling to meet new teaching requirements that most textbooks don't yet address. Community colleges have jumped on the Khan bandwagon as well. Faced with providing huge numbers of incoming students with remedial math instruction, many look to Khan's resources as a potential solution. And those resources are already staggering. Originally known for producing mini math lectures in the form of YouTube videos, the Khan Academy website now features an interactive content library of 6,000-plus lessons and 100,000 problem sets. It covers a wide range of subjects, from history to economics to organic chemistry to pro- gramming and more. It also offers progress reports to help teachers and students understand how they are doing and has introduced gaming mechanisms such as badges and the like to encourage stu- dent engagement. The explanations for how and why Khan Academy got so big are varied. Timing was one element. Khan Academy's growth has taken place during a period in which the effectiveness of the U.S. education system has been in great doubt. "The data on how woeful American public education remains—including (the fact that) 33 percent of all fourth-graders in 2013 were functionally illiterate (along with another 33 percent reading at basic levels of literacy)," RiShawn Biddle, recently wrote in the online publication, Dropout Nation. As a result, solutions of every flavor—particularly from the tech sector— have gained enormous traction in recent years. The Khan Academy's success also lies in part in the way it delivers content to individual learners: simply, clearly and in small chunks. From an inspired, indie-learner's point of view, that model works. "I really liked Khan's JavaScript courses," says 13-year-old Harry Ziegler, a sometime Minecraft enthusiast who taught himself coding at 11 (and who has since graduated to drafting plans to build a quad copter in his South Austin living room.) "The way the videos laid out and explained one idea at a time was really easy to follow when I was first figuring stuff out. And I could do lessons when I wanted." Of course, for Khan Academy to fulfill its founder's greatest aspi- rations, it has to do more than inspire self-directed kids like Ziegler, and more than attract funding dollars or millions of users; it has to work. Specifically, it has to help millions of learners, at every level and in every environment, master specific subjects. In 2012, the Gates Foundation funded a two-year research project, conducted by SRI International, into the use of Khan Academy Resources in schools. The resulting reports focused on implementa- tion—how 70 teachers in 20 schools were using and adapting Khan Academy tools for day-to-day us—and noted a correlation between students' use of Khan tools and improved test scores. In 2015, the all-important question of efficacy may be more definitively answered, thanks to a $3 million U.S. Department of Education grant that funds a randomized control trial to look at how effective Khan Academy's resources are in helping community college students improve their algebra skills. But while others crunch the numbers, Khan's vision for his work remains grand, as he told those same B-School students: "My day- dreams, which were pretty delusional when I was one guy operating out of a walk-in closet, centered around just what might happen if we could have billions more people reach their educational potential by appropriately using the technology at their disposal." Sal Khan will appear as part of SXSWedu's Closing Program on Thursday, March 12 from 12:30-3pm in Ballroom D of the Austin Convention Center. Sal Khan in the Eye of Education's Hurricane by ashley craddock S S a l K h a n