LONG BEACH - Salman Khan isn’t the sort of person you’d expect to devise a revolutionary education system.
The former hedge fund analyst is as surprised as anyone that a series of videos he began posting online in 2004 have had such a profound effect on strangers around the world and have provided a new way for students to learn math and science.
Khan described his strange journey Wednesday at the Technology Entertainment and Design conference (TED). Khan was speaking during a special session curated by Microsoft founder Bill Gates, who was invited to build a session with people that reflected his interests and that he thought the world should be watching.
In 2004, Khan began tutoring a few of his cousins who were having difficulty with math. To make it easier to communicate with them, he decided to post the lessons as a series of videos on YouTube.
His cousins quickly discovered they preferred Khan on YouTube than in person.
“They were saying something very profound there,” Khan said. “They were saying that they preferred the automated version of their cousin to their cousin.”
What this meant, essentially, was that having a video lesson that they could pause and repeat at will, made it easier to learn without tiring their tutor.
“If they have to review something that they should have learned a couple of weeks ago or maybe a couple of years ago, they don’t have to be embarrassed and ask their cousin,” Khan said. “They can just watch the videos. If they’re bored they can go ahead. They can watch it at their own time at their own pace.”
Khan’s videos caught on among other family members and soon strangers were stumbling upon them online as well. He began receiving comments and letters from random viewers around the world, expressing appreciation for his lessons.
“First time I smiled doing a derivative,” one commenter wrote on YouTube about a calculus video Khan had posted.
“Same thing here," another wrote. "I actually got a natural high and a good mood for the entire day. Since I remembered seeing all this matrix text in class, and here I’m all like, ‘I know kung-fu.’”
Then he got a letter from the parent of a 12-year-old autistic boy who had experienced a lot of difficulty grasping math.
“We have tried everything, viewed everything, bought everything,” the parent wrote. “We stumbled on your video that’s on decimals and it got through. Then we went on to dreaded fractions. Again he got it. We could not believe it. He is so excited.”
“Here I was an analyst at a hedge fund, it was very strange for me to do something of social value,” Khan told the TED audience.
It started to dawn on him that the videos could help a lot of people, and never grow old. They would be as relevant for his cousins today as they would be for his cousin's children in a few decades.
“If Isaac Newton had done YouTube videos on calculus," Khan said, "I wouldn’t have to!"
Nonetheless, when he added more lessons to YouTube, he still had modest hopes for his work. He thought their reach would be limited and that at best they would be a good supplement for regular schoolwork or help home-schoolers. He never thought they would go mainstream and enter the classroom. But that's exactly what happened.
He began getting letters from teachers who said they were using his videos in class to great success. That's when it hit Khan that the standard one-size-fits-all way of teaching that exists in most classrooms doesn't work and leaves many students, whether they are smart or not, behind.
"In a traditional classroom you have homework, lecture, homework then you have a snapshot exam," he said. "And whether you pass or not, the class moves on to the next lesson."
Even the ones who get 95 percent of the lesson correct, still have 5 percent they didn't grasp, and with each subsequent lesson, the percentage they don't understand increases.
Khan compared it to learning how to ride a bicycle. A rider having trouble making turns and stopping is told he's 80 percent proficient at it, given a C-grade, and then handed a unicycle in place of the bicycle. He's then expected to grasp the complex machine when he hasn't even mastered the bicycle.
“As ridiculous as that sounds, that’s exactly what’s happening in our classrooms right now,” Khan said.
Good students suddenly begin failing algebra and calculus, despite being smart, because they have these small holes, like Swiss cheese, in their comprehension, and the holes keep increasing as the lessons get more difficult.
It was this realization that got Khan to quit his job and turned his lessons into a non-profit.
The Khan Academy, which he launched with a small team of software developers, has more than 2,000 videos on math, science and economics but now also offers accompanying online lessons that use an interactive approach to allow students to learn at their own pace and stick with problems they find difficult until they master them.
"The traditional model penalizes the student for experimentation and failure but does not expect mastery," he said. "We encourage you to experiment. We encourage you to failure, But we do expect mastery."
Students are presented with modules of problems in groups of ten. Once they solve a group of ten, they move forward to a more advanced module. The online approach also allows students from around the world to communicate with each other on the site, so that a student in Calcutta can suddenly find himself tutoring a student in Florida.
“I think what you’ll see emerging is this notion of a global one-world classroom,” Khan said.
The online lessons are also proving useful for teachers.
Khan and his team were invited to conduct a pilot project at a school in Los Altos, California using two 5th-grade classes and 7th-grade classes doing the Khan Academy online lessons for half of their time in class. The software tracks each student's progress and logs that show teachers how long students worked on a particular lesson, where they got stuck, which videos they watched or paused and re-watched.
"When students are allowed to work at their own pace, you can see students who took a little extra time to get through one concept or another, once they get through the speed bump, they race ahead," Khan said. “So the same kid you thought was slow six weeks ago, you now would think are gifted. And we’re seeing it over and over and over again.
"It makes you really wonder," he added, "how much all of the labels that maybe a lot of us have benefited from were really just due to a coincidence of time.”
