This article was taken from the August 2013 issue of Wired magazine. Be the first to read Wired's articles in print before they're posted online, and get your hands on loads of additional content by subscribing online.
Khan Academy has had more than a quarter-of-a-billion views of its 4,100-plus video lectures. But founder Salman Khan, 36, aims to offer high-quality, free education to "anyone, anywhere". In 2004, New Orleans-born Khan tutored his cousin Nadia in maths by phone and Yahoo! Doodle.
Demand grew within his family, and Khan -- with three MIT degrees in electrical engineering, computer science and maths, and an MBA -- put short lectures on YouTube. By 2009, they were in such demand that he gave up his job as a hedge-fund manager. Wired editor David Rowan spoke to Khan in London about his next steps.
Wired: Isn't Khan Academy's challenge that, however flawed the conventional university degree, it's a recognised currency?
Salman Khan: The university degree doesn't carry the weight that it used to. Thirty or 40 years ago, if you had a university degree you were probably guaranteed a white-collar job; that's not the case any more. In the US a lot of students, especially under-served students, work hard, they take out loans, they go to university -- not Harvard, not Stanford, but a local regional university, sometimes a community college. They end up tens of thousands of dollars in debt -- and they're not necessarily getting that white-collar career that was promised to them.
What do you see as the endgame for Khan Academy?
We want to get videos on every single subject, internationalise it, translate it or re-do it in every language. But we don't view the videos as necessarily the most important part of the experience. We think the exercises, the interactivity, students connecting and maybe even collaborating on a site like ours, are equally important.
We're ultra-focused right now on diagnostics and assessments. In the next six months, a couple of things will happen: a student goes to Khan Academy, they can press a button, take a 30-minute diagnostic, and it will be able to analyse, "Look, this is where you're strongest, this is where you're weak. Here are resources that might help you." Kind of an automated personal tutor. And it's crazy that every teacher is writing and grading their own tests; that's time that could be used to actually teach students.
This sounds like a vision of a more automated AI-led, data-led form of education.
For parts of it. Data and analytics can be really powerful for things like algebra. But for subjective things, something like writing, peer to peer can be powerful. I have trouble believing that a machine would really be a good measure of your quality of rhetoric.
Won't this mix of video and peer assessment mean students lose the in-person university experience, where you're part of a community and develop creative thinking?
The videos and exercises are a core scaffold of skills which are an important part of education, but not the only important part. Our current school system is 100 per cent focused on that -- "What were your test scores?" That doesn't have to be the focus of the physical classroom. Four- and five-year-olds are incredibly curious and creative people -- it's innate. But then something happens as they sit in class: they're told to be quiet, not to move, not to talk to their friends. Everything they do has an end point, with a finite answer, and most of the hands-on projects are ones that every kid is going to be able to accomplish in the next 55 minutes, which means it's not going to be creative, it's not going to be open-ended. Do that for 12 years, and at the end you have people who say, "Tell me what to do," as opposed to creating something.
Headteachers of traditional schools are probably thinking, "We've got centuries of knowledge -- what does he know?"
That's a good point. I would say that we don't know a lot, a lot of what we're doing is a rediscovery of what's been out there. You know that ten to 15 minutes is about someone's attention span -- this has been empirically proven. We're constantly running experiments and A/B testing. That type of stuff wasn't possible before.
If you created a Khan Academy lecture course to deliver the next generation of Wired cover stars, the people who want to change the world, what would your lessons be?
Think about why the rules are there... and do they make sense?
Successful entrepreneurs definitely have maverick qualities, and they question the norms. Silicon Valley is so successful because failure is nowhere near as stigmatised as if, say, you are in Russia or India or China -- if you fail there, you might not find a wife. If you fail in Silicon Valley, you get up, it's a mark of honour. So we shouldn't look to Singapore or Finland as models of how to remake our schools. There are no Googles starting in Finland or in Singapore, or Facebooks or Teslas or SpaceXs. We should try to make our school system less pressured -- right now all school systems, whether in Singapore or the UK, are pressured systems where everyone goes at the same pace. Instead, everyone should make their systems more American, where failure isn't a signal that you're stupid, but that you need to keep working so that you master that concept.
Where do you see Khan Academy in relation to the for-profit online-education companies such as Coursera or Udacity?
The MOOCs [massive open online courses] are taking much more of a philosophy of transplanting a traditional course and then virtualising it. They feel like a university course: you start at a particular date; you finish a semester later; you have a problem set every week. It's not personalised, it's the same pace for everyone. We think that the notion of a course is an artificial thing. Why should we marry ourselves to grades? Why can't you have a learning experience that's three hours long and isn't a semester long?
You say the Khan Academy is a kind of brand, but you have become the brand's public face.
I don't feel like a celebrity. Wiping your 18-month-old's butt has a good way of grounding you. But I do feel really good when I meet someone on the street who says, "Oh man, you're the Khan Academy guy -- you're the guy who helped me pass algebra."
I mean, wow, it helped you, that's extremely rewarding.
Salman Khan is author of The One World Schoolhouse:
Education Reimagined (Hodder & Stoughton). khanacademy.org
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
