Boston Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge

Transcription

Female: Upon first hearing that Salman Khan would be speaking at Castilleja during Global week, my mind immediately went to the famous Bollywood actor who goes by the same name. After seconds [paused], I recognized the absurdity of the thought, and realized who actually was coming. While the Salman Khan, who joins us today, might not possess flashy dance moves, he is nevertheless a world-renowned movie star in his own right. Salman, or Sal Khan, is the founder of the Khan Academy, a not-for-profit organization that provides a high-quality education for free to anyone with internet access, regardless of location, social stratification, or age. Sal has recorded over 1,000 YouTube videos, available at khanacademy.org, covering everything from arithmetic and algebra to calculus, physics, chemistry, biology, and finance. Sal personally helps more than 70,000 students a month from all over the world, my family members included. Whenever my sisters or I have a problem, the first thing my parents tell us to do is visit khanacademy.org. Sal has successfully helped me study for the SAT, helped my older sister prepare for the MCAT, and help my younger sister understand difficult chemistry concepts. My mom even frequently visits the website to learn more about the credit crisis, and to brush up on her differential calculus. Before quitting his day job in September of 2009 to work on the Khan Academy full-time, Sal was a Senior Research Analyst at a Bay Area investment fund. He had previously held positions in venture capital, engineering, and product management. He received his MBA from Harvard Business School where he was a student body president, holds a master's degree and a bachelor of science degree in electrical engineering and computer science, and has a bachelor of science degree in mathematics from MIT, where he was President of the Class of 1998. What started as a way to help his younger relatives and family friends understand course material and do well in school, has turned into a global sensation, touching students from San Francisco, Switzerland, Uganda, and beyond. He received a 2009 Tech Award in Education, an award that honors innovators from around the world who apply technology to benefit humanity. He has also appeared on the Rick Sanchez Show on CNN to explain the credit crisis, spoken on NPR's "All Things Considered," and been interviewed in a recent San Francisco Chronicle article. In this article, Sal was quoted saying, "With so little effort on my own part, "I can empower an unlimited amount of people for all time. "I can't imagine a better use of my time." Sal's dedication to educating and enlightening the world, free of cost, has inspired [and aided] millions of people. It is my pleasure to introduce Sal Khan. (applause) But first, he'll be showing a video before he comes up. (light music) (applause) Sal: Thank you for having me here. It's incredibly exciting on a whole set of levels. I think the first thing that makes it really exciting to be here, in particular, at Castilleja ... Many of y'all may know it. Some of y'all might not know it. This was the first place where I was taken seriously. 3 or 4 years ago, I was just this guy working at a hedge fund, who had this little software that barely worked, and I had a couple of videos on YouTube. I wanted to get people, other than people who I was maybe related to, to actually use it. (laughter) I approached Ryanne ... I guess y'all call her Ms. Saddler. She was the site director for the Peninsula Bridge here at Castilleja. I tried to convince her. "Hey, why don't y'all use this "in the Peninsula Bridge Program?" She was the first person who essentially took the Khan Academy seriously. The talk I want to give today, is really about how things can start small, and how an individual, with the tools that we have on hand right now, can do pretty far-reaching things. You really can't underestimate the power of those first few people who believe in something, and help you take it to the next level, and make you feel like it's a legitimate project. My first visit to Castilleja was a very positive one, and actually played a very crucial role in what you saw in that video. Actually, Ryanne is now on the board of ... We have a 2-person board where ... 2-person board, and I'm essentially the company. (laughter) It's a fairly small organization, which is another theme I want to touch on throughout this--what I want to be more of a conversation than a lecture or a talk. One thing I want ... set the ground rules. Raise your hand. If something comes to mind, or if you don't agree with something, or if you just get inspired, raise your hand, and I'd be happy to address something, or if I say something that confuses you. The other reason why I'm incredibly excited about being here is, 1, I love the theme of Global Week, especially that it's peace. It's this notion that is ... I think most people are afraid to talk about things like peace because it's such an audacious goal. You almost feel that if you start thinking in terms of world peace, you're destined to fail. We can get inspired here today, but then when we turn on the news, we're going to see people talk angrily at each other. We're going to probably find out about some bombing, or whatnot, in some place in the world. It's very hard to tackle this subject. I think it's a very impressive thing to be tackling. The other reason why it's incredibly interesting to talk to y'all is I think the people in this room are in a unique position. When I say in a unique position, a unique position as a function of your age and a function of where we are in history, that I think for the first time, I can legitimately tell y'all that you are in a position to do something at least as good as the Khan Academy. We don't even know where the Khan Academy is going to go, but the tools now exist. If 20 years ago, someone like me was giving a talk to myself when I was your age, and they were to say, "Hey, you could change the world," I would've rolled my eyes. The best I could've done is maybe had a signature campaign, or sent a letter to a politician, or volunteered in my local community, which all would've been great, but they wouldn't have reached the threshold of changing the world. Now, I can stand here, and legitimately tell y'all about my story, and hopefully through my story you'll realize that you also have the tools at hand to touch the world in ways that we can't possibly imagine. It really is a unique opportunity based on the age and your specific life experience. I think y'all are in a better position to do it than large corporations with millions of dollars, or large governmental agencies, or the UN, or whoever. I think the people in this room, using technology, maybe the type of technology I use with the Khan Academy, or maybe other things, really have the potential to do amazing things. What I want to talk about, or give you the outline of this talk, I'm going to tell you the story of Khan Academy, but the whole point of telling you this story is to put yourself in my shoes as someone who's doing something interesting for them, rewarding on a very small scale. I want you to take in the experience of how it happens, how it's a very organic, that it's not like I just sat down one day, and I wrote on paper, "I want to educate 80,000 people "in the world, or 80 million people in the world, or bust. "If I don't do that, then I'm a big failure." I started off very small, with very small goals, really to just impact a very small set of people, all of whom I happen to be related to. It slowly had grown into something more. I'm going to tell you the story about Khan Academy. You got a little bit of a tidbit right there. After that, I want to talk a little bit about what that means for education. That's another reason why it's neat to be here. This is a school. What could be a more interesting discussion than where education is going? I think Khan Academy might play a role in it, but I think there are some trends that are going to happen, whether or not the Khan Academy ... if I got hit by a bus, God forbid, outside. (laugther) Regardless of what happens with Khan Academy, there are things that I think are going to occur. I think they're going to occur in the next 10-15 years. I think it's a very interesting discussion to have. Then finally ... I have attended, when I was young, a lot of talks that inspired me, and I wanted to go out and change the world and start a revolution. I would be all inspired, and have all this inspiration, and I would go home, and I would just twiddle my thumbs, and not know what to do with myself and my energy. I had a friend who was a hardcore athlete. He always told me, "Never waste inspiration." What I want to do ... It's actually a very valuable commodity, so it shouldn't be wasted. What I want to do at the end of this talk is throw out ideas. I don't want to just tell you my story, and say, "Look, you can change the world. Now, go home." What I want to do is say, "Look. I did this, really almost by chance." Here's 4 or 5 things you all could do. These are really just to be seeds in your head of stuff that you could work on. You might think they're horrible ideas, but hopefully it'll at least get your juices flowing on ways that you might be able to impact the world. To start off, you got a little tidbit right there. 4, 5 years ago, I was a newly-minted MBA. I was working at a hedge fund. It's kind of a bad word now, but not all hedge funds are evil. (laughter) Many are, though. (laughter) My portfolio manager, who is a vegetarian ... If we made money off of an egg company, he would donate his profits to fight abusive chickens. I have not made this up. We were a more ethical hedge fund. I was a newly-minted MBA, working as a hedge fund analyst in Boston. I had just gotten married in New Jersey. I had some family that wanted to visit me in Boston, my aunt and uncle, and their children; Nadia, Armand, and Ali. Nadia was the oldest. She was 12 years old at the time. They visited me just to see Boston, take in the sights. It was exciting for me because it was the first time that I really got to spend time with my cousins. When I was in New Orleans ... They were from New Orleans. I grew up in New Orleans. When I was there before high school, they were toddlers, and I never had really a serious discussion with them, or I never really was able to bond with them. Now, when they visited me in Boston, for the first time, I was really able to connect with them. Nadia especially impressed me. I think this story is especially interesting, talking to many of you all, because when I look out into the audience, I see a lot of Nadias. I see a lot of bright, motivated young women who ... In Nadia's case, as soon as I spent a couple hours with her, talking to her about life and what she wanted to do, and politics, and philosophy, and I would give her brain teasers. She was just ultra sharp, and here was I. I thought I was this reasonably-sophisticated 25 or 26 year old, and I literally could talk to her as an equal. Sometimes, I felt like I was a little bit out of my league. I was just wildly impressed by her. You can imagine. I think it's ... You've probably experienced this a little bit with your own parents. When you have a ... When you meet a young person, who you're very impressed by, who you think has a lot of potential, you have this natural inclination to have them follow in your footsteps. Everyone thinks that what they do is the best possible thing. While we were touring around Boston, we visited MIT. When I was visiting MIT, I told Nadia, and the whole family was there. I said, "Nadia, I know there's probably "all these stereotypes in your head "that make you not think that you want to go to this school, "and it has this [unintelligible], "but I generally think, based on interacting with you ... "You're creative. You show this analytical ability. "I really think ... I'm just going to put this seed in your head. "You don't have to do it. No pressure, "but I really think this would be a good place "for you to think about coming to. "Maybe you'd want to be an engineer, "and become an engineer, and then one day, "work at a hedge fund, but a good hedge fund." (laughter) If any of you all are interested in that career path, talk to me afterwards. (laugther) I'll be your personal counselor. She kind of, I think, did what a lot of y'all would do when your mom or dad tries to get you into the family business. She rolled her eyes a little bit and said, "Thanks, but I don't know about it. "I was thinking of becoming a journalist, or something." I don't know if I really got a lot of traction, but when I said that, at the same time that I was talking to Nadia about possibly coming to MIT, I saw my aunt and uncle give each other a look, a look like, "What's Sal talking about, "asking our Nadia to go to MIT?" I didn't know how to interpret that look. I thought maybe it's another one of these stereotypical things about women in technical fields, and engineering, or whatever. Maybe it was something deeper. Who knows? Maybe it was just my aunt was mad at my uncle for some other random reason. (laughter) I didn't know, but it caught my eye. The next morning, before everyone else had woken up, my aunt [unintelligible] had come to ... We were just hanging out. Everyone else was still asleep. She said, "Sal. I can't tell you how great it is "that you're a bit of a role model for my children. "They really look up to you. "They're enjoying this trip tremendously. "I can't tell you how much it's affecting them. "They're getting inspired to do things. "They all want to come to Boston to go to college. "They love the area." She said, "The one thing you probably don't know, "and it's concerning us, and it's been an issue in the family "is that Nadia's actually having a lot of difficulty "in math right now, and she was actually placed "into the slower track in her ... "as she goes into 7th grade. "They didn't place her into the track "that would allow her to take algebra in 8th grade, "and then progress on that track." I think many of you are on ... that allows you a college preparatory track, where you take calculus in high school, whatnot. For me, this was obviously surprising. I just told you how impressive Nadia was. Sometimes when I would speak to her, I felt like I was speaking to someone out of my own league. For me to think that in 6th grade, there was something that was tripping her up. It was almost hard for me to believe. When Nadia woke up, I [pulled her]. I was like, "Hey, your mom says you're having an issue "with something in mathematics. "What do you think is the situation?" She says, "I just don't get units." She just doesn't get kilograms to milligrams, or pounds to ounces. It does. It gives all of us a little bit of a headache, but she just didn't get it. She says, "When I see those problems, "my brain just shuts down, and I just think it's beyond me." I told her. I said, "Nadia, let's do a deal. You're here for ..." actually another ... I think it was the last day of their visit. "You're going to leave tomorrow, go back to New Orleans, "but I am 100,000% convinced that you are well capable "of learning units, and I actually suspected "you're capable of learning things far deeper than units, "but it's just my suspicion. "Why don't we do some type of remote tutoring? "You go back to New Orleans. "We'll get on a speakerphone. "We'll get some pen tablets, maybe. "We'll find something that where we can write. "We can both see. We're each writing," and she agreed. I think she was, 1, excited about this idea of having someone interested in her directly, and giving her that 1-on-1 attention, and someone to be able to connect with. I was kind of like her older brother. But on the other level, I think she was a little bit daunted by the idea. It was a little extra pressure above and beyond what you already have from school and being a middle school ... a young woman, which a lot of pressures that y'all are probably facing on some dimension right now. It's actually very strange to be talking to y'all about Nadia, because I keep realizing that a lot of y'all are Nadia, or in some way have elements that are similar to her. It adds a whole new level to this conversation. She agreed. Within a week, we both had our pen tablets. She was in New Orleans. I was in Boston. I would come home from work, right after the market closed. I would call her up. She would be done with all of her ... I think she was on the basketball team at the time. We would start doing these sessions. I've got to tell you, the first week was painful. The tone of the conversation ... When we were just speaking as friends, or as relations, it was a dynamic conversation, really intelligent, really engaging, really fast-paced, but as soon as we entered this domain of units, which was our first subject to tackle ... As soon as we entered that domain, I felt like she just shut down. I would ask her a question. "How many kilometers would that be?" There would be this long pause. I didn't know if I lost her on the line, if something happened with our internet connection. Then, her answers were always in the form of a question. They were always like, "100? 10?" I had no idea. I said, "Nadia, are you guessing?" It was just very difficult. I could imagine if it was painful for me, it was probably 10-times as painful for her because above and beyond this being a subject that she was struggling with, and we all have had that feeling of struggling with something. She was working with her cousin, who she probably wanted to impress because he was already impressed by her. He already believes in her. She probably felt all this anxiety of being judged, and what not. Literally, after a week of this, I started questioning whether this made sense, whether I had done more harm than good, She was already having difficulty, and I was getting pretty close to giving up on her just because it felt like we had made no headway in a week after 5 sessions. I made a last-ditch effort. The next conversation I had with her, I said, "Nadia. I know you're smart. "I know it by based on interacting with you, "and we also share a certain amount of DNA. (laughter) "That, by itself, is proof enough. "I am not judging you. "I am not judging you in no way, shape, or form. "You need to view me as a resource, purely as a resource. "There is nothing that you can ask me, "that in any way, will make me think less of you. "In fact, the more questions you ask, "will make me think more of you. "I need you to be completely honest "when you don't understand something. "When I ask a question, either say, "'I do not know the answer to that question, Sal. "'Please explain it,' or answer in the affirmative. "Don't say, 'Ten?' Say, 'Ten,' "or say, 'I do not understand. "Just be a little bit more engaging," and it worked. Over the next week, because she started giving me more information about what it exactly was in her brain, that was having trouble with units, I was able to hone in a little bit better, and address those small points of confusion that she had. When do you multiply? When do you divide? I think that's the confusion many people have with concepts of units. You're always multiplying and dividing by different things. But, she got it. Once she got it, it was fascinating because something clicked in her head. Not only did she go from thinking that it was this huge, intractable, impossible thing to do. She went to thinking that it was easy. She thought it was so easy, and so intuitive, that she was almost angry about it. She was angry that something that she now found, 3 weeks later, to be intuitive, and easy, and natural. She was angry that this was potentially derailing her career, derailing her self-impression, or not allowing her to proceed with her other friends into the normal-track math class. I want to take a side here, from Nadia's story, because I think that experience ... and I don't know if any of y'all have experienced it yet. Hopefully you will. I've experienced it multiple times in my life, where you have this intractable problem that you're almost ready to give up, that you just think your brain is not built for this type of problem. When you're faced with something like that, most people give up, and the rest of their life they think, "I'm not meant to do algebra. "I'm not meant to do calculus. "I'm not meant to do physics." I used to know people on the other side. "I'm not meant to be a writer. "I'm not meant to ... I'm a slow reader." Whatever it might be, we all face this, and most people tend to give up. That experience of facing it once in your life, and then overcoming it, and overcoming it in a way that you realize that it's actually an easy thing, that's tremendously powerful. I think it's tremendously transformational. I encourage you all to try to have those type of experiences, to try to really engage with things that you find intractable right now, because I guarantee you, at the age that you're at right now, if you discover that it really is not so intractable, and if you really can overcome that hurdle, the rest of your life, you won't really find anything to be impossible. You're going to realize that you just have to engage, and be aggressive, and find the right resources with enough energy and things will work out. Nadia--to make a long story short-- she just progressed tremendously. From then on, once she figured out that if she just engaged enough that she would be able to understand the concepts. We just keep proceeding forward. After a month or two, I said, "Nadia, the stuff we're covering now, "this is stuff that not only you would normally expect "of a smart, or an advanced, 7th or 8th grader. "This is material that you would expect "of a advanced 9th or 10th grader." From then on, and since then ... This was in 2004, 2005 that we started. Nadia just turned into a rock star. She ended up taking ... or maybe I should say a mathlete. (laughter) She ended up ... I don't want to give you the impression that I think this is the measure of a person of what math classes they take, and what year, and all of that. I want to give you a very tangible example of someone who I saw firsthand, who went from someone who was ready to give up on mathematics at the age of 12 or 13, to someone who took calculus when she was a freshman in high school, who ended up having to go to the University of New Orleans when she was a sophomore because they had run out of math classes at her high school. But, at the same time, she now still wants to be a writer. This isn't something where ... She's actually going to go to Sarah Lawrence, and she wants to be a writer, and God bless her. She didn't want to be an engineer and a hedge fund manager, (laughter) but this is the important thing. She didn't become a writer. I think in a lot of Asian, in a lot of ... My family is originally from South Asia. In our culture, there's this notion of, "Oh, they're becoming a writer because they couldn't "be an engineer, or because they couldn't be a doctor." In Nadia's example, she can say, "Oh yeah. Well, I could've been one, but I'm deciding to do this." I think it's super important for people to have that option, for her to know that she made the decision to be a writer as opposed to being forced into it because when she was in 6th grade, she had given up on mathematics. After Nadia's story, I've got to tell you. That was probably the most rewarding experience in my life up to date. You can imagine. I was a guy working at a hedge fund. It's an intellectually-stimulating job, but it's a job where it's hard to answer the question of what did you do for humanity today? I actually used to have this rationalization [as well]. In a Communist system, you have these central planners who like to allocate the capital, but in the Capitalist system you need people participating in the market to make sure that prices are set efficiently, and only when prices are set efficiently, can capital be allocated efficiently, and because of that, people will be better off. That was my rationalization for working at a hedge fund. As you could imagine, it's a convoluted argument, and it would always make my wife roll her eyes. To be able to come home and touch someone in a meaningful way, someone who I was related to, and feel that I was impacting her life's trajectory, tremendously satisfying. I decided I wanted to keep going. I started with her younger brothers, Armand and Ali. Then, I started with some other cousins, other family friends. This is really, now we're going into 2005, early 2006. I had this cohort of about 15 or 20 students that I would use ... I tried to replicate the Nadia model. I would get on a conference call, and we would use Yahoo! Doodle to write with each other, and to see what we're doing. As you could imagine, [unintelligible] just getting very hard to scale up. I had the luxury with Nadia of having this 1-on-1 interaction. Even when I started having small groups of 2 or 3 students at the same time, it just became completely different, hard to scale, but I thought really hard. How can I ... that same thing that I did with Nadia, how can I somehow scale it up? How can I print out more versions of myself, so that other people could interact in the same way. One thing I did, is I started writing some software. It was fun for me, again, because I had given up my computer science part of my brain to go work in finance, so it was just a fun project for me. The whole goal of the software was to be able to hone in on that weak point, to automate that process that I had, that question-and-answer process that I had with Nadia, where I was able to realize, oh, she just doesn't get this more basic concept, and that's why she was having trouble with the idea of units. I wrote a little bit of software like that, and I put a little database behind it, so that I could keep track, what the students were working on. My cousins, they liked it. They enjoyed the fact that it was generating problems for them, and they could practice, but the harder problem ... and this is what really directly led to where the Khan Academy is now, is how do we schedule time with each other, or how can I teach all of these students? I only had 20 right now, but it was already becoming too much for me, in a way that they could learn at their own pace, they could learn at their own time. That's where the idea ... and it really wasn't my idea. I have to give credit to a friend of mine who said, "Hey, why don't you just put some stuff up on YouTube?" I have to say, my own pride, right? When he said that, I was like, "No, no, no. "My software is enough. YouTube vidoes ... "My software is so good, it gives people hints, "and it's web-based, and it has a database, "and you should see the database." After I got over the fact that I didn't think of the idea, (laughter) I said, "Look, maybe I'll try "some of these YouTube videos." The very first YouTube video I did was a least common multiple, so if you watch that video, it's by far the most rough video. Hopefully it'll be a part of history one day. (laughter) I made that video, and my cousins and family friends, who needed to learn the least common multiples, they actually said they really liked it because ... Actually, one of them told me ... and this was a bit of a backhanded compliment. I didn't know what to think of it. They said, "Oh, I like you better on YouTube." (laughter) It's actually funny. He was the first person to say it, but I got that feedback over and over again. I think the core issue of why I'm better on YouTube is 1, there isn't this stress when you have this interaction with a tutor or a teacher of, "Hey, do you get this?" You're kind of like, "Oh, gee. He's looking at me." I'm sorry. You were just standing right there, (laughter) so you have to ... But, it's hard to think when someone is waiting for you to process something that you're just learning to get your hands around. Maybe I said something that you don't understand, but you don't want to ask me because it's a basic concept, and you want me to think that you're a smart individual, but this is something that you really should've mastered probably in 4th or 5th grade, and you're in 9th grade now. If you tell me that you really don't know ... Dividing decimals is still this little gray area, and if dividing decimals actually is, you're not alone. I actually want to go to a mall one day, and just see how many adults ... (laughter) That's a whole ... I can't tell you how many letters I get from all sorts of people, all walks of life, that dividing decimals is the one thing that no one wants to admit that they forgot how to do, but it's a huge need [unintelligible] ... But anyway, that's a ... I go on tangents. (laughter) I was talking about why I'm better on YouTube is that you can pause me. You can repeat me. If I say something you don't understand, you can go to Wikipedia,or go to some other site, or go to one of my other videos, and get that concept filled in. There's no stress. You're doing it at your own time. I actually got a letter from a college student once. He wrote me ... I can't tell you how valuable this is. He said, "I actually have a very good calculus professor, "but our class is at 7 in the morning on a Monday, "and when I'm there, there's this cute girl "who sits two rows in front of me. "All I can think about all day, throughout the entire class "is whether I'm going to have the guts to walk up to her "after class and ask her out. "I think about whether I want to write memoirs "about what I did last weekend." (laughter) By the time all those thoughts go on, he's completely missed the calculus class at 7 in the morning, and then he goes home, and he watches the YouTube videos. His story, it's actually very realistic. It's what happens all the time in the model that's ... In the standard model, you're learning, you and the teacher in a room that's dictated by some schedule. It has to be, based on logistics. It's no one's fault, really. If I had to teach you a concept everyday at 7 in the morning, sometimes I'm not going to be on my A-game. I'm not going to be super passionate about it because teachers are people, too. Sometimes it's hard to ... (laughter) It's hard for the teacher sometimes, and it's especially hard for the student to engage, especially if there's some other thing that they're thinking about, or they're sleepy, or there's some core concept that they missed in the last class. This idea of being able to get something on demand is tremendously useful, and once I got that feedback from my cousins and family friends, I made more videos. At first, I put the videos up. [Obviously], I expected about 10 or 20 people to watch them, but slowly, people that weren't related to me, or who didn't know me personally, started watching them, and that kept growing. I got excited. I don't know, how many of y'all have seen the movie, "Julie and Julia?" Have you? Okay, when I was watching that movie, I felt like this is like ... on some metaphysical level, I felt some ... It was actually, I didn't want to watch it. I thought it was about cooking, or something. I didn't realize it was about someone who started a blog that became very popular. That experience she had where she keeps pressing "refresh," and she's amazed that someone, other than her mother, actually read her blog. That was me. That was me 4 years ago. I put a video up, and I would keep refreshing it. I still do this. I'm not as secure as I might appear to be. (laughter) I keep refreshing it until I get some feedback. Something, either the little YouTube people rate, if they give it 5 stars, I'm very sensitive. If someone even gives 4 stars, I question whether I'm doing the right thing, and whether I should go back to finance, and what not. (laughter) It's a very emotionally-trying experience. But, I keep refreshing, and I wait to see some positive feedback. Eventually, someone will just say, "Thank you." As soon as they say thank you, it's like, "Oh, good. This was somewhat useful to somebody. "I'll record the next video now." (laughter) I can't tell you how valuable that notion is. More and more people kept watching it over the course of the next few years. It grew roughly 20% a month, and if y'all are familiar with the compounding of growth, that's actually a very fast rate. You're growing several fold every year. Now, as I was thankfully introduced, it's reaching, actually [on the order] of about 100,000 students now a month, and 40,000 video views a day. What's really exciting about it is that's just a small sliver of people who just happened to have found out about it through word of mouth, or through friends and family, or through the blogisphere. Someone might have written about it. It's a very small sliver of, I think, the people who could benefit from something like this. On top of the 100,000 people, it's still mind-boggling to me when I say these numbers. Here I am, just sitting in my pajamas, recording YouTube videos all day. While I'm having breakfast, or at work ... I didn't quit my job until 3 months ago. While I was at work, or sleeping, somebody around the world is learning from me. They're being empowered on some level. This is what I think is the most important ingredient in the theme of peace, of that individual empowerment. and it's happening with no effort on my part, no cost to me, nothing I'm doing, but that person is getting empowered. It's like a perpetual motion machine. It's like you're making gold out of lead. It's like creating something out of nothing. That idea, to me, is still mind-boggling. It didn't have to be 100,000 people. Just the idea that it's even 1 person that it's happening for is even mind-boggling to me. Then, when you throw out numbers, like 100,000, or we've had 9 million [unintelligible], I have trouble even completely understanding what that means, but it just amazes me. Out of the blue ... Once again, I want this narrative to show you how organically things can happen. Out of the blue, I got a letter from somebody who distributes computers in Uganda, and said, "We distribute these computers, "and we don't have any internet access, "but we love the Khan Academy videos. "We've seen some of the students interact with them. "They love them. How can we get these videos "to these students in Uganda?" I had no idea. I was just recording YouTube videos. The very next email ... This is why ... I'm not the most religious person on the planet, but sometimes things happen in certain ways, where you think, "Gee, there's some aliens, "or something, controlling what's happening to me," [laughter] but the very next email was this group of volunteers, from Cisco Systems, that said, "Hey, we like your videos. "We view them as a K-12 school-in-a-box "for children who don't have access to good teachers. "Why don't we ... Can we download your videos, "and put them on hard disks, "and distribute it to other groups?" I said, "Yeah, not only can you do that, "but there's this other guy who just emailed me "literally 4 minutes ago. "Why don't you send him a hard drive?" Literally, in about 4 minutes of forwarding emails, I got a letter from the group. It's called [viewconnect.org], in Uganda, a week later, saying, "We have the hard drive from that group "at Cisco, [World Possible]." Literally, it just happened with a couple of email forwards, "and the kids in Uganda love it." I did nothing. (laughter) I did absolutely nothing. I forwarded a couple of emails between people. We're at this period in ... and I want this ... This is my story, but I want you to think about this could kind of be your story as well, because we're at this point in where technology is, and how society is getting interconnected, where people are just waking up, and they're realizing, "Gee. That's there. That's there. "If we put those two things together, "and take it over there, that's free gold. "We're turning lead into gold with no cost for anybody." I think Khan Academy is just one small sliver of what could be done. I think there's a whole set of dimensions. I think the people in this room probably could think of ... You've been immersed in this from ... You're immersed in it right now, in whatever you want to call it, web 2.0. You understand this. It makes sense to you. I think there's no reason why everyone in this room couldn't do something similar, although I don't know in what form it might take. We can talk more about that later. Khan Academy, that's the organic story of how it happened, how I ended up here. Somewhere in there, I showed up with the software and the videos at Ryanne's office. I said, "Can you use this for the Peninsula Bridge?" At first, she's like, "Does it work on Macs? "Because we only have Macs. If it doesn't work on Macs ..." (laughter) Actually, it didn't work on Macs at the time, but I said, "Well, I think it does." It's a little part of salesmanship you have to learn early on. (laughter) Anyway. If you think, it's not necessarily [unintelligible]. (laughter) Anyway. We got it working on Macs. It was used at Peninsula Bridge. Actually, that was a tremendously powerful experience there, because at Peninsula Bridge, we saw that pattern that I saw with Nadia. There's a chart. Actually, I'll show the chart. Well, I won't show the chart. It's small and all of that. The big takeaway ... and this leads into where education is going. Right now, when you learn, there's just snapshots. You get assessed at certain points in your life. Those assessments tell you whether you're good at math or bad at math, or good at reading or bad at reading. What we saw when we dealt with the students at Peninsula Bridge, who had a whole spectrum of backgrounds, is that when you started everyone at 1+1=2, and then let them progress at their own pace, that there were some students who had just very, very basic deficiencies. They just didn't understand negative numbers, or they didn't understand borrowing, or I guess it's called regrouping, or however you want to call it. They didn't understand subtracting numbers. In a traditional learning model, when those students get to algebra ... I think they were rising 7th or 8th graders. You could have the best algebra teacher on the planet, and you can be the smartest student on the planet, but if you are having a basic weakness in negative numbers, or subtracting numbers, that conversation, you're just going to be talking past each other. The teacher's going to get frustrated. The teacher's going to wonder what they're doing wrong. The student's going to wonder, "Why do I not get this when everyone else gets this?" The main issue is this core weakness, very early on in their careers, that can't be addressed the way the current system is structured. Once again, it's no one's fault. It's all a by-product of being able to get people in a room, and being able to have one teacher teach 10, 20, 30 students. But, the exciting thing is over the next 10, 15 years, through technology, I think some of this can be addressed. When I talk about technology, I don't want to give anyone the impression that I want to take the human out of the equation. I think it's the opposite. I think what technology will allow us to do is let the human be the human, and the technology will take away all the minutia, take away all of the things that it's hard for a teacher to do, whether it's writing exams, or grading papers, or trying to assess what the core weak points are in a student. Let the technology do that, and then let the teacher go in and be that mentor, be what I was with Nadia. Guide them and really focus, and give them that instruction that the videos and the software could never do. I want to make that very clear. Sometimes people see me as this background about potentially robot. I'm the kind of guy that people think wants robots to take over the world, and whatever. (laughter) Nothing can be further from the truth. One question I get a lot from, especially when I started off, was people asking, 1,"Why are you doing this?" And 2, "How do you know that this is working?" I have a lot of data, and I could show you the data, but that would bore you. The single-biggest thing that I think has been motivating me, and I think has proved that it's working is some of the letters I get. I'll just read a couple of letters. I feel a little bit awkward about doing this because it's kind of self-praise. My wife has made me very conscientious about self-praise. (laughter) I want you to think of how I would feel reading this, working at a hedge fund, where all day, the best thing I could get is maybe a couple extra dollars bonus from my boss. He never writes me a letter like this. (laughter) Let me read. These are mind-blowing. The point here is I want you to realize that Internet and web technologies can touch people in tremendously meaningful ways. "Hello, Sal. My 12-year-old son has autism, "and has had terrible time with math. "We've tried everything, viewed everything, bought everything. "Well, we stumbled across your video on decimals, "and it got through. Then we went onto dreaded fractions. "Again, he got it. We couldn't believe it. "He was so excited. It's your soothing voice and calm manner," (laughter) "coupled with an easy-going explanation and examples. "I can't say thank you enough. You are a hero." Once again, I didn't jump into a burning building. I didn't save someone's kitten from a rooftop. I'm not G.I. Joe. (laughter) This person--while I'm sleeping, or eating lunch, or at work analyzing financial statements for my hedge fund -- this person is calling me a hero, with no extra effort [unintelligible]. Here's another one. I'll just read this one. This one is almost ... When I read this, this is pretty much what sealed the deal for me to quit my job. I got this in August of '09, and I quit 2 weeks later, just because I realized if people are being touched in this way, I've got to be able to figure out a way to do this full-time. "Mr. Khan. No teacher has done me any good. "This may sound harsh, but I mean it quite literally. "I was force-fed medication to keep me from talking, "and chastised for not speaking out when called on. "Where I'm from, blacks are not welcome "with open arms into schools. "My mother and her sisters had to go to a small shack, "2 hours from home, when they went to school. "About 5 years ago, my family collected enough money "to move from where I was born, "so that I could have a chance at an education, "and living a real life. "But, without a real mastery of elementary math, "I was slow to progress. "I am now in college, and learning more "than I ever have in my life. "But an inadequate math background "has been holding me back. "I found the Khan Academy in June of 2009." This is literally 6 months ago. "Right after I had completed Math-141, "a college algebra course, "I spent the entire summer on your YouTube page. "I just wanted to thank you for everything you're doing." Once again, "You are a Godsend." I don't know what to even say. That makes me feel awkward. (laughter) "Last week, I tested for a math placement exam, "and I am now in Honors Math-200." This is the [unintelligible]. "No question was answered incorrectly." This goes from someone ... It's mind-blowing. "My placement-test holder was so impressed "by the breadth of my knowledge of math, "that he said I should be in linear algebra. "Mr. Khan, I can say, with any doubt, "you've changed my life and the lives of everyone in my family." This is happening through the Internet. This is something you can reach people. It doesn't have to be through education. I think any time that you interact with people, and they can see humanity, you are fostering world peace. I want to finish off with things that you can do. I promise I would throw out some tangible ideas. The first thing is y'all could do exactly what I did, teach things, even teach mathematics. Different types of teachers, people respond to different types of instruction all of the time. Your take on things might connect with people and you in innovative ways. Teach English. There's no better way to empower people in the developing world to participate in the global economy than learning English. That's something I think everyone in this room could do. Set up Skype buddies, so that you can start interacting with people across the world. Even better, try to get people in Iran and Israel to interact with each other, or Pakistan and India to interact with each other. That is very tangible world peace. That's something that you can go home, right now, and do from your living room. You could ... One idea that I threw out ... Record videos, little screenplays, 3-minute videos, and I think everyone in this room collectively could get the job done in a couple of weeks, where y'all just use SAT words. Use them flagrantly. (laughter) The idea being ... It would be cheesy, and it would be silly, and it would be ridiculous, but I guarantee you, 1, to the process of making those videos, you're going to do a lot better on the SAT verbal section, but even more importantly, it'll be used by your peers, probably future young women at Castilleja, and even more interestingly, I guarantee you, if they are smart, and funny, but rough, and genuine, and human, that people all over the world, very likely will start to use it, and you will be empowering them to perform well on things that really do matter. Hopefully, through my story ... and you do appreciate this idea that y'all are in a position to go home right now, without millions of dollars, without governmental support, to start something that has the potential, over the next 5-10 years, to touch millions of people. Even if it doesn't touch millions of people, you should ... If it just touches your direct community, and your direct friends and family, that alone makes it worthwhile. I thank y'all very much for having me. I'm open to any questions. (applause) If anyone has any questions or ... Oh. Yeah? Female: Do you think that you'll ever do anything like history lessons or English lessons in Khan Academy? Sal: Yes. That's actually on my to-do list on my whiteboard. I want history lessons, 1, just because I think there's this huge gap between the news and what goes on in history class right now, where the news is these 30-second sound bites, and history class, you start off with Mohenjo-daro and Harappa. If you're lucky, you might get to World War 2. There's this huge gap between that and ... I don't think that happens here at Castilleja. I never got beyond World War 2 in my history. That leaves this huge gap in why is the world the way it is right now? Actually, I would like to do a little 10 minutes on Israel and Palestine conflict, 10 minutes on Indian ... Obviously, these are very touchy issues, and I'm going to have a lot of caveats out there. I actually have a whole set of videos on intelligent design and evolution. I keep [unintelligible]. I don't want to skew your opinion. But anyway, I do intend to do that. I do want to do grammar. I want to do everything. I think all of y'all should join in. Female: Sorry. Female: How do you know so much on all of these subjects? (laughter) Sal: My wife would be rolling her eyes right now. (laughter) There's a small set of things that I do know based on my background. I was a mathlete in high school, on some level. (laughter) Other things, like biology, I took the courses. I got an A in the course, but that doesn't mean I'm an expert on biology. What I do is ... and this is what's really fun for me. The other aspect that really motivates me is I get to sit and learn things when I never learned them before. For example, I did some videos on entropy a few weeks ago. Entropy was something that I never understood properly in high school. I could write the right words on the exam, but I never quite understood what it meant. I literally pondered it for 2 weeks. I would call up my thermodynamics professor friends at Standford and MIT. I was like, "Let's have a conversation about entropy." We would do that. Then, over the course of time [unintelligible], I was like, "Okay. Now I get entropy," and I would make the videos on them. A lot of it, it's a learning process for me, and that's what makes it so much fun. Female: Mr. Khan. Can you repeat the questions that are asked? Sal: Oh. Sorry. Just so y'all know, the question was, "How do I know so much?" (laughter) That was the ... Yeah. Female: When exactly did your YouTube videos become the brand, Khan Academy? When was that transition? Sal: Oh, you're one of the few people that refer to it as a brand, but that's exciting. The question is, "When did the YouTube videos "become the brand, Khan Academy?" I think I was at a birthday party for a friend. He was the first person to say, "What you're doing with your cousins, "this is actually something that could be generally useful. "You should do something with it, "make it into some type of an organization." The Khan Academy is a non-for-profit organization, but when he told me that, that was the first time that I thought about the idea, "Wow, this could be a virtual school, "or this could be something." Since it's a nonprofit organization, I was like, "Well, gee. There's no ownership. "How do I make sure they don't fire me one day?" I said, "Well, let me name it after myself." (laughter) Female: How'd you develop a curriculum for each course that could be used for people all over the world [unintelligible]? Sal: The question was, "How did I develop a curriculum?" I actually get a lot of ... I actually talked to the State of California, and that's the first question they asked, "Where's the curriculum come from?" It initially started very organically. It was math and science as I had known it, with the theory being if I'm able to convey that understanding in those connections, that that's a good understanding. YouTube had 10-minute time limits on me, initially. That was super fortuitous because it forced me to 10 minutes. What that allowed me to do is make the concepts very granular and short. Miami Dade County has actually used them for teacher training. It's very easy to map it to almost any curriculum now because the videos just cover one small concept at a time. You could say, "Oh. The standard 2.3.2 "in the California Standards, that's these 4 videos." I don't have ... but some of the things I am doing now, I do look at textbooks. I do look at what the AP Curriculum, the standards are, so I do try to make it so it's useful for tests that people are going to have to take. Up there, in the [black]. Female: How do you make it available to people [unintelligible]? Sal: The question is, "How do I make it available "to people who don't speak English?" English is the only language I speak well. I can laughably speak Hindi [unintelligible], but that wouldn't do the job. That's an excellent question. People have come out of the wood works. This is another thing I actually forgot to talk about. People have come out of the wood works over the last 3 months to start translating the videos. Because, in the videos, you don't see my face, the translations work really well. They look like they were natively spoken. There's actually a chemistry teacher in Uruguay, who has started translating the chemistry videos. He set up a "Khan Academy en Espanol" channel. It's just happening organically. Translators are [unintelligible] Polish, German ... Once again, I'm doing nothing. All I'm just saying is, "Go ahead," and people are translating it. Female: Do you still find that there are some children who need personal tuition? Are you still doing that at all? Sal: I am no longer directly interfering. The question is, "Do I find that there's still "some children who need personal tuition?" Kind of what I was used to doing with Nadia and her brothers. I still call them up and check in on them, but I haven't been doing that 1-on-1 session with them anymore. They're all in high school now. They've, I think, gotten over their hurdles, but I' not. I think ... I don't want to make it sound like this solves all the problems. I think this gets a lot of problems out of the way, so that the personal time with a teacher or a tutor can be a lot more productive. I'm sure there are people who can always benefit from that personal instruction. Yeah. Right here. How about you in front? Yeah. You. Female: When you're making the videos, how do decide which concept you're going to cover next? Sal: The question is, "When I make the videos, "how do I decide what concept I cover next?" Some of it ... I get emails all the time, and I take requests. I'm telling this to all of y'all. If y'all have a particularly hairy problem, that I haven't ... Send it to me, seriously. I literally put your email up, and we'll do a video on it, and it'll be up there. I do take requests, but a lot of it is my mood. I'm doing this almost out of ... It's fun for me, so I do what's interesting, where I think a lot of people would find value from it. The simple answer is, what I feel like teaching is what I teach, which is a huge luxury, I think. Oh, you. Female: Where do you see the Khan Academy going in the next 5 or 10 years? Sal: Yeah, where I see it going. I could talk for another hour. Right now, there's the videos. I intend to keep making videos, several hundred a year. I really want to cover everything. Oh, the question was, "Where do I see Khan Academy going "over the next 5, 10 years?" I'm going to keep making videos. The software piece, I want to build out. I'm talking to some philanthropic groups about potentially being able to hire a small team of engineers to build out the software so people can practice, and we can get data on what works and what doesn't work. Then, this actually ties into world peace. What I want to do is overlay that with the community, where people are using the vidoes. People are using the software, but if they still don't get it, the site knows what they're having difficulty with, and it can match them up with someone else. You are a 9th grader in [Taron]. You have trouble with systems of equations. There's a brilliant teacher who is a 10th grader, in Tel Aviv, and we'll connect the two of you. Y'all will have a session. Y'all will talk about mathematics, and respect each other, and do well. As you can imagine, over time, that can foster a whole set of other things. Actually, I'm talking to these philanthropic groups because there's potential of going to rural villages where you can't find algebra teachers, where students, even if you build them the best school on the planet, and you give them the teachers, they're not going to show up because they have to help out their families during the harvest, or work, or whatever else. The idea is really have a school-in-the-box, where kids can learn on their own time, and then the philanthropic group can actually take a step back, and the data comes back to them, and see what the kids in the villages are actually doing. I envision this world-wide virtual school. That's my dream. It might even have physical incarnations. But, the physical incarnations are just places to plug into this world-wide school that spans all continents. That's my dream. Any ... right there. Female: Have you ever felt like, with all the [unintelligible] and stuff, that you need to hire people to help you with [unintelligible]? Sal: I have, many ... The question is "Have I ever thought that I need to hire someone to help me?" The answer is, yes. I have. Right now, it's being funded by the Salman Khan Bank of America checking account, (laughter) and they're pretty stingy. (laughter) I do want to hire people, especially on the software side. I've actually thought about bringing other people for on the content side, even in English. It's actually harder than I thought. I have a lot of friends who would probably be brilliant instructors, but something about the YouTube format, they start to freeze up. I think one of the big values about it is when I started making this, I wasn't getting paid to do it. It wasn't stressed about it. I was like, "This is for Nadia and Armand. "They're going to take what I give them." (laughter) I literally ... I'm answering the phone. I'm talking to telemarketers on some of these early videos. It has this very ... You hear my wife yelling at me sometimes in the background. (laughter) It's really low-key, but I think that's why it's connected with people. The answer is I would like to hire up a small team, probably 5 or 10 people, eventually. Oh, our last question. Right there in the back. Female: Have you ever considered visiting the rural areas where your videos are being watched [unintelligible]? Sal: The question is, "Have I ever considered visiting "the rural areas where the videos are being watched firsthand?" I would love to do that. I have an irrational fear of flying, which I need to get over. Other than that, I would love to. In particular, the group in Uganda, they seem to be doing tremendously. They send me pictures all of the time, but nothing would be more exciting than to do that. Actually, my mother's village, which is outside of Calcutta, I would love to ... they're apparently using it on some level over there as well. I would love to go visit there, and see how it's being used. Thank you, very much. (applause)