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Homeschooled

Image by John Ritter
About a month before schools began to close in the United States in response to the pandemic, Sal Khan (MBA 2003) (pictured above, right), founder and CEO of the online learning platform Khan Academy, began to see traffic pick up in Asia. “Then the week before the school closures happened—Santa Clara, where I live, was one of the first counties that had a stay-in-place order—it became one of those situations where you look left and look right, and think, ‘I guess this is us. Students are going to need to keep learning,’” says Khan. “It's got to be accessible and free. It's got to have breadth and depth, and be a quality, trustworthy resource.” Khan Academy has developed daily schedules and learning plans for students of all ages, runs webinars to support teachers and parents, and offers homeroom livestreams so that learners feel connected. In addition to helping students, Khan wants parents to feel “Oh, I can do this. This isn’t impossible.” Today, Khan Academy usage is up about 250 percent, student and teacher registration rates are six times higher than normal, and parent registrations are 20 times normal.
At HBS, Senior Lecturer of Business Administration John Jong-Hyun Kim (MBA 1993) saw the School pivot its entire MBA and doctoral curriculum to an online model in just ten days—a move informed by years of experience developing HBS Online, the Harvard Business Analytics Program, and other online platforms. “We have this opportunity now to expand on what we have done thus far and think about, ‘How do you make this a truly transformative experience if we need to continue with online learning in the fall?’” says Kim, who teaches the second-year MBA course Transforming Education through Social Entrepreneurship and is co-chair of the Public Education Leadership Project, a collaboration of HBS and Harvard Graduate School of Education.
Here, Khan and Kim talk about the successes and failures of online education brought to light by the pandemic—and what education might look like on the other side.
When schools reopen, how do we get K–12 students back up to speed academically?
Sal Khan: As we look to the next several months, we are thinking about how students are going to show up to school with huge gaps in their knowledge. Some kids will keep learning and might even accelerate. Others won’t do anything at all. So schools are going to need better diagnostics and ways to remediate students who are behind grade levels. That’s something we can do. There’s also a possibility that we have school closures again in the fall. If that happens, we want to help districts, teachers, and parents to think about how to do this in a more planned way.
Math is where, historically, you see the biggest learning loss occur, and when those skills atrophy, it’s very hard to engage in the next level. Everything builds on the level before it. That’s true in other subjects as well—reading is next on the list, but you can engage in reading slightly ahead of where you are and catch up. At the beginning of every school year, getting kids back up to speed has always been an issue, but it’s going to be that much bigger this year. If I were a district administrator, I would double down on math time for those first few weeks, maybe the whole year, so kids can get back to the level of preparedness they need to be at.
John Jong-Hyun Kim: One of the things that’s distressing is that with public school closures, many districts have decided not to teach new material. For equity reasons, many districts have focused on just reviewing material presented up to the time of closure. Students are going to have to do a lot of catching up and will need more time on task when they return to the classroom. They’re going to be at different places when they start the school year—far more than ever before—and schools are going to have to plan ahead in order to get students back up to speed.
Once we’re on the other side of the pandemic, what do you think the biggest takeaways will be in terms of the successes and failures of online education?
SK: One clear impact is that at-home access to devices and the internet is a must-have. I hope this crisis changes our mindset about that. Khan Academy doesn’t solve that problem, but we can use our soapbox to help advocate for that. There seems to be writing on the wall that this will happen, and not just for academic success. It’s critical to stay connected to the world, to be economically viable, and to be able to do certain types of gig work.
We’ve been talking for a long time about an ideal world where learning is not bound by time and space. We never thought that online should be a replacement for education in the physical classroom, especially for younger students. They need that support, that community, but in terms of the core learning part of it, I think this crisis will open folks’ minds all the more to using online tools for learning.
JJHK: I agree. This experience is pushing us to explore how technology-driven instruction can help the students. Previously, that wasn’t happening as much. But I also think this period has given us a renewed appreciation for what teachers do, especially in the K–12 arena, and their importance in society. Parents all of a sudden have become teachers at home, and they’re all saying, “Oh, my gosh. This is really hard.” I certainly hope there is going to be more thinking about the role of the teacher and the role that technology can play in personalizing the content. Helping students develop resiliency and empathy—things that human beings do well—combined with technology that offers personalized instruction, is what I hope will come out of this.
Do you see online learning dominating the education sector 10 to 20 years from now, or will there be a more blended approach given that socialization and coaching in the classroom are still so important for children?
SK: I think it’s going to be a blend. We started the Khan Lab School because we believe so much in in-person instruction, especially with the younger age groups. In terms of higher education, by the time kids are 18, 19, 20, they have the agency to learn using online alone, in theory, but there are also benefits of community that a residential experience provides. But that raises the question about situations where people are going to commuter colleges purely to learn accounting, let’s say. So, if you want the throwing-the-Frisbee-in-the-quad experience, you can get that, but it’s not a forced thing—especially for kids who need to start making money sooner. If you think about online as a place where you learn in an even more personalized way, then you have this other aspect of your life where you create a rich experience. You could travel through Europe and Asia with a cohort of friends while you’re on Zoom with your professors. That sounds very compelling to me.
JJHK: I see a blended approach as well. Online learning will be embraced for all sorts of reasons, especially in the professional development world, but I think people will still really value the community and the social and emotional aspects of schooling. The one thing that this pandemic will help us reevaluate for ourselves is the definition of schooling and learning. This period has demonstrated that it is possible to learn lots of things in a remote environment on your own or through platforms like Zoom. The question will be, “Will this kind of change in our approach stick around for a while?” I certainly hope that online learning is not viewed as a temporary solution, but that it really gets integrated into a blended approach so we can leverage the personalization capabilities and efficiency of online learning and better leverage the skills of teachers and other adults in schools to provide coaching, targeted teaching, and social and emotional development support.
The current situation has highlighted inequity in educational resources. How do we close the digital divide created by economic disparity so all students can benefit from online learning opportunities?
JJHK: The pandemic has highlighted the incredible inequities that are out there—from lack of internet access to the disparities in educational opportunities. It’s an issue that we as a community, as a society, have to tackle. Free online platforms like Khan Academy and others are part of the solution, but not everybody can access these.
SK: In the past 10 years, schools have done a pretty good job of getting internet access and devices. The huge thing that this is surfacing is the gaps at home. In a high-need area, 50 to 60 percent of the kids might not have at-home access. We’re talking to some large foundations that are trying to think holistically, "How do we push for it?" The cost of a laptop is $300. Its useful life is easily five years, so that's $60 a year. You can put a little pressure on the telecom carriers for delivering internet at, say, $5 a month. So, for just over $100 a year, you can get a device and internet access for a home. It’s not a huge amount of money, and it would be a major leveling of the playing field in society.
Why is it important for the business community to help further online education and enhance technical fluency?
SK: It’s a major competitive issue for businesses. Do they have a trained workforce? Do they have an empowered workforce? In some of the training, do you even have basic computer skills? Some very good teachers aren’t as fluent with computer skills as we would like, so technical literacy is as foundational now as regular literacy. That’s going to give you a better workforce, and it’s not just for those in white-collar data analytics jobs. It’s also for the person working in the warehouse. You should be thinking about it for your competitive advantage.
JJHK: I wrote a case study on Code.org, which is a nonprofit organization that wants to make sure every student in America’s K–12 system has the opportunity to learn about computer science. There are millions of jobs available that are going unfilled because we don't have enough data scientists or computer programmers. Meanwhile, we have K–12 systems that don’t require students to take computer science to fulfill their graduation requirement, so there’s a disconnect. Just having a better alignment would be really helpful, and there are some efforts like that underway.
In spite of the hardships resulting from the pandemic, are you hopeful for the way it has made us reexamine how we teach and learn?
JJHK: I think we’re going to be reflecting on and learning from this experience for a long time. I studied Chinese history in college and have wondered how many pages all of this will occupy in a world history book. What will we say about this collective global experience and how will we as a community of citizens around the world get through this together? And then, what effect will this have on the education system? Can this be an opportunity for us to rethink how schooling should be done so that it can lead to a more equitable society? By nature, I’m an optimistic person, so I’m hoping that will be the case—that we will learn from this period about the strengths and limitations of online learning and use the lessons learned to help shape better ways to teach and learn.
SK: I run optimistic as well. In the short term, a lot of unfortunate things are happening, a lot of stressors on society, but in the long run, I think opportunities will come out of it, such as habits of learning not bound by time or space. I tend to take the silver-lining view that this might make us more resilient as a society.
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