Dan Morrell: Founded in 2008 by Sal Khan (MBA 2003), Khan Academy is a nonprofit with a simple mission: to provide a free, world-class education to anyone, anywhere. Today, more than 135 million registered users around the world use Khan Academy across 190 countries and 50 languages. In this special edition of Skydeck honoring recipients of the Alumni Achievement Award, Associate Editor Julia Hanna talks to Khan about how the nonprofit got its start and the role it played when the pandemic shut down schools around the world.

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JH: Khan Academy has grown into a digital platform that not only offers video lessons, but educational tools and tests for teachers, students, and parents through its Khan Academy Districts program, which at last count was in use by more than 280 districts across 45 states. But its origin story is rather simple, even accidental, as Khan relates in his TED Talk from 2011.

TED Talk: I was an analyst at a hedge fund and I was in Boston and I was tutoring my cousins in New Orleans remotely. And I started putting the first YouTube videos up, really just as kind of a nice to have, just kind of a supplement for my cousin, something that might give them a refresher. And as soon as I put those first YouTube videos up, something interesting happened. Actually, a bunch of interesting things happened. The first was the feedback from my cousins. They told me that they preferred me on YouTube than in person.

JH: The lessons allowed his cousins to pause, rewind, and absorb the material at their own pace. Before long, he was hearing from complete strangers that the videos had made a real difference in their ability to master material they’d struggled with previously. Another value became clear about a year after he began filming his lessons.

Sal Khan: In 2005, Hurricane Katrina hit, and those same cousins were dispersed to Texas and Florida. And so, in many ways I was their safety net education system while they were refugees, I guess, with a lowercase “R,” right. They were fine, but it was still tough for them.

JH: With demand growing, Khan eventually left his full-time job as a hedge fund analyst to devote himself full-time to Khan Academy, bootstrapping it for the first nine months before receiving early support from Ann and John Doerr (MBA 1976), the Gates Foundation, Tata Trusts, and others. Today, Khan Academy is the established, go-to education platform for learners of all ages. But two years ago, the organization faced a test, one that recalled the role those video lessons played in the lives of his displaced cousins.

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News clips:

With the increased number of Coronavirus cases, some area schools and universities are closed this week.

Shutting down to help stop community spread…

Across the country, at least 21 million kids, now home from school.

Students are often not at high risk, but their parents, grandparents and the community at large could be.

The superintendent cited the national emergency…

We are increasing class time, but increasing it at home and fulfilling our obligations through distance learning.

JH: Khan Academy stepped up to fill the gaps when school went online around the world in 2020.

SK: I remember it was actually February of 2020 that we first caught wind that Khan Academy might become very relevant in what was going on in the world. We got an email from a teacher in South Korea, telling us how he was using Khan Academy to keep his students learning during their nationwide school closures. And we knew that this pandemic, this coronavirus, was going on in Asia, but it wasn’t being reported in the United States that literally countries were shutting down their schools physically. And I said, wow, if this thing actually spreads, this could happen everywhere, including the United States.

So, it’s like a week or two later, out here in Santa Clara County in the middle of Silicon Valley, I believe it was the first case of community spread in the United States. It was that weekend of the first week of March, California Public Schools were going to shut down. And so, we started stress testing our infrastructure. We said, okay, maybe in a really wild scenario, we might have three times the usage or something like that. And then that Monday hit, when many states started to shut down physically. And then by the end of the week, pretty much the entire country and much of the world had, and our usage on school days went from a normal school day of about 30 million learning minutes a day, to about 85 million learning minutes per day.

But then we also realized there was just a lack of leadership and an information gap on what should people be doing? What should parents be doing? What can schools be doing? And so we started putting out things beyond the scope of Khan Academy around, you know, how can you organize pandemic schooling if your school district hasn’t figured out how to do this well yet?

JH: Khan says that in the recovery phase that we’re undergoing now, tools like Khan Academy will become even more relevant as we search for ways to rebuild the education system. And for that, we'll have to recognize what’s changed for the educators on the front lines, and the kids who need their support.

What are you hearing from teachers in terms of how they're approaching their work differently?

SK: What we see throughout the system, and I’ve observed it directly talking to teachers: extreme fatigue. People have theories about what’s causing it…two years on Zoom, every week having changing COVID guidelines. Not just what’s going on in your work environment at the school as a teacher, but what’s going on in your home environment. Just having a background anxiety that I think everyone has had. But teachers have to be on. A lot of days, if I’m feeling a little bit off it’s okay. I can kind of sit in the meetings and go through the motions. But if you’re a teacher, it’s on, there isn’t a lot of a cushion there. And so what we’re seeing is everyone is incredibly tired right now. Where we saw this huge spike of usage of Khan Academy at the early phases of the pandemic, I think as people started to have Zoom fatigue, we started to see in schools, some of that usage go down and then as we go into this year, you know, we can measure the learning time on Khan Academy directly.

There’s no way to directly measure the total aggregate learning time in the actual school system. But if I could, I would bet that has gone down dramatically. Kids also are incredibly tired. Some of them haven’t shown up, etc. Right now Khan Academy reaches tens of millions of students a month, over a hundred million a year. We want to be two things: We want to be, for billions of learners around the world, if they don’t have access to school at all—which we know happens in some parts of the world, or their school is not sufficient, or they’re not connecting with it in some way—we want to be a safety net education, world-class education, for free.

That’s part of our mission statement. And then if you do have access to a respectable school, which hopefully most kids will have, then we can supercharge that—that a lot of these assumptions around kids having to move at the same pace and you get an 80 percent in something and you didn’t understand it. You have that unfinished learning and then the system kind of ignores it.

And then you move on to the next concept. And eventually you don’t understand what’s going on in your algebra or your calculus class. We think we can supercharge that so that the traditional system can be less traditional, so to speak and serve a lot, lot more students. The pandemic, I think really underlined this need of needing a safety net educational system.

A majority of minority majority schools in America, I know that’s a mouthful, don’t offer calculus, don’t offer truly college preparatory science, don’t really offer algebra 2 in a truly college preparatory way. So that’s where you need a safety education system.

JH: At this moment, Khan feels the Academy is uniquely positioned to address those educational gaps and develop new services in response to the needs of students today, wherever they may be.

SK: Obviously the pandemic has caused massive dislocations in certain ways. Physical schools shut down. We see wars going on. Just yesterday, we had a meeting about what we’re going to be doing in Ukraine. These dislocations are happening. And the pandemic has been a catalyst for us to think more holistically. How do we deepen what we can offer? So we offer all of this practice and feedback and videos and articles from pre–K through the core of college. We do it in a way that’s adaptive to the student, that has game mechanics. We’re also started a new not-for-profit called schoolhouse.world, which is about how can you get free coaching and tutoring. We’re just trying to fill in all the gaps of what would a real free world-class education look like, either if it’s a safety net or if it’s in conjunction with the traditional system?

JH: Tell me more about schoolhouse.world. It’s a peer-to-peer platform for people interested in volunteering their time to tutor and students who need extra help, correct?

SK: It’s a way to get free tutoring. There’s different modalities of free tutoring. You can get anyone who has children who need help, right now, it’s 13 years and over, but there’s math, science, and SAT help. Live tutoring. You can get on particular subjects. You can join a cohort that meets regularly. And we now in the US, well, anyone in the world, but it’s based on US time zones right now, in the evening have free homework help.

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JH: I asked Sal Khan what he’s learned since starting the Academy, and what’s changed.

SK: I think the biggest change of the last couple of years…it has changed people’s views about education. You hear people talk about unfinished learning, which means that students need a way to finish that learning, which means that you need more personalization. It means that people are starting to think more about mastery learning and competency versus just sitting in a chair.

JH: In a 2015 TED talk, Khan advocates for mastery learning in the classroom as a way to ensure students build a solid foundation before being shuttled along to the next concept. Doing so, he says, can change a student’s mindset toward math and other subjects and tap into their full potential.

TED talk: We have the tools to do it. Students need an explanation at their own time and pace? There’s an on-demand video for that. They need practice? They need feedback? There’s adaptive exercises readily available for students. And when that happens, all sorts of neat things happen. One, the students can actually master the concepts, but they’re also building their growth mindset, they’re building their grit, their perseverance, they’re taking agency over their learning. And all sorts of beautiful things can start to happen in the actual classroom. Instead of it being focused on the lecture, students can interact with each other. They can get deeper mastery over the material. They can go into simulations, Socratic dialogue.

SK: The reality is students have always just sat in a chair year after year, and they’re accumulating unfinished learning. And there’s a lot of evidence of that. Eleventh or 12th grade math, that’s sixth or seventh grade math. So in a situation of non-mastery learning, of seat-time learning, these gaps will become debilitating. And even those kids who sit through classes called algebra 1, algebra 2, geometry, sometimes pre-calculus, trig, sometimes calculus—they go to college and it’s the first time mastery learning is being even referred to and they’re being told, “Hey, you don’t have a foundation yet to even really learn 9th or 10th grade math. So go back.” Huge, huge, huge waste of resources, and time, and demoralizing for kids.

These notions of competency-based learning? That it doesn't matter how long you sat in a chair, but do you know the material? Do you have the skill or not—regardless of your age and there’s, there’s many opportunities for you and pathways for you to develop that? I think you’re seeing movement there. We at Khan Academy are exploring that aggressively. We’re looking at ways, for example, that if you get mastery on Khan Academy, that you could get credit for, say, college algebra or physics or chemistry or biology. I actually see no reason why you couldn’t get your core of college for free on a platform like Khan Academy—at your own time, at your own pace. If you need more support, you go to schoolhouse.world, you can get literally live human tutoring, coaching. So that world, which I think we’re already entering and in five or 10 years will be very robust, across many subjects and grades, obviously can be a game changer—a game changer in terms of convenience, a game changer in terms of cost. And then, the reality is, if you’ve actually mastered your first two years of college, you’re quite educated. Like, do you really need the next two years? So many people go through the four years, but then if I asked them in year five, what classes did you even take? Much less do you remember what you learned? Most people will not remember.

There’s a chance that in the next five, 10 years, the traditional institutions that navigate well are going to do just fine, but I think you’re going to see a lot of alternative pathways and new credentials that really matter that are competency-based.

JH: You're leading this organization. So many people depend on it. You have your employees, you have a lot of stuff going on. And I wondered, what is it that sort of keeps you going? What do you like about what you do?

SK: It’s not laughable to make some of these grandiose statements about being the global safety net for the global education system or being able to reach in our lifetimes, billions of learners in every corner of the world and really empower them. As a high level, that’s where I love spending my energy. And then within that there’s things that I love doing. I still make content. So I still get to geek out. I still get to immerse myself in chemistry or biology or civics. Some people ask me what are you going to do after Khan Academy? I’m like, die? I don’t know. I hope that’s a long, long time from now.

This episode of Skydeck was edited by Jocelyn Gonzalez from PRX productions. Skydeck is produced by the External Relations Department at Harvard Business School. It is available on iTunes or wherever you get your favorite podcast. For more information or to find archived episodes, visit alumni.hbs.edu/skydeck.

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