Why Sal Khan started Khan Academy | Q&A with Ladder
This week, members of Ladder had the opportunity to meet Sal Khan, the founder of Khan Academy, and ask him about the future of ed-tech, flaws in the current system, and his story building a not-for-profit for the past 15 years. Apply here to join our community and meet our amazing lineup of guest speakers, including founders like Sal!
Sal Khan is the Founder & CEO of Khan Academy, a not-for-profit with a mission of providing a free, world-class education for anyone, anywhere. He’s now also working on schoolhouse.world, a new project he started to help students get personalized help via online tutoring during COVID-19.
How did you found Khan Academy, and how did it grow to the product it is now?
In 2004, my original background was in tech, and then after business school I ended up working as an analyst at a hedge fund. As that was getting off the ground, one of my cousins, who was 12 years old, said that she needed help with math. Naturally, I offered to tutor her, remotely.
That worked out really well, and word spread through the family like a wildfire, until soon, there were 10 or 15 cousins, family, and friends from around the country that I was helping. More than anything, I had a lot of fun connecting with them on a human level and being able to help them cover gaps in their knowledge that had accumulated over time.
I soon began programming some practice problems for them to do, and that first software I wrote was the earliest version of Khan Academy. The 2005 version had nothing to do with videos, but in 2006, a friend suggested that I make videos to supplement these exercises that I was creating. I initially thought it was a horrible idea, but I gave it a shot, and that marked the start of the YouTube channel in 2006.
In 2008, I set up Khan Academy as a not-for-profit, and by 2009 I quit my day job to do this full time. I had a bit of delusional optimism that this could scale to millions — although the first year was really hard, I had been receiving letters from around the world from students who watched my videos and realized that closing this education gap was something I was really going to commit to. In the past decade, Khan Academy has gained a lot of traction and we’ve been working hard to make this an amazing learning experience for our 120 million and growing users.
What do you think are the key factors of democratizing education?
One issue I see is that around the world, and even in the US, a lot of kids don’t have access to school, or if they do, it’s a nominal one. Some schools might rarely teach an AP Calculus or AP Biology course, and even if they do, the classes aren’t taught at a high expectation and limited students go on to take the AP exam. A lot of schools don’t even offer the courses that we took for granted, like Physics, Algebra II, Precalculus, etc.
So, one thing that Khan Academy has always tried to offer is accessible content at a high global standard. Now, the next issue becomes that you can offer great content, but what about the people who are just showing up at a high school or college level course with no prior rigor? This is where the personalization in the mastery learning of Khan Academy becomes really useful, and using an approach where people can start at the basics and learn all the way up to advanced concepts with little to no gaps in education.
After that, you can ask, How do we make this engaging?. That’s where the game mechanics of Khan Academy comes in, as well as intrinsic and extrinsic motivators and human to human connection. For the last part, this is exactly what we are trying to do with the schoolhouse.world project.
Lastly, we can ask, How do we connect education to opportunity?. Namely, it can be very demotivating to learn a lot of amazing things, but gain no recognition or reward for it. Using this knowledge and merit to get into college, get scholarships, and get jobs and internships would be super motivating and inspirational for students, and a proper reward to those who earned the education. schoolhouse.world and some future features of Khan Academy are really trying to make this come into fruition by giving students that push to advance their career with educational merits from our products.
What are some things you noticed are different from founding a for-profit vs. a not-for-profit?
During my time at Harvard Business School, I only “flunked” one class, which was social entrepreneurship. I was pretty cynical about the whole not-for-profit space, and didn’t see huge value in it to solve big problems pressing society. My first job was as a hedge fund analyst, which is about as “for-profit” as you can get. During my time there, I saw how much capital structure and leadership effects what the company does, and how much an organization can change from founder to founder.
When it comes to education and healthcare, there are room for for-profits in both, but the main goal is to reduce as much friction as possible in the space and give people access to the resources they need. In both of these spaces, the beneficiary, the payer, and the decision maker tend to be different people, which makes the market forces a little weird. Even if you do a lot of market forces, I think most of us have a value system where we believe, if there’s a human being who wants to learn, they should be given the resources immediately and with as little friction as possible.
In 2009, when things were the hardest financially, we thought about signing off on a couple investors who wanted to make Khan Academy a social “for-profit” type of company. However, the more we talked about monetization strategies and where profit would come from, the more I thought about those letters students had sent me, and I asked myself:
“Why would I put a gate on these resources?”
Then, I took a pause and thought about what Khan Academy would look like 50 years in the future, in an ideal world. What if Khan Academy could be an institution that exists on the Internet and can serve billions of people, even after my time there?
How important do you think it is for a student to feel connected to their teacher?
At the end of the day, to really learn, your mind has to be open and trusting. We’ve all been in the situation where someone we know is trying to explain something for the first time, and we’re skeptical of if that person is going to work for us. So, for that reason, we do believe consistency with teachers is key to building that trust and reducing other friction.
With schoolhouse.world, we’re already seeing that relationship and cohort-model, where students can gravitate towards tutors they like and really build a connection with them. In the future, we’re planning on explicitly implementing a cohort-model system into schoolhouse.world where students can form groups of people with similar goals and one “leader”, and come in and out as they please.
What are your thoughts on the future of measuring academic success (GPA, SAT’s, etc)?
Our current academic system likes to boast a “growth mindset” which appreciates failure, but also brands students that get a “C”, once, for the rest of their lives. There are at least three dimensions of the current system which we can talk about:
1. Can we prune down what is expected for everyone to learn, to maximize success in the real world? Should synthetic division always be taught in Algebra, and does everyone need to take Calculus? Maybe, Statistics would be more applicable, or classes like Law, and Finance, which are just as mentally rigorous.
2. How are you going to standardize grading? From state to state, school to school, or even teacher to teacher, grading metrics and standards are all over the place. This is where mastery on Khan Academy, or even getting certified as a tutor from schoolhouse.world can be really insightful, as its a rich and standardized process of assessment.
3. In the American community college system, 70% of students have to take remediation at the middle school level. These are kids trying go through all the motions correctly in school and achieve high grades, but are failed by flaws in the fundamental system. As it is now, schools are not based on achieving mastery of basic concepts, but instead making students do all they can simply to pass the class. After years of non-mastery of basic concepts, there is little merit to taking much more advanced classes, when the underlying theories are not strongly understood.
What does the future of Khan Academy look like?
In 10 years, I’m hoping Khan Academy becomes the plumbing of the global education system, where billions of students around the world can go to learn at their own time and place. I also hope that we have very clear pathways to getting real credit for your knowledge: from attaining mastery on Khan Academy to getting certified on schoolhouse.world. In the future, our goal is that any student that can become a schoolhouse tutor, or has mastered all the Khan Academy courses, can get real college credit — and maybe even a diploma that complements their standard schooling.
