In 2008, Salman Khan, then a young hedge-fund analyst with a master’s in computer science from M.I.T., started the Khan Academy, offering free online courses mainly in the STEM subjects — science, technology, engineering and mathematics.
Today the free electronic schoolhouse reaches more than 10 million users around the world, with more than 5,000 courses, and the approach has been widely admired and copied.
I spoke with Mr. Khan, 37, for more than two hours, in person and by
telephone. What follows is a condensed and edited version of our
conversations.
Q. How did the Kahn Academy begin?
A. In 2004, my 12-year-old cousin Nadia visited with my wife and me in Boston. She’s from New Orleans, where I grew up.
It
turned out Nadia was having trouble in math. She was getting tracked
into a slower math class. I don’t think she or her parents realized the
repercussions if she’d stayed on the slower track. I said, “I want to
work with you, if you are willing.” When Nadia went home, we began
tutoring by telephone.
Did you have background as a math educator?
No,
though I’ve had a passion for math my whole life. It got me to M.I.T.
and enabled me to get multiple degrees in math and engineering. Long
story shortened: Nadia got through what she thought she couldn’t. Soon
word got around the family that “free tutoring” was going on, and I
found myself working on the phone with about 15 cousins.
To
make it manageable, I hacked together a website where my cousins could
go to practice problems and I could suggest things for them to work on.
When I’d tutor them over the telephone, I’d use Yahoo Doodle, a program
that was part of Yahoo Messenger, so they could visualize the
calculations on their computers while we talked.
The
Internet videos started two years later when a friend asked, “How are
you scaling your lessons?” I said, “I’m not.” He said, “Why don’t you
make some videos of the tutorials and post them on YouTube?” I said,
“That’s a horrible idea. YouTube is for cats playing piano.”
Still,
I gave it try. Soon my cousins said they liked me more on YouTube than
in person. They were really saying that they found my explanations more
valuable when they could have them on demand and where no one would
judge them. And soon many people who were not my cousins were watching.
By 2008, I was reaching tens of thousands every month.
Youtube
is a search engine where producers can upload short videos at no cost.
Would the Khan Academy have been possible without this technology?
No.
Before YouTube, the cost of hosting streaming videos was incredibly
expensive. I wouldn’t have been able to afford the server space for that
much video — or traffic. That said, I was probably the 500th person to
show up on YouTube with educational videos. Our success probably had to
do with the technology being ready and the fact that my content
resonated with users.
In
your videos, the viewers never actually saw you — just cartoonlike
equations you’d drawn. The voice-overs were friendly and encouraging.
Had you taken the dread out of math instruction?
I
tried to strike a balance. There’s some STEM teaching where the lecture
is blah — no joy, no intonation. On the other side, you have people who
try to make it fun by making it less math-y. That’s often cheesy. I was
trying to get to the idea behind the math and say: “This is a really
interesting idea. Once you get it, it’s beautiful.”
Talk about the “studio” you built to record your videos.
It
was in a closet at my home. It had a $900 desktop from Best Buy and a
$200 microphone. I had a little pen tablet that I got from Amazon and
screen capture software. I drew on an art program on my computer while
talking into a microphone.
Around
2009, I left my job at the hedge fund to devote myself full time to
building the Khan Academy. I dreamed a lot. Then, one day, [the
philanthropist] Ann Doerr sent a text message. Something like “I’m at
the Aspen Ideas Festival and Bill Gates is on stage. For the last five minutes, he’s been talking about the Khan Academy, how he uses it for his kids.”
He ended up supporting us financially, allowing the Khan Academy to become a real organization.
How are Khan Academy tutorials different from MOOCs, the massive open online courses that many universities offer for free?
They
tend to be regular courses transplanted into the virtual world. They
tell you what to do in Week 1, Week 2. You take a final exam. Some
people pass. Some don’t.
That’s
not what we want. We don’t want to see who can keep up with an M.I.T.
course and who can’t. We want to get everyone to the point that they
have the knowledge that the M.I.T. course is trying to teach them. When
you go to the site today, you get a test to evaluate where you are in
math. You determine your own pace. And you don’t go to the next level
until you’ve mastered the previous one.
Another
difference between us and many of them is we have a platform where
people can get personalized suggestions. Our software tracks your
progress and customizes your lessons. You can take as long as necessary
to get to a high level.
We’re more like a highly enriched, personalized textbook, a tool for you on your own or your teacher or tutor.
Last
April, when administrators at San Jose State university wanted to use
Harvard’s online version of Professor Michael Sandel’s “Justice” course
as the basis of their undergraduate philosophy class, some San Jose
State faculty members protested, saying the school was shortchanging students. Were the professors resisting progress?
I
think they are right. To tell the San Jose faculty, “Hey, move over,
we’ve got the Harvard guy on tape — why don’t you facilitate him
teaching your kids and you grade the papers?” — that’s the incorrect way
to be thinking about leveraging technology. The single most valuable
thing that any student at San Jose State could have is a conversation
with their professor. He or she doesn’t need to watch Michael Sandel
having a Socratic dialogue with Harvard students.
The Washington Post had an article
last year saying a viewer had discovered that two of your tutorials
were wrong and you’d removed them from your offerings. Have you been
growing too quickly, doing too much?
You
know, the benefit of this form is that everything we do is out there.
You get feedback and critiques. And when we see [an error], we take a
second look. I view that as very healthy. We are definitely imperfect,
but we have processes in place to put in a check. In a traditional
classroom, you often don’t know when a professor makes a mistake.
What ever became of your cousin Nadia?
Nadia
is now a pre-med and writing major senior at Sarah Lawrence. She’s
turned out to be a very impressive young woman. I do, however, sometimes
joke with her that a lot is riding on her future!