Of books in any big library, and you got a lot of competition. The first thing you want to do, if youre an author, is to at least have somebody pick up the book. And so when i was thinking of a title issue thousand what i can title this book that would get somebody to take a peek, read the first paragraph. And i thought, well, nigger. Nigger is a strange career of a trouble selfword. And i thought that would just think hard about words, think hard about examples, get the readers attention. Thats what i was trying to do with the title. Up next on booktv, afterwords with guest host, the president of the National Alliance of public charter schools. This week, sol month and his book, the one world schoolhouse. In it, presenting the benefits of online universal education for primary and secondary School Students and discussings his Career Change to public educator. Host hi, sal, tell us about the book and the journey you went that led you to writing the book . Guest the book is about the journey, but how that informed what khan became and how that could inform what learning could become, and not just in a pies in the sky way, but this is really happening and feels like were in this Inflection Point in whats going on in classrooms. You know, the whole adventure for me started somewhat inadvertently. It was 2004. I was working as an analyst at a hedge fund at the time. Just got married. Family from new orleans visiting me in boston after my wedding, and one cousin, nadia, was having trouble. 12 years old, a bright girl, share some of the beauty, and when i asked her, her mom told me, and nadia said she was having trouble with units. I said, let me tutor you. She thought i was bluffing. She went back to new orleans, got on the phone, we used some tools on the internet to see each other and pen tablet things, and long story short, you know, she went from being a struggling student to catching up with the class and becoming somewhat advanced student, actually. I joke, i became a tiger cousin at that point. I call the school saying nadia needs to take a placement exam. They said, who are you . I said, im her cousin. I tutored her brothers, and then fast forward two years, word got around free tutoring was happying, and it was at that point that a and the firm i was working for, it was a firm, but my boss, his dog, and me, we moved to Silicon Valley, and i was telling a friend about what i was doing, and i was complaining that its getting hard to scale. I thought a day job, all students around the country, time zones, ect. , ect. , and he said make tutorials. Make them up on youtube, and i thought that was really youtube are for cats playing piano, not serious, but i gave it a shot. Long story short, that go a ton of traction. People looked at it. The word is i was working on a Software Tool for my cousins. There was a view, hey, maybe could be used to help people. The set up is a nonforprofit, and in 2009, i had trouble focusing on my day job, so i became fulltime. Tell me about the khan academy . Start with the Business Model. The big Audacious School and the Business Model you have been on. Guest yeah, so, well, maybe ill go the other way around because, you know, when i started this, i came from a forprofit reality. I have friends who are venture capitalists, saying, we can fund this, a Double Bottom line business, whatever that means, and there was a lot of temptation there. Nothing wrong with that, but the feeling, i was getting all this emotional reward from the thank you letters people sent me and the cernes that, hey, i was making simple things for my cousin, and first a few and now millions use it around the world. I want this to be around in 500 years. I dont want a collection of software and content and disorganization. I dont want it to skew the mission to be able to reach these people. When i look at other organizations in the universe that are able to do that, last many, many, hopefully, centuries, and stay true to a mission, its a nonforprofit with no ownership, but a public charity. I said, well, its a nonforprofit, and i remember doing the paperwork for, it the irs asks you, whats your mission . I kind of thought about it for three or four minutes. I said, well, a e free world class education for anyone anywhere. Host why not . Guest why not. You just dont want something to say, check, its done. Its an aspiration, a delusional one at the time. I was operating from a close et. The Business Model is were not a business. Were a nonforprofit, but we have to sustain ourselves, and the way we want to because we always want the learning side of education, we want that to be free because that empowers people. Its primarily foundation and philanthropist driven so far, but we sustain ourself in other ways like licensing content or who knows what. We are exploring that, but were true to keeping the contents free. Host how many students are you serving now . How many instructors . Do you have aceps a sense of how large . Whats a typical profile of those visiting your website . Guest so the organization, itself, 36 people, still relatively small, but for us, huge because last year we were 13 and year before that it was one. Weve been growing fast, but in this past month, rereached 7 million students, unique students. Weve reachedded a total of 60 million, the way you measure them on the web, delivered 180 million lessons, 700 million problems, and weve been done on the site. Its, you know, its students all over the wore. All over the world. Students have used the academy this some way. 20,000 teachers, as far as we can tell from the data are using it in their classes or are their cohorts in a type of a way. Its surreal for where it came from. Host yeah. Talk about how a classroom or school can use you, this concept of a flipped classroom. Explain that to our viewers. Guest yeah, two things. A flipped classroom has been tied to khan academy, and it is an interesting idea and forward step, but the point of the book was to show people were not necessarily about the split. Were about pushing the envelope further than the flip. In a flip model, you know, right now at home, problems, homework, and in the classroom, a lot of time in the traditional classroom, its lectures, and the flip is predates khan academy, and you made a motion on projectile motion, i dont have the give the election. Students watch it on their own time and pace, remediate without taking up class time, and when they go to class, they can ask me questions, clarifications, and we can do problems together. It used to be homework, but now the problems are done in the classroom. The advantage there is the real learning occurs the engagement, and traditionally students dont do homework, have trouble doing homework because theres nobody home to help them out, but now they do it in the classroom, the teachers, the peers, not only to help you, but when you help others, you learn better. When youre lecturing, its hard to know where people are. I mean, you might be able to pull them, ask questions, but its hard. Students are blank faces, but if you do problem solving together, much more you can understand where students are and diagnose them. Thats the flip. What used to be homework in the classroom, what used to be lectures are now at home. It makes the classroom interactive, students get lectures at their time and pace. Great. What i foe e cues on in the book is lets go further. Still, even the flip, assume that all the students are going to cover the same material at the same pace together, and what i talk about is this weve been in the system, and when i talk about the system, its not what should be the student teacher ratio, but the system, grouping kids by agebased cohorts. They cover certain subjects at a set pace, grade them on their variable understanding and push them forward. We assume thats what school is, but what i go to show is, no, its a relatively knew phenomena, 200 years not that new, but 200 years old, inherited that from a country that no longer exists, the prussians, and in fairness to the prussians and to us, i guess, during the Industrial Revolution was the first time people seriously thought about how can we educate everybody . Before that, it was, you know, youre the son of a lord, and you would get to be king and have a private tutor. That was the gold standard. They work at your pace, but now, we want mass education. How do you do in in a practical way, oh, the Industrial Revolution, stick them on an Assembly Line, as they go through, do something to the product, and at the end, have a decent product. They applied the same model to classrooms. Kids are in the buckets based on age. I was talking to a friend, and her child already knows how to read and everything, and she was trying to get the child into kindergarten, born in october or something, and the school said, oh, yeah, a bright kid, but we cant. Hes too small. I told she came back, yeah, hes too small. Look, if thats what they were concerned about, group them by size. Host right. Guest thats the obvious, natural, but thats the model, and so what even the flip is in the context of that model. On week three, we cover parabolas, systems of equations, and we give students grades. We give them a b showing they have a gap in the knowledge, a c or a d, but you move on to the next topic moving you to failure. What we advocated, and schools are experimenting in this direction is if you take lecture out of the classroom, theres no longer the need for everyone to move together at the same pace. As soon as you get rid of that assumption, you can completely rethink what a classroom can be. Everyone can learn at their own pace. Leverage class time when humans are together for interactivity. Why cant we have two teachers in the room . Why does a bell ring . This is like a factory in 19th century, why is there a bell ringing saying stop what you are doing on chemistry, you have to now start english. Anyone who does anything creative, thats the way to stop it, you have 55 minutes, and then youre done. Host right. Guest what we advocate is move to reality with possibly with the help of tools like khan academy, teachers have dash boards, tools to empower them, and use classroom for activity and creativity. Host right, right. You touched op this a little bit, but explain a little about why is it that your platform has taken off, getting so much attention when others were trying to do the same thing on the forprofit side, some on the nonprofit side have not succeeded. Guest its an open question. We ask that ourselves. Whatever the secret sauce is, we dont want to lose it in the process. My best guess of why theres this initial wave of traction, you know, from 2006 to even continues to grow, is the first videos, i think, it was fortunate that it was a guy making it for his cousin. I think host easy to use. Guest easy to use, felt human, and the big learning thing is people were hungry. I was not the first person to put videos on youtube or teaching. With radio, oh, well use this to teach the world, tv, vcr, and now on demand. But historically, it was a videotape of someone at a chalk board, you know, traditional class, feels very feels distant even in the class roosm. Youre there, im here. The next step in the equation, and you do it like that. When you make that in the video, its harder 20 see. What are they writing there, i cant hear them, and these feel personal. Youre next to me. I think the other dimension of it is the conversational tone. Its, you know, a lot of people, they try to make it polished, which is not bad, but in that process, you lose the humanity. It sounds like your gps system, the next step in the e cation host exactly. Guest i think, hopefully this is something i tried to put into it is one of the things that allowed me to do to thrive in math or science or eventually finance was i felt like i had a holistic understanding of things. My basics were really, really solid, and my basics in algebra were good. When i went into corporate finance, this is intiewtive. Theres nothing new here. You see other really, really smart people just learning for the next exam, memorizing formulas, and forget it. Theres a related con concept, and they are like, whats this . Draws connections between things so that when you see a concept, its not new, but its connected to everything they learned before, and i get a lot of letters saying i would assume that would have been appealing to the motivated kids so to speak, but i get letters from kids were traditionally disengaged or demotivated, and no one just explained the why or giving them the connections. Hopefully thats why people are have been, i guess, connecting to the content. Host yeah. So lets talk about Virtual Education and offering the types of things youre offering. People are still a little weiry of these reforms. They see it as a mechanism to ultimately get rid of teachers in the classroom or reduce class sizes. You talked about this in the book, and explain that a little bit. Guest yeah, yeah, super important point. Over the last 1520 years, when people see virtual x, its going to replace the physical. Barnes noble against amazon. Com, theres a contention there. Exact opposite of whats going to happen in education. Everything we do is not going to replace physical school. I have young kids. I want them to go to a physical school. I want them to get interaction. What it will do, i think, is give all of our children the experience that i think every parent and every teacher or student wants to be a part of. Even now, were going into the physical experience, but were not leveraging the human. Were going, but people are sitting passively there, listening, and its hard for the teachers too because its hard to speak for 60 minutes without getting that connection with the students, and so what we advocate is leverage tools so you can get information delivery out of the way, get some of the problem solving out of the way, but so when people go, and they have class time, the scarce class time with other miewbs, thats ultimately interactive, and interactive in the human sense. Class time is all conversation. Class time is all peer tutoring and working with the teacher. Class time is open ended projects, and so, you know, i talk about this in the book, and i gave a talk, and the irony here is i strongly believe, and its not just talk again, but seeing this in the classrooms is that you can actually use technology to make the classroom more human. Im careful. You mentioned skepticism. There should be. Im skeptical when someone ordered 500 ipads for the school. What are you going to do with it . How will you integrate that in the curriculum or leverage it to transform whats going on . There are not a lot of answers there. I think it is good to be skeptical, but at the same time, there is i think, a reason for hope. Uhhuh. How do you evaluate the impact of the courses since, again, you talked about grades in your book and how you dont like grading. How do you know they have actually worked . Guest yeah, and ill tell you, i mean, a lot of times, when i grew up, i remember i would meet people saying i dont believe in grades, and i thought they were a gray granola bar hippy type people, but i appreciate what they are saying now. People who dont like grades are being touchy feely, but they are not being rigorous enough. Oh one, they are somewhat arbitrary, depend on the test and how its measured, but more than that, when you give grades, especially in the sense, if you got a c on an exam, you have obvious weaknesses, assuming it was a good exam, theres obvious weaknesses. That should be used as an assessment to say you have to improve on the weaknesses before we move on. Its common sense, get the basics down. But now its a value judgment, youre dumb, youre fast, youre smart, youre slow. What we say is, no, make sure everyone masters the concept. Rather than having a superficial understanding of algebra and moving on to trig no , maam try. Understand it deeply and then trig no , trig will make more sense. In terms of how we do it, we work with schools, los altos using khan academy, probably one the best in the country, using khan academy for 5th8th grade as one of the tools they use. We have formal studying going on how to understand how this impacts students and teachers, both objectively on things like test scores and grades, but also on things on subjects. Are the teachers more excited about the work. Are the students excited about their work . On top of that, you know, we have 3 million problems done a day on the site. Theres a huge number of students a month. We have a treasuretrove of data on the site itself. Host monitoring it . Guest all the other Web Companies are able to do, we, as an education nonforprofit can do using analytics, optimizing for engagement, seeing what learning is going op. Host so tell me a little bit about so you gave a great historical overview of how we came to educate students today, the way we are educating them. Did you always hold these views and know the information before you stumbled on the khan academy or the platform created or these things you studied afterwards . Just so happens everything flows so beautifully, thats why i was curious what came first. Guest you know, its been a combination. I think its more of the latter. You know, obviously, all of us spent time in the system. I think the whole timing and nip who knew me growing up, knew i was like, why is that this way . Why cant i tutor. No, this is a positive interaction. Theres a question, you know, you go to college, and, like like people are in a lecture hall, anything happening . The learning happens in the cram session three days before the final. Theres always these ideas, and then, obviously, i work with the cousins, saw my cousins were motivated. They were good students, but they were having gaps in the knowledge, not learning intuitively. Host swiss cheese learning. Guest swiss cheese learning. I started building tools, a process of discovery saying teachers emailing me, and conversation of how do i learn, how do others learn, what am i seeing with the teachers, with my cousins, what are teachers telling me . As this got more traction, i had people tell me about this stuff. I knew about the history before. You know, i heard about this committee of ten and, you know, i was told lookout that in high school, but it was interesting that, you know, even the research. The reason why i made the video short was because Youtube Limited me to 10 minutes, but research said theres cog cognie research that, actually, like, people, especially dense academic content cant Pay Attention for more than 1015 minutes. Why use hour long lectures . Cant we get people to interact more . The more i researched, the more these basic common sense ideas jelled with research. Th