Welcome to the "The Daily Homeroom" livestream.

This is just a way for all of us to stay in touch

during this time of school closures.

And as we have in homeroom homeroom in the real world,

the physical world which we all now really miss,

it's a time for us to come together,

to make announcements, to answer questions,

and that's what we wanna do here.

So, as we go into the meat of this homeroom conversation,

and it's really just going to be

a really informal session today of being able

to ask myself and my team member Dan is going

to join us as well, literally any question.

So, go on to Facebook, go on to YouTube,

and ask anything you would like (laughs)

of me or the team here at Khan Academy.

What we have already been putting out for all of y'all,

parents, teachers, students, over the last several weeks

is based on the realization that Khan Academy exists,

we never could've foreseen this type of a situation.

But, we wanna create structures and support

so that you can use all the content,

and all the software that we've been making.

Which is all free.

It's all non-commercial in a way that meets your needs

as a parent, student, or a teacher.

And so, you can see right over here,

these remote learning resources we've been putting out.

Things like teacher webinars, parent webinars,

lesson daily schedules for students of different ages.

Also, we put out learning plans recently in math

so that students could learn through the end of the year,

and through next summer, or this coming summer

so that they can not stop learning.

I do wanna give a special shout-out

to several corporate partners who

are helping support all of this.

Many of y'all know, Khan Academy's a not-for-profit,

and with a mission of providing you

free world-class education for anyone, anywhere,

and that's only possible through philanthropic donations

from folks like yourself and from some of

our corporate partners that you see listed here.

These are folks that literally

just stepped up in the last few weeks.

We have other folks who have been helping us

keep going over the last several years,

but we were running at a deficit even going

into this situation and our deficit increased

because our traffic now is 2.5,

actually approaching three x of what it typically is.

We're trying to do more supports,

trying to accelerate some content software programs

that we normally would've done in a few years

so we can do it sooner than later.

Bank of America, AT&T, Novartis, Google.org, and Fastly,

all organizations that are really

helping Khan Academy deliver on its mission.

But with that, I would love to

literally answer any question you have,

and I'll issue a challenge to surprise me.

And I have team members, we have team members,

who are looking at the message boards on Khan Academy

and they are going to surface any questions,

and Dan will also help me surface

any questions that folks might be having.

Let's see, we have some questions.

I could start while everyone's warming up

with some questions we had from last year.

Sorry, from last Friday that we never got to.

One person Abderrahman (mumbles) Hasan from YouTube asks,

"How come Khan Academy is running a deficit,

"and what will that have an impact on the provision

"of free world-class education as you do now?"

That's a very good question, Abderrahman,

so, you know, we're running at a deficit

because, you know, simple math, we're spending more

than we are bringing in in philanthropic donations.

And we are able to do that in the near term.

We do have a little bit of reserves,

but obviously that's not something

that we're going to be able to do indefinitely.

So, what we've been, the reason why we've been spending more

than the resources we've been bringing in,

is the belief that these things need to be out there.

They'll be able to serve students,

parents, and teachers that much more,

and the hope that folks are going to step up

whether they're individual donors, or corporations,

or foundations to allow us to do this work.

So, running a not-for-profit, there's always this tension

of sometimes you wanna move ahead

because you think some work, especially,

we're a bit of a unique non-for-profit

that we are, we do software and content.

We aren't your traditional not-for-profit

that, you know, maybe does other types

of great work like running a soup kitchen,

or providing malaria nets, or things like that.

And so, a lot of our work has to be front-loaded

in terms of expense, in terms of, you know,

we have approaching a hundred engineers at Khan Academy.

We have designers, product managers

who are all thinking a year a head,

two years ahead of what to build.

And so, sometimes we have to say,

"Okay, let's build it and hope

"that we're going to be able to support it."

But it's a constant, it's a constant tension

that we are trying to figure out.

But my, you know, it's my intent

that Khan Academy, hopefully, doesn't disappear.

You know?

When I do wake up in the middle

of the night that is my main concern.

I wanna ensure that Khan Academy is an organization

that doesn't just last through my lifetime,

but has the financial foundation

that it can last well beyond any of our lifetimes

to serve hopefully billions of folks in generations to come.

But, that is, you're hitting at a very real issue

for me and the team here.

So--

- Sal, we have another question.

Sal, we have a great question

from YouTube from Selena Chang.

She says first, "Hi, Sal.

"Hope you and your family are doing well."

Selena's been engaging in online courses

at Khan Academy and meditation and her question is,

"What are some of the habits that she can enforce

"to optimize productivity and learning?".

- So, take anything, Selena,

anything I have with a grain of salt.

I'm always trying to optimize my productivity,

and learning as well, but the things that I found

are definitely, some form of structure helps,

and it doesn't have to be, and I actually wouldn't

make that structure too intense.

I think it's actually bad if your day

is completely chopped up into very small sections

because then you don't have time to do some deeper things,

to do some more creative tasks.

So, what I try to do personally,

and I've talked about this on the livestream before,

is I try to have some easy wins early in my day.

So, I wake up, I do that meditation, I, you know, get ready.

I make the bed which I've talked a lot about

that gives you an easy win.

And then when I, in normal times if I'm coming to the office

or I'm working from home during quarantine,

I try to, I find the morning is when I get

my most productive creative work, so that's

actually when I try to do some videos.

So, I try to do two, three, four videos

in that morning time period.

And then I'm able to, and then I feel really productive,

and then I try to go into the rest of the day.

If I'm a student what I would try to do is,

in that morning period, I would try to tackle

the subjects that maybe you find take

the most cognitive load for you,

and I would also make sure that you have

a little bit of time so, you know,

there's kinda this tension between having fragments

of time to make sure you touch on everything,

and then longer blocks of time so you can go deeper.

I would try to ensure that you get every day,

some amount of math, every day some amount of reading,

every day some amount of writing,

and then free up time in your afternoon for maybe,

if you wanna go deeper and say,

"Hey, how far can I get with this project,

"or this thing I'm trying to start."

Other things I would recommend is just

remind yourself to just get started.

It's easy to paralyze yourself by overthinking things.

But just say, "You know what?

"Let's just see what happens,

"and just put one foot in front of the other,"

and that act of moving will oftentimes unblock you,

but we actually are hoping to bring on some guests

over the next few weeks, onto this livestream.

Folks who are experts in things like grit and resilience.

Folks even from the military who are experts

at things like discipline and proactivity,

and how to stay focused on things.

So, we hope to bring in more resources like that.

So let's see, from YouTube Catherine Pierce asks,

"How long does it take you to record a video?

"Do you do anything to prepare, or do you wing it?"

So, great question Catherine,

and the simple answer it it depends.

You know, this morning I got some messages from Charlotte,

who's on our content team say,

"We need some new content in some of our geometry,"

because we, our old worked example videos

used the old exercises that we had on Khan Academy,

and now we have new exercises.

So, for something like that where I'm able

to take an exercise that one of our team members

has created, copy and paste it onto

my little drawing program that I have here.

That doesn't take much at all,

and actually I try not to over prepare for that

so that when the student sees me doing it

it's really in real time.

We're working through this together.

What we've heard, and at least what I feel,

is one of the benefits of Khan Academy videos,

many of y'all are familiar with them,

they're not super fancy in terms of, you know,

computer graphics, or they don't look

like a well-produced movie, but their value,

hopefully their differentiator is

that whoever's making the video with me,

or someone else is really thinking through it in real time.

They aren't reading a script, and so sometimes that leads,

you know, I might have a little pause.

I might say um, or something like that,

but you can tell that we're doing it together.

So something like a math worked example, not a lot of time,

and reasonably winged, so to speak.

But, if I'm doing a topic that I need to really refresh on,

or go deeper than I might've even known before,

that could take some time.

You know, we have videos on Khan Academy in world history,

or certain parts of say organic chemistry

that I definitely have to spend several hours to research it

and then I, what I oftentimes do,

is I might just write some bullet point notes

just to make sure I hit the key ideas,

but I don't write a script.

So, the bullet point, you know, might be like,

"Make sure you don't misspell

"these steps of photosynthesis," or something like that.

And then I start the video.

'Cause I do always want the student, the user, to feel that,

"Hey, Sal's really explaining this.

"His brain is really with his mouth," so to speak,