Khan Academy today, here at Google. We have three wonderful guests here. Sal, who's the

founder, and Shantanu, who is the President and COO, and Marcia, who is a software engineer

of Khan Academy. I learned about Khan Academy about a year ago. I wasn't sure how, just,

it also comes with a lot of comments, also like people appreciating. I wasn't sure just

how this video is going to be theoretical as far as personal education is concerned.

So I tried it myself and I guess the first thing that I noticed was that it almost seems

that he was having more fun teaching me than I was having fun listening to him. [audience

laughter] He is so passionate about teaching. And I intentionally chose a non-technical

topic, which I always hated, like history. And I watched through all the videos and it

was just like glass and ice. At a very certain level, I realized why it works. With that,

I will actually give it to Chris Uhlik. He will formally introduce Sal. He has been working

with Khan Academy over the past year and he has actually helped them get a $50,000 grant

from Microsoft Research and he also helped them get two million dollars from Google,

as part of the 10 to the 100th Project. So, with that, I'll give it to Chris.

[applause]

>>Chris Uhlik: Hey, so, I have four children, ages eight through fifteen, and we homeschool

them. My wife is very interested in education technology. She has a degree in education

technology and it's illegal to experiment on humans, so she made her own.

[laughter]

And we've been basically educating our kids using 100 percent online materials. Every

kid's got a computer; they spend all day at the computers and then they go off to physical

education classes outside the home and stuff like that. So, she's a great student of what

kind of education technologies are out there in the world. We buy everything; she researches

everything well. Just over two years ago, she sent me a link to this Khan Academy. She

said, "Hey, check this out. This one's pretty cool and itís free." And I started watching

a few videos. I watched the banking crisis explanation videos. And I was like, "This

stuff is really, really good." And I had been thinking about what are a few of the really

big, high impact projects we can do in the world, like fixing carbon dioxide emissions,

educating the people in the world. These are some of the huge problems where you can really

totally transform the future. And I firmly believe that doing this for free, so that

everybody in the world has access to education materials, by taking advantage of the leverage

that technology offers, the ability to take one lecture given by one guy and then have

a 100,000 people watch it over the next few months. And Sal's done 18 hundred little capsule

lectures and they have a typical number of views--around a hundred thousand each--40

thousand here, a million there, give or take. So, he's reaching, right now, about two million

people a day.

>>Salman Khan: A month, unique a month.

>>Chris: Unique a month. The University of California has .2 million, right? So, he's

reaching ten times the University of California with his own efforts, a few people helping

him, and a free video hosting service, right? So that's the power of technologies like YouTube

and AppEngine to let people build incredibly impactful, valuable things for free. So, a

year ago, I was working on this education project. It wasn't Microsoft Research that

gave him the 50K, by the way. It was Google Research.

[laughter]

And I also helped the Google 10 to the 100 team decide and figure out how to give them

one fifth of the total prize, which is two million dollars. And I think he's gotten some

significant backing from the Gates Foundation and from John and Ann Doerr, and a few others.

So, he's able now to really commit full-time and actually hire people and expand and he's

getting some serious publicity help. That publicity has caused him to grow a factor

of 50 in the past year. He was getting something like, 40,000 views a month a year ago; he's

getting two million a month right now. And that's just incredible and it's probably going

to continue accelerating at that kind of pace for a while. You can look forward to most

people on the planet having seen a Khan Academy video in the next couple of years. That's

impact. So, we're gonna start the talk. There's a Dory page at go/khanacademy. There's gonna

be a lot of kind of question and answer period at the end. There's a microphone in the middle.

Go up and ask your questions at the end. Don't interject and I'd like to introduce the Linus

Torvalds of education.

>> Salman Khan: [laughs]

[audience laughter]

He's gonna transform the operating system of the education future. Salman Khan.

[laughter]

>>Salman Khan: Thank you, thank you.

[applause]

Actually ñ I don't want to be -- how many of you all saw the Ted talk that came out

a week or so ago? Ok, I don't wanna bore y'all, but some of y'all haven't seen it, but there

will be a little bit of an overlap. And since you don't know the structure of this, I'm

gonna do a quick overview and feel free to interrupt me at any time, or ask a question.

And then we'll just open up to Q&A cause that'll be more fun. We'll learn things. But just

to start off, as Chris mentioned, Khan Academy started off me making videos. So, I'll show

yíall a little bit of a video montage to see a feel for what the videos are like, and

we'll show you what else we're up to.

[pause]

[video plays]

>>Salman Khan:(speaking on video) So, the hypotenuse is going to be five. This animal's

fossils are only found in this area of South America; nice, clean band here and this part

of Africa. We can integrate over the surface, and the notation usually is a capitol sigma.

National Assembly that create The Committee of Public Safety, which sounds like a very

nice committee. Notice, this is an aldehyde and it's an alcohol. Start differentiating

into effector and memory cells. A galaxy. Hey, there's another galaxy. Oh, look, there's

another galaxy. And for dollars is their 30 million plus the 20 million dollars from the

American manufacturer. If this does not blow your mind, then you have no emotion.

[laughter]

[end video clip]

>>Salman Khan: So, that's a feel for what we're doing. And as Chris mentioned, we are

now -- there's now on the order of 2200 videos. I made five this morning. And they're--

[laughter]

ten minutes, you know. And they now cover everything from basic arithmetic all the way

to vector calculus and the French Revolution, and all the rest. And we're reaching -- actually

a month ago, we were reaching a million unique students a month. Now, weíre reaching two

million unique students a month just with the latest buzz. So that's kind of where we

are now, but there's a lot more that we're up to. Yíall have very generously given us

two million dollars, so I view this as a progress report.

[laughter]

But before I go into that, I'll talk a little bit about how I got started. And as yíall

know, I was a hedge fund analyst five years ago in Boston. Then, we moved the firm out

here in Northern California. It was actually a two-person hedge fund and my boss -- his

wife became a professor at Stanford, so he moved to Palo Alto. And I was tutoring my

cousins remotely in New Orleans and started working with one cousin, then another cousin,

then another cousin. Before I knew it, I had this cohort of cousins all over the country

and I was looking for a way to scale myself up. And one of my buddies [Sulfaka Ramzana]--I

should give him credit--I was literally hanging out at his house, showing him how I was tutoring

my cousins and all that, and he's like, "You know, why don't you put some of your lectures

on YouTube?" And I said, "Oh, that's silly. YouTube's for dogs on skateboards. It's not

for--

[laughter]

It's not for a serious learning. But once I got over the idea that it wasn't my idea,

I--

[laughter]

said, "I'll take a shot at it." And I remember the first video, I think, and you can go there,

literally, it's like November 6th, 2006. It was greatest common divisor, least common

divisor. One of those. I wanted to teach my cousins fractions. I was like, "Oh what do

they have to know? And the negative numbers." And I put in like, 20 or 30 videos and this

has turned into a bit of a one-liner, but it's true. The very first feedback my cousins

gave me were that they preferred me on YouTube than in person. And so, I felt like this was

something to do. So I kept making the videos. I started getting feedback from people all

over the country, saying how it helped them. "Hey, this helped me on my exam. I passed

the exam." But some of them were like, "Hey, I was gonna drop out of high school until

these videos". Or "This motivates me to go to college and become an engineer." Or "This

is the only reason why I can, now that I'm retiring from the military, I can feel comfortable

going back to the community college." So, I was excited. So I kept going. And along

the way, the site grew and then the other thing that happened--actually this is what

most people don't realize-- sometimes, I switch around the story because it sounds better

when I started the videos. But I actually started on the software side. If you rewind

before I even wrote that first piece ñ I recorded that first video, when I was tutoring

my cousins, I would just point them to random websites. I was like, "Hey, I just found some

website run by this university and there's ten good problems on fractions. Why don't

you do those problems and we'll go over them tomorrow?" And the next day, I'd say, "Hey,

now you do the problems?" She'd be like, "Yeah, yeah, I did them." I was like, "How many did

you get right?" She said, "Yeah, I think I got them all right." I was like, "Oh, when

did you do the problems?" "Oh, yeah, I did 'em like at night."

[laughter]

It wasn't that ñ it wasn't that informative. So I was like, "Oh, I'm gonna write my own

problems." And then she would run out of problems. There's these little worksheets that you see

all over the web, like ten problems and then you're done. So I wrote these really primitive

JavaScript generate problems, as many as you want, in adding fractions, or adding negative

numbers, or multiplying fractions, or whatever. And so that was -- the premise was, "I'll

give you as many problems as you need until you get ten in a row" and I'll show you what

they look like in a second, "and you'll get hints for them." And before I even made the

first video, I thought that was the solution. That was like, "this is all someone needs

to do math." Because on the exercises you have hints and all of that. But then, once

the videos took off, it was just a better use of my time to make five videos a day rather

than one module every five days. So, that kind of ñ it got orphaned a little bit. And

actually, one thing that happened is, I left it out there and I had this 50 dollar a month

webhosting and at some point, there were too many people using that software, so I just

turned it off -- which is probably a bad idea if you're ever starting a business. [laughter]

It's probably a signal that you shouldn't. Maybe spend a hundred dollars on your webhosting.

So when the opportunity -- once Khan Academy started growing, we had this viewership and

it seemed like there was an organization that we could start here. The question was like,

"How do you take what we're doing to the next level?" And that's what ñ [pause] And that's

what I wanna show you right here. So, these are the exercises and what I started with

my cousin was a much more primitive version, but this is the same, actually some of the

same basic code. It's been fancied up a good bit now. But the general principle is, it'll

give you as many--this is subtraction one--it'll give you as many problems as you need until

you get ten in a row. And it's a very simple--it got cut off here-- but you can have the videos

here, there's hints, you can see it draws a number line for you. The Khan Academy videos

can be pumped in, and itís a very simple idea; you do it until you get ten in a row,

but itís--at least in our minds--completely different than what happens right now in a

traditional school. In a traditional school, lecture, homework, lecture, homework, lecture,

homework, lecture, homework, then snapshot exam. And regardless of whether you get 80

percent, 90 percent, or 95 percent, the whole class moves on. Even if you fail an exam,

actually, the whole class will move to the next topic and what was that five, twenty,

or thirty percent you didn't know? It was probably something that you actually probably

need for the next topic, or definitely something you'll need in a few years. And there's no

-- people just ignore it. They place a label on your head; that some kind of value judgment

on whether you're smart or not and then everyone just proceeds down with those gaps. And so,

what we're saying is, "No, we're gonna have them do the opposite." Instead on penalizing

you for failure and not expecting mastery, we wanna do the opposite. We wanna allow you

to experiment. If you're learning ñ if you're learning to ride a bicycle, you would just

sit on that bicycle as long as it takes to actually learn how to ride the bicycle. And

so, that's what we wanna do here. We wanna allow you to experiment, we wanna allow you

to fail, but you're not going to move on to more advanced topics until you actually, until

you actually master the topic. So this is -- that is the subtraction one module. This,

right here, is trigonometry. [pause] This, right here, is shifting and reflecting functions.

And then this is how all of the exercises are structured. So literally, this node right

up there is single-digit addition. It's literally five plus seven, or one plus one. And once

you get ten in a row there, it'll move you up to one digit and a double digit addition,

and then single digit subtraction and then we call it very basic multiplication. Once