Salman: As I just introduced what Khan Academy is most known for

is this library of videos that I started producing

almost five, six years ago now.

Before I go any further, let me just show you all a little bit of a mix

of what the videos actually look like

and then we can go a little deeper from there.

So the hypotenuse is now going to be five.

These animals fossils are only found in this area of South America

a nice, clean band here and this part of Africa.

We can integrate over the surface in the notation usually is a capital sigma.

National Assembly they 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 it to affect or, and memory cells.

A galaxy, hey there's another galaxy.

Oh look there's another galaxy.

For dollars is there 30 million

plus the 20 million dollars from the American manufacturer

if this does not blow your mind then you have no emotion.

(audience laughing)

You know the videos there's now 2,200 of them.

That's kind of what I want to do until I get a hit by a bus

or hopefully it won't be for a while.

We're doing a lot more than that,I mean the videos are reaching ...

Actually now, on the order of about two million unique users a month.

We've had almost 45 million video views

they are being watched 2 to 300,000 times a day.

Before I go any deeper, I actually just gave a talk at TED down in Long Beach

a couple weeks ago, I don't want this to be a repetition of that talk.

I want this to kind of be a part two.

But before I go any further, I want to get a sense

just so I know how much background and depth I need to give.

How many of you all seen that talk?

Okay, good.

How many of you all have been to the site?

Because I want to know how much background, okay very good, very good.

What I want to focus on today is kind of going a little bit deeper.

I will give a background about what we're doing beyond the video portion.

Now that it isn't just me.

We are actually kind of a team now, we're at six people.

(audience laughing)

Some of the questions that I think have surfaced

is we've gotten a little bit more popular and we started to enter into domains,

but frankly I never thought we would enter.

Especially into the classroom itself.

Before I do that,I want to give you all a little bit of a thought experiment.

Imagine if we're in a juggling class and I'm your juggling instructor.

This week we are going to learn to juggle oranges.

I give you all your orange juggling kits, I give you all each four oranges

and I give you all a lecture on juggling oranges.

I say practice and in a week I will assess your orange juggling ability.

You practice and a week later I come back with my clipboard and I say juggle.

You try the best you can to juggle and different three oranges,

four oranges, all the rest and I say, "You can't juggle four oranges at all."

"Three oranges, barely can keep the oranges in the air"

"for more than a few seconds."

You are a 70% orange juggler, you are a D orange juggler.

I place that label on your forehead.

I put it in your permanent record making it all

but impossible for you to go in an elite juggling school.

(audience laughing)

Despite those deficiencies that you clearly have in your abilities,

there's the state mandated a juggling curriculum that we have to follow

and there's a calendar that specifies how we have to move forward.

We have this kind of assembly line and so I say,

"Well give me back the oranges. The next lesson here are some knives."

(audience laughing)

As crazy as that might appear to be

that's exactly what's happening in our classrooms right now.

It might not be as physically dangerous but it is just as mentally dangerous.

We have students they take an exam, they get 10% wrong,

20% wrong, 30% wrong, you can even fail an exam.

Regardless of the fact that we've identified those deficiencies,

we know that the student doesn't know those concepts,

we have to move on to the next concept, we have this assembly line.

That the only thing were using the test for is to put labels

on peoples foreheads to separate them, to track them.

Though we know there's weaknesses we push them forward

and we're pretty much ensuring that at some future point they'r going to fail.

We're pretty much ensuring that motivated kids,

even if they have awesome teachers at some point

those gaps are going to come back and they're not going to be able to perform

once they get to some more advanced mathematics.

Now that we've gotten a funding ...

just so you know a little bit of the story how all of this happened.

I was literally making videos in my closet for about five years.

Then about a year ago Google brought me over to their campus

and I thought it was just like a lot of the Google engineers,

as parents they were using these videos for their children and all of that.

But they brought me in to a conference room and they said,

"Sal, what would you do with two million dollars?"

(audience laughing)

I said, "Is this an education context? Or is just a broader question?"

(audience laughing)

There are very different answers.

That happened and a little bit later, I mean this is like last year,

I was still in the closet.

(audience laughing)

I get a call from Larry Cohen, who's Bill Gates chief of staff,

and says, "I don't know if you realize this but Bill Gates likes your videos."

"He watches them, he uses it with his kids, and he would like to support you."

"Do you have some time to meet him in the near future?"

I said, "I think I can move around my calendar a little bit."

(audience laughing)

I think I can push back a few of the video recordings here or there.

But you fast forward to October of this year,

we got funding from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

We got the funding from Google.

In a sense it allowed me to come out of the closet.

What we're now trying to do there is take these videos

to their natural conclusion, and address that juggling mastery problem.

What we're doing, if you go to the site it's all free,

it's a not for profit, not trying to sell anything.

You can start at 1 + 1 = 2 and we'll give you as many problems as you need.

As you get 10 in a row,

you can keep advancing to more and more advanced concepts.

The paradigm here is don't move on to a next concept

until you master the one you already know.

As an organization what we're trying to do

and it seems like there's already a little bit, we're getting the traction here

and we'll talk later and to talk about why we think we're getting that traction.

What we're trying to do is enable anyone, anywhere in the world for free

to get one an education but when we say an education,

to get an education that really is a mastery based education.

One that really ensures that someone understands the basics

before they move forward and they can do it all at their own pace.

I want to be clear, this is actually ...

We'll talk more about this in the second half of the talk.

This isn't a new idea,

it's actually nothing that Khan Academy doing is fundamentally new.

Doing videos either online or even on TV or whatever,

it's not a new idea when the radio was first invented,

when TV was first invented,

people thought it was going to revolutionize education.

Put the best teachers, broadcast them, it never happened.

Even when the internet kind of came out,

they thought that was going to be the killer [happen] for the internet.

When the PC was first invented,

they thought this was the first time we can give people self-pace learning

but it never got traction.

In the second half of my talk

I'd like to think a little bit about maybe why we're getting a traction.

It's a super important question for us as an organization

because we don't want to lose whatever that secret sauce might be.

The other interesting thing that's happened

and I talk a lot more about this in the other TED talk,

and is actually a big surprise to me,

is that our software and video start to get adapted in the classroom.

I mentioned the previous talk that it happened early on

even before we got funding or anything.

I started getting letters from teachers who's saying

that they were using just the videos to flip the education model.

They were now assigning the videos for a lecture,

they were assigning the videos for homework

and instead of doing a lecture in the classroom,

they were actually allowing their students to interact with each other

in doing problems.

Just with that simple technology, just the on demand video

they were actually able to kind of personalize

and make the actual classroom experience interactive.

Now with this kind of self-paced mastery base learning software,

we were approached by the Los Altos School District not to far from here,

"What would you do with a classroom?"

We said, "Well we would let every student work at their own pace."

The teachers role would be, they have a dashboard,

they would have all of the data

and only intervene on the students that are stuck.

So you could do a very focused intervention

and be armed with the right data to do it.

Or even better get a student who's already proficient in that

to intervene on that student

and then you get all the benefits of learning something even deeper

when you yourself are the teacher.

They decided to do it.

In Los Altos we have two fifth grade classes and two seventh grade classes

and they're using this as their core curriculum.

What I want to emphasize here and it's not always made clear

is when I talk about this to people, a lot of people will say,

"Oh this awesome."

Self-pace learning, mastery based, differentiate in instruction

but there is a crowd that starts to get a little suspicious.

They start saying well, "This sounds like you're automating things"

"but it sounds like it's very robotic."

"It sounds like kids in front of a computer just doing exercises all day,"

"listening to videos, not interacting with each other."

"It sounds like you're marginalizing the teacher."

"It sounds your deskilling the teacher,"

"that you're making them just do what the computers can't."

What I want to emphasize here is the exact opposite.

What we're seeing in those classrooms in Los Altos,

is we're seeing every moment of that teachers time

is spent interacting with her students, being a mentor.

These students are getting one on one with the teacher multiple times a week.

When I was in school I was lucky to get that even a few times,

and even in your whole career.

Multiple times a week.

They aren't doing this at the expense of project based learning

or investigations.

What this is allowing the teacher to do, it liberates the classroom.

So now that they can do more of the project based learning,

they can do more of the investigations.

These classrooms in Los Altos, there is more of that creative activity,

more of this interaction, more of this experimenting with the world

than you would see in any other classroom.

So for the first time because we have this technology

it's not an either or proposition.

You have this kind of camps of mathematical instruction.

Do you do kind of the traditional,

do a lot of problems, lecture and see a lot of traditional problems?

Or do you do the project based learning where you investigate things?

Our answer is now we can do both.

Even better, even on the instruction itself there's these debates

between old Math and new Math, how you to it?

The value when you have on demand video, you can do both.

You can actually expose the students to every possible way

that there is to learn Mathematics.

In the same classroom, you have one kid doing third grade Math