Khan Academy's New Tools Designed for Real Classroom Teaching

Hi everyone, good afternoon. Um, I'm Aveed Weiss. I'm here with my boss Al Khan, my colleague Genghis Varnedore. Um, and we are so excited to be with you. Um, I'm excited to be with both of you here live. We're actually in the middle of our company on-site. We all work at home, but we come together once a year, which is super special. Um, and it's extra special for us right now because we're making the biggest change we've ever made in Khan Academy's history. Um, so as a reminder, we are a non-profit. Our mission is unchanging, uh, free world-class education for anyone, anywhere. Um, and today we're going to look at the changes that we made, uh, to show how they're really the

fullest expression of that mission in this country. Uh, so we're excited to show you all kind of what's new. Before we start, Sal, you were recently in California with a group of administrators, superintendents, talking about their actual problems, right? Like the like we don't have enough bus drivers, right? So like the you know the real things. Um, and so I'm just going to play a short clip so we can, uh, kind of ground ourselves in the reality. So I keep coming and just listening to your conversation and keep going back to the policy environment. Like could Khan Academy partner with an Axon, an Akali, and a CoSN, and ISTE and try to shift and find the legislators that are were willing to put forward these things,

also work with public opinion, and work against this sort of tech backlash that we're seeing and explain to them that no one in EdTech has wanted what you just described us wanting. We don't want to plug kids in and have a teacher sitting scrolling their phone. That's never what we wanted. I'm sure you're still reflecting on that conversation. Um, we've been working shoulder to shoulder with districts. So let's let's start with that. Um, can you tell us a little bit about the district's work? How we got here, what it's taken to get this right. Oh, yeah, I know that it's a it's been a journey. Uh, you know, Khan Academy from the beginning uh, we've we've always imagined that you know, with our mission

free world-class education for anyone, anywhere, ideally it would be happening in a school setting. We never imagined that technology by itself is some type of magical silver bullet. Uh, for most students, arguably all students, they really need that social context, they need adults, teachers holding them accountable, they need the support of their students. Um, and so our goal was always, "Hey, if a teacher in a class of 25, 30, 35 students they know these students are different levels if we can provide tools that allow them to personalize the learning awesome." And since then, you know, over the years we've had many efficacy studies showing that. And we also said, "But if a student is on their own, they're in some

part of the world where they don't have access to a course, you know, I met a young woman from Afghanistan who's used Khan Academy as her school, we also want to support that." So from the beginning we've had teacher tools, etc. But about eight years ago uh, we had the we had and we continue to have a ton of efficacy studies that if people engage on Khan Academy even 30, 60 minutes a week, they're accelerating a lot more than their peers. And so we started going to school districts and saying, "Look, a lot of your teachers are already using, a lot of your students are already using Khan Academy. Why don't you use this systemically in your district to accelerate out outcomes?" And almost every superintendent, chief

academic officer said something like "Oh, I believe you. My niece swears by Khan Academy. It got her through blah." Or "I used Khan Academy to get me through statistics in grad school." Whatever. But uh, if you want us to use us if you want us to Khan Academy systemically, which we would like to do, too, because we believe those gains, we need support, we need training, we need integration with our rostering systems, we need district-level dashboards. And so that was the first time that we as a organization said, "Look, if we're serious about moving the dial for schools, for districts, for countries, we have to be able to partner this very, very deep way with school districts." So that was the journey, and we've been on that journey ever since.

We're now over 600 school districts just in the United States. Internationally we have a bunch more. Um, but that's how we got to where we are. Thank you so much for that overview. Um, I think what I'd love to do um, is hand it over to Genghis so he can show us this thing, and then I would love, Sal, if you can just jump in, um, as much as you'd like, uh, and sort of share where things came from or what you're particularly excited about. I think that would be great. Um, so Genghis, I'm going to pass it to you. And before you uh, one thing I'll just add before Genghis jumps in is what he's about to show is very cool, and it's not just us in a vacuum. This is, you know, like the conversations you just showed, this

is based on years of things that we've gotten feedback from folks, from teachers, from administrators uh, of what they like about Khan Academy, but what they would really like to see. So you're going to see that from Genghis, we'd love to hear also what did Sal miss? What else have we learned that we made sure to incorporate? Yeah, I think this has been a long time coming. I think, um, we have heard from teachers, district admin, everyone. We have three north stars. We wanted to make it as effective as we can for learning. Learning is first and foremost getting students as much practice. We want to make sure teachers it's as easy for them to assign practice and monitor as it can be. And we want to make sure

district admin are in the driver's seat. So this admin experience, uh, this is what you're seeing right now is our new district admin dashboard. And the goal of this is to make sure that district admin have the data, they know how Khan Academy is being used in classrooms, with students, with teachers. They have visibility into course mastery, skills proficiency, activation, learning minutes, all of that is at their fingertips. If they need to, there's a view report button, they can click in and get even more detailed reports. Truly understand how Khan Academy is being used because we understand teachers and students aren't in isolation. They are working in partnership with their district admin who care deeply about making sure that,

you know, Khan Academy is being used in the most efficacious way in classrooms, uh, with students and teachers. It is also now easier than ever for district admin to set up goals and then monitor those goals and make sure that Khan Academy is being used in line with their implementation models and their goals and their targets, which I couldn't be more excited about. Thanks, Genghis. So we would love to see the teacher experience, um, and kind of where all teachers will be able to have a version of this experience in the summer, which is amazing. Um, so let's start there. Uh, show us what's new.

Yep, absolutely. Um So I'm now product manager, and folks tell me I have a hard job. I don't know if Sal if you agree with that. Oh, I well, hard, but I envy you sometimes, too. You have a fun job. Fair enough. Sometimes. You probably don't always agree. It's a fun job. Yes. What I'm going to say is it is, even though folks say it's a hard job, it has never has been as hard as being a teacher. Mm. Uh, that's where I got my start. And being a teacher, you absolutely have a shortage of time, but you have no shortage of platforms and new things to pick up and learn. So our first and foremost thing that we did with the teacher experience is we made sure that it's as intuitive as we can

possibly make it. Um, now I know also as a teacher sometimes we'll get nervous about new things. So I will say the one thing is everything that you love about Khan Academy is still here. So all the videos Sal has made, all the exercises, all the practice, our entire content library is still available within the experience. We also recently launched, or not so recently, over a year ago now, Khan Academy tools. So all of those are still available. So teachers can use Khan Academy to plan lesson plans, create exit tickets create their newsletters, we even have a Blooket generator through our partnership with Blooket. So all that is still available. And I'll add it's all built on top of our vetted

content. Correct. Exactly. It's all built on top of our vetted content. Um, what is most exciting now is for teachers it's as easy as it has ever been to get up and running with mastery assignments. So through onboarding you create most of all of your assignments. If you ever need to create a new assignment, it's as simple as a single click. You click it, you can assign unit mission, Khan Academy activity, content, writing coach, all of it is there for you with a single click. In the experience, we know teachers are short on time. So we built this dashboard to be as intuitive as possible. So when you log in the morning, um, you'll see this is actually my actual teacher's account cuz as Sal knows, we as Khan Academy are in our

own classrooms doing our own practice. I'm actually a teacher and a student in my own classroom. Um, and I am on top of everything today. But this is where in my insights space I would actually see if my students are underperforming, if they're struggling to understand something, um, that would show up here for me, and I could immediately take action on all of that. I also can see all of my upcoming assignments, student activity, all of that is tracked here. For our district partners, importantly, your district targets are located right here. So I can see immediately whether I am tracking to the goals that my district admin has set up for me. Um, I'm sorry to say it, Sal, I'm not I'm

not we're not living up to it right now. I'm going to say that's because we're in our company on-site and people are taking a little bit of a break. Um, we being the Khan Academy employee students of Yes. Khan Academy employee teachers. Yes. Progress. So all that progress is visible here. Um If you are a student and you're observing this and you've been using Khan Academy for a while, you will notice there's two very, very new things on this page. Um, we have the April Gem Challenge, and we have the live stream game.

April Gem Challenge, we are using gems now within Khan Academy to motivate students. And the way gems are earned, we could have just said, you know, you log in, you get points. No, we're tying it explicitly to practice. So when you promote a new skill to proficient, you get 10 gems. When you get it to mastery, you get five gems. So it's practice on the things that we know drive learning outcomes based on 50-plus efficacy studies, which will drive outcomes on state tests. We're very excited about that. Sorry to interrupt. No, no, no, go ahead. That's That's a really good point. So, you know, sometimes motivation systems it's just, you know, it's it's points for points' sake. But here we're talking about actual real

practice. And so as students get their gems, they're working towards a class goal. So here you can see um, you know we're at 819 gems and I as a teacher can set what the reward is and I may be a little bit traditional. I still think pizza party is probably the best thing you can get in your day-to-day as a student. So, our goal here is a pizza party. So, when my students get to their gem target, they'll get that pizza party. May I ask quickly Sal is um when you see this like school district alignment um goal setting has always been part of Khan Academy, right? We know how important it is. Can you talk a little bit about sort of the importance of that?

Yeah, I you know actually we can start at the student. Um there are some students that yes you just give them Khan Academy and they're off to the races and you saw that even the old versions of Khan Academy many years ago, but we've learned that the look for most students you the teacher needs to really hold them accountable, make sure they're on task, be invested in those goals and then for teachers to be invested in it, it's got to fit in you know as get to set and teachers already have so much on their plate. So, it's got to fit into what they're already doing. It's got to be super easy to use and if there's ways that the administrators whether it's at a at the district level or at the school level

can understand where the classrooms are and figure out how to support the teachers, that makes all the difference. Some of the top you know this some of the districts that we're seeing uh students have we just we at our onsite we just had a visit from some of the from the folks in Newark, New Jersey who are doing some amazing things with Khan Academy, but they had several schools where they had uh their median student in these schools where is it 95% mastery in some of these courses, 100% mastery median student and that happened because the administrators are looking at these dash well the teachers are definitely looking at the type of dashboard that get to showing right now, but the

administrators are also and we what we're building in this new version of Khan Academy, a lot of it is based on what we're seeing in places like Newark where they were doing poster board and they were putting kind of games out you know co-opetition fun you know more carrots than sticks of like hey here's the classroom, here's the grade level that's doing a great job. So, we're starting to put some of those things like leaderboards in it the live team game. How do you make it kind of a fun competition in it the gems? So, yes it's all about driving alignment making it so that there's an incentive to support each other fun carrots co-opetition not competition. We're seeing really drives outcomes in a lot of districts.

Thank you. Our colleague Fernando was um in KIPP Washington Heights for a long time. He told me that the reimagined Khan Academy experience just kind of does for you all the things that he was doing by hand that drove a really strong culture around growth in math. So, we're excited about that. Go ahead Gentas. Yeah, so exactly. These leaderboards we saw those Excel spreadsheets and it's kind of work to get set something like this up. So, it's now in product. This is one place where we are excelling. We're currently first place within our internal company metrics. So, all of our teams are competing. So, we're seeing some you know we've been doing this on a pilot and we've been seeing some pretty interesting like

there's some [snorts] changes that Gentas and his team have done to make it much easier to assign unit mastery goals and we're seeing some like 500% increase and then the live team game which is kind of this fun competition kind of Blooket Kahoot style, but you're doing it on Khan Academy exercises. Um we're seeing like in the same amount of time. So, let's say you do a 20-minute game with the students like Gentas is showing in the same amount of time the kids are getting four times as much practice learning because they're just into it. They're leaning forward as opposed to leaning back. So, we're we're pretty excited about this stuff.

Yeah, and the most exciting thing about that data that we got back is it's not just your it's not your high-achieving students that we're seeing those changes for. It's all the students that in the classroom are disengaged. We've seen real meaningful signs that when they engage in a game like this, they're actually getting skills to proficiency and then we've seen once they get that first or two skills to proficiency it snowballs. They feed burning them over time. Yeah, and these games to be clear they're not to you know they're not like just rewarding the high flyers. They're randomly assigned into teams. It's how your team is doing things like that. So, it's really about how much growth you're and it and you

know we're personalized learning. So, there could be a student who is a couple of concepts ahead and other students who's behind, but the performance on the game isn't about that. It's who's getting more skills to proficiency at their level. So, everyone's in the game as Gentas has mentioned. Gentas, can you just quickly um share with our audience what skills to proficiency means in case they're not with that? Great. So, every time so our exercises we call them you know they they measure skills and so whenever you get an exercise to proficient, we call that a skills to proficiency and proficiency means you know they cross that barrier where we believe they've truly learned something meaningful. So, skills to proficiency is

our that's our North Star. If you get students to skills to proficiency, we're doing well. On the efficacy studies, we used to measure time, but then we and we still measure time, but we realized like if there's a way to get more skills in less time, that's good. As I just mentioned things like the live classroom game actually don't change time so much, but it changes the productivity of that time. And so most the efficacy studies we've seen at Khan Academy, there's y'all both know about them, but 18 hours over the course of the year depending on the study you look at anywhere between 20 to 60% faster than expected growth even 9 hours over the course of the school year which isn't actually that much over the course of a whole school year. You're seeing

still a pretty large, but more recently we've seen that instead of looking at the time, if you get to 60 skills to proficient, that is not just associated with where there have been some pretty good causal studies now where those kids are accelerating 30-40% and even 30 skills to proficient, we're seeing pretty large effect sizes. You're reminding me of um Dr. Kristen DiCerbo our chief learning officer um said that is what Khan Academy is about. So, that is what is always here that's always the through line. We're there for your students in the moment of to encourage productive struggle. And if it's not driving learning measurable learning like we do, it's not for Khan Academy. 100% a lot of people think

Khan Academy videos and yes videos I made videos back in the day, but even I'm always very defensive about it cuz even in the very early Khan Academy, I didn't start with videos. I was tutoring my cousins and I said they need more practice at their learning edge at their zone of proximal development. And so the first Khan Academy had nothing to do with videos. It was a primitive version of what Gentas is showing where my I was assigning it to my cousins for them to get that practice and I was making them get like you know eight questions in a row. I had to find proficiency and mastery a little bit different, but the videos were just a supplement to that.

Yeah. And even today we view the exact same way. The core learning is when students do that deep practice on Khan Academy and yes we have videos, we have AI, we have articles. Those are supplements to that practice. Yeah. I think people probably don't really know this about the origins of Khan Academy, but you made the first version of teacher tools, right? You built them. All myself. Right. And then there was a fifth grade teacher John Marmeno in Washington D.C. He said hey can I use this? I was like I was so excited a real teacher wanted to use it and so then I started making it.

I still remember one Christmas break I was coding it so that he could use it and then ever since yes we've been building it for teachers. You know I've helped start now several schools that are very much you know teacher focused and how do we make the tools so that the humans in the room can really drive personalization, drive accountability and then hopefully free up class time for other things. Yeah. So, everything leads practice is I think the version of that. Everything we've we've built here we could build engagement just for engagement's sake, but we don't do it unless it leads

practice. Um so, here's our live team game. Nobody made progress unfortunately. Yes, if we were if these teams were there you'd see these characters move up with the bar increasing. But at the end of the game, we celebrate team that won the most gems and of course it all leads into our game closer to a pizza party. Are we moving up the leaderboards? It all connects together. So, last thing on the teacher side. If you've noticed Conmigo is here. It is our helpful teacher's assistant. I can ask it or search for anything. I'm going to pretend I was an English teacher. I'm going to pretend a scary scenario where tomorrow I have to teach fractions. So, I would say um adding fractions is what I need help with and Conmigo will search through

everything we have available on Khan Academy. It's going to help me find those resources for me to teach that class the next day and then also we've been talking about um you know teacher tools and all those. It's going to connect me to a teacher tools so I can build out those lesson plans, build out those multiple choice questions and all those things. So, if again it's that scary scenario, I know Conmigo is there to help me out with all that. I it's powerful for me to think about this in the about the content that it's pulling from cuz we are here with all of our content creators. They're very real people in the very real loop which is cool these days.

Yeah. Yeah, I mean I you know it's very there's it feels like there's a million startups saying we're going to do AI this AI that and we also are using AI, but you know we are very proud of the content that we have um and you've met the team here this I mean they're you know these are former exist and existing teachers, people with PhDs, people who have direct connections to the standard authors and the multiple standards Texas, Florida, Common Core all of the above and yes we are looking at ways and we just got out of a little thing of like maybe how we could use AI to, but a big part of that conversation was but we cannot we have we can't have AI slop on Khan Academy. It's got to be a high bar high level of rigor. Yeah.

Yeah, that will never change. Yes. Yeah. Go ahead Gentas. Yeah, is there anything else on the teacher side you wanted to share? I think it's time to jump into the Okay. So, Joyful are the insights. We just mentioned You mentioned it earlier. You mentioned it briefly. You mentioned it. Okay, we can talk about the insights. We can say it again. So, this is the section where you will see your insights. So, insights are just a quick summary of this is where your students are. They might have some misunderstandings, where they might have some overdue assignments. So, we're going to take all the data that we have We're going to summarize it for you. And if you have a Conmigo, it might

recommend, "Hey, these kids struggled with this. Assign a tutoring session." Things like that. Yeah. That's right. So, um I want to shift to talking about the student, and I just have to pre-empt this. If you've been with us for the last year or so, you've heard a lot of talk about broccoli. Um but, tell us again, Gintas, what all of the student experience has to do with broccoli? Yeah, so we as a product team go into a lot of classrooms, uh and students are, you know, if anything, honest. Yeah. Um and they will tell us exactly what they think. So, we've we've heard students describe Khan Academy as

broccoli. Um even they know Khan Academy is good for them, but uh it's not always the most the thing they want to do or uh easiest thing to eat. Um so, we've tried to make it not broccoli, and make it a little bit more joyful, a little bit more fun, a little bit more easy to use. Um so, you see here, I've got Conmigo welcoming me as my learning coach, and Conmigo is going to be the one that's telling me cheering me on, but also telling me what I have to do next. We know often the problem is students are just

like, "What do I have to do? What do I need to do now?" So, we made it as simple as here's a start button. You hit start, and we are going to be showing the student the things that you have assigned, and we're going to be pacing things out for them, so they can always get started on efficacious practice. And we've seen really, really good positive signs of, as we talked about before, more skills to proficient. More students are getting more skills to proficient because of how simple and easy this is. Um so, this is my own account. You'll see, I uh I my hand at basic ratios, and uh I didn't quite get to proficient, so um I'm going to have to probably retake that. So, I click retake, and I'll see

Conmigo is here on the left-hand side. It's it's here willing to explain to me what a ratio means if I need it. And so, this is where I could chat with Conmigo here on the left-hand side. I could talk through and get some help about um you know, what a ratio is, and then move on um with my practice. We know, even though we want to, you know, say we are much more than videos, if I benefit from watching videos, those are still available to me here in this folder, so I could watch a video, refresh my knowledge of basic ratios, or read an article uh before I continue on my practice. So, you all could watch me try my hand at basic ratios, and see if I can figure it out, but we're going to go back to our learning path here.

Um if I complete this right, I would have earned some gems. Uh we said gems are towards our gem challenge, so we're getting closer to that pizza party that I had signed up as a teacher, but I'm also getting gems personally, and you know, Conmigo, he's looking a little bit plain uh in my experience right now, so I really kind of want to give him a banana hat. Uh so, I'm going to start working. I'm going to start earning gems, and as I earn gems, I'm going to unlock more and new things to dress him up in. just observing my own kids, of all ages, uh middle school and high school now, this is shockingly motivating for them.

I was like, "I don't care that much about that." But, the kids are definitely into it. Yeah, and the confetti. Yeah, and there's confetti when you get something right. it. That works. Yeah. Yeah, the confetti button is yeah, by far and away one of the most popular features. So, yeah. So, we can make Conmigo look good. I go back to my dashboard. Um but, you can see here, you know, I've I've completed certain missions, so we have daily and weekly missions, and those I'm completing and getting motivated to just, you know, you'll see here for today, all I have to do is three things, so that's enough. Just three things, and I get a mission completed. That's motivating for me to just get started on

practice, so I don't feel like I have a endless list of things to do. Um but, if I'm a student who wants to just jump around, I can. I can see all my unit missions here. I also have access to the full content library, so if I'm an independent learner, I can go explore there. Um and then I can track all my achievements on my achievements page. Um I only have one proficient skill. I'll get there eventually, I promise. Um I also track my current streaks, um and all those things that could motivate me. Last but certainly not least, if I'm ever curious about anything, there's a tutor me section where I can just chat with Conmigo, get help on any topic I need help with, from cells, social

studies, you name it. Uh Conmigo's there to help me out. And a big thing that's coming, it's not in this yet, but it's going to be coming by back to school for our district partners, is something called gap detector. Because one of the big tensions that we've been hearing, it's a legitimate tension, is how do you make sure the students are doing their grade level practice, and you can do that in a personalized way, but we know a lot of almost everyone has some gaps that are pre and some kids have significant gaps that are pre-grade level. And people have always asked us, "Hey, can you do some type of a diagnostic, etc." And we have always actually had ways that we could plug in

things like the MAP Growth assessment. Khan Academy is coming up with its assessment. We've had getting ready for grade level course challenges, so we've had those things, and we continue to have those. But, with gap detector, it's really going to be an adaptive diagnostic assessment that any of our district teachers can assign to their students, and the default is that they should do it in that first week of school, and then as the students do it, it'll create a gap mission, or well, you know, things that the kids need to work on. And so, the teacher will still be able to assign the units for the existing grade level, but those gaps will be sprinkled in into their daily

and weekly missions to make sure that they're not just building on a Swiss cheese foundation. And it's super powerful stuff, because we never want to trap kids below grade level. That's right. Um that's always been important to us. Um and yeah, I mean, all of this is in service of getting kids working on grade level, Exactly. But, there are a couple of ways of getting there, and we want to make sure we're offering kids all those tools. I just I can't express how excited we are to get this into the hands of our students and teachers and the district admin. I just it's going to lead to so much more learning. Mhm.

I can't wait to see those numbers take off. And it's going to be a real event. Yeah, so I don't know when the last time you sat through like a full demo was, so yeah. What was that like for you? I love I and I agree with Gintas, you know, and here at our on-site, you know, I was telling our team, we're a nonprofit. We're not here to just exist for the sake of existing. When more districts use Khan Academy, etc., none of us get I don't own Khan Academy. None of us do. None of us own stock. None of us become any richer. If anything, I have to go raise more money, you know, go find money. So, everything that motivates us, I mean, hopefully people realize it's genuine. We're not just trying to say things

is like what's gets all of us up in the morning is like, "Wow, look, kids are learning. Teachers are engaged. Kids teachers are saying this is really working for them." So, we are we believe, based on the pilot data, this is really going to be a lot easier to use, um a lot more meaningful. It's going to drive move outcomes, but we continue you know, it's not going to be perfect, either. So, we're we're excited to be partnering with the you know, almost uh over 600 school districts just in the US, approaching 2 million students here in the US. There's actually many uh multiples of that even internationally, uh to just make it better and better. Um you know, there's a lot of talk these days about screen time, this and that, and I

keep saying like, "Look, I too keep my kids off the screen, the cell phones, etc., but there are things in moderation that we not only believe, we know are going to improve and you know, students are able to do 20, 30, up to 40 minutes a day of this, I mean, they are going to accelerate their outcomes. In some schools, uh you know, people are hearing about some of these schools that are driving a lot of personalized learning, they're using Khan Academy. Those are the schools that are using Khan Academy. Some of the ones that I've been involved with, you're seeing multiple grade levels in a year when kids are really allowed to practice at their own pace. So, we're excited working with all

the districts to try to accelerate that. Yeah. Um there's so much more we could say about our work with districts. Um there's a lot we'd love to share about how our implementation services work. Um that's really like the I would say the heart of Khan Academy right now is in our folks here who are working directly with districts. We value our district partners so much. Um and we want to work closely with you. Um if you are an existing partner, thank you so much for your partnership. We're excited to do this with you. Um and if you would like to learn more about what we're doing, uh you can visit khanacademy.org/schools. But, thank you so much, Sal. Thank you so much, Gintas. We'll see you all later.