Khan Academy Skoll Awardee Profile

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Organization Overview

Key Info

Social Entrepreneur Salman Khan

Year Awarded 2013

Issue Area Addressed Education

Sub Issue Area Addressed Early Childhood to Primary Education, Post- Secondary Education, Secondary Education

Website http://www.KhanAcademy.org

Twitter handle khanacademy

Facebook https://www.facebook.com/khanacademy

Youtube https://www.youtube.com/user/khanacademy

About the Organization

Khan Academy’s mission is to provide a free, world-class education for anyone, anywhere. The Mountain View, CA-based nonprofit uses intelligent software, deep data analytics, and intuitive user interfaces to help teachers and students around the world. Online resources cover preschool through early college education, including math, biology, chemistry, physics, economics, finance, history, and grammar. Khan Academy offers free personalized SAT test prep in partnership with test developer College Board. Khan Academy has been translated into dozens of languages, and 100 million people use the platform worldwide every year.

Impact

10,000 unique videos, 3,000 unique articles, and 50,000 unique exercises, all available for free. 999 million lessons delivered. More than six billion problems solved. Available in 190 countries. 2.5 million students use Khan Academy’s free Official SAT Practice at roughly equal rates across income levels, race and ethnicity, and gender. Approximately 50 percent of SAT test takers in the United States use Khan Academy to prepare for the exam. 64 percent of first-generation students at top universities in the US say Khan Academy was a meaningful part of their education

Path to Scale

Open Source Online Resources Any learner or teacher can have free access to courses, materials, and tools.

Social Entrepreneur

Salman “Sal” Khan is the founder and chief executive officer of Khan Academy. Khan Academy started as a passion project in 2004. Sal’s cousin was struggling with math so he tutored her remotely and posted educational videos on YouTube. So many people watched the videos that eventually Sal pursued Khan Academy full time. Today Khan Academy has more than 130 employees in Mountain View, California. More than 48 million registered users access Khan Academy in dozens of languages across 190 countries. Sal has been profiled by 60 Minutes, featured on the cover of Forbes, and recognized as one of TIME’s “100 Most Influential People in the World.” In his book, The One World Schoolhouse: Education Reimagined, Sal outlines his vision for the future of education. Sal holds three degrees from MIT and an MBA from Harvard Business School.

Equilibrium Overview Current Equilibrium

In the current equilibrium, access to quality education and the attainment of positive educational outcomes for K-12 students in the U.S. are unequal, and are highly correlated with income levels of parents. Learning and performance in K-12 determine higher education opportunities, employability and livelihoods, but K-12 systems are unable to meet the unique learning needs of all students in the traditional classroom structure. Technology brings the potential for improving teaching and learning, but costs of such tools threaten to further expand the gaps in access and educational achievement by the poor. The U.S. market for K-12 educational software and digital content is at $7.5 billion and growing. [i] Within education, however, K-12 digital learning is currently characterized as highly bureaucratic and slow moving, with many teachers feeling threatened by digital tools, a tight fiscal climate and parent opposition due to quality and cost concerns. As a result, the vast majority of teachers still are fettered by challenges of ineffectiveness within classrooms, constrained to teach at one level while leaving some students behind and others bored. Technology is able to provide a platform for more personalized teaching and learning in classrooms and at home, but the full possibilities of its benefits to empower students at their own learning paces has not been realized. Common Core State Standards are controversial but aim to promote shared educational standards for student learning across states, enable providers to create content for use across potentially millions of students and benefit from cost savings. [i] Education Division of the Software & Information Industry Association as cited in fall 2012 Khan Academy Grant Recommendation Memo

New Equilibrium

Khan Academy aims to shift this status quo first by making a world-class education free to anyone, anywhere through technology. As a non-profit, it has a mission to build quality content and make it accessible through its web based platform and as of 2015, a mobile platform. Khan Academy’s model focuses on personalized, competency-based learning, aided by digital tools, which make mastery of subject matter the measure by which students move to the next lesson, unit, course or grade, regardless of how much time it takes. This allows teachers to move from a single-pace of curriculum dissemination to more personalized instruction, meeting the unique needs of more students. Technology can help make individualized instruction and mastery- based learning achievable in ways not previously possible, with real-time feedback loops providing insight to teachers, who can then adapt the educational experience to meet the unique needs of each student. As evidence begins to emerge to demonstrate that digital learning and blended learning can lead to improved educational outcomes, organizations like Khan Academy can result in new learning models that could drive systemic changes in the ways students learn and progress through school, educators are held accountable and informal learning is accessed. By focusing on making Khan Academy’s content and platform free, KA aims to close the achievement gap between low income and middle class/wealthy students. In addition to the platform creating impact for students in schools, Khan Academy also focuses on creating learning opportunities for non-student learners, as well as for independent students who don’t use the product in the classroom setting. This allows the organization to ensure it is actively working toward its mission statement, and not prioritizing certain use cases over others.

Innovation Khan Academy (KA) provides high-quality educational content and an open-source software platform to enable personalized learning. KA content is available for free to anyone with access to the internet. The learning platform consists of video tutorials, practice problems, articles, performance dashboards, and interactive community features. Its content ranges from math to art history, biology to computer programming, and beyond. KA allows a user to learn at his or her own pace to truly master a subject, and concurrently collects data on student performance in order to structure learning models according to student outcomes. Four characteristics differentiate Khan Academy and position its innovation to disrupt the status quo. Compelling content: KA’s growing library of video tutorials, exercises, articles and other interactive content on many subjects is available in 40 languages, enabling a student to learn at his or her own pace. The tone is engaging and makes the subject matter interesting and more easily accessible. Moreover, KA is aligning its content with educational standards to make it useful for both students and teachers. In 2016 KA has continued to invest in its content, by adding: 918 new content items created across math, science, history, grammar, and more 200 reference articles created in math leading as part of growth efforts New practice content in Physics, Chemistry, and History covering the most important topics in each subject Distribution strategy: Since its early days, KA’s partnership with Google enabled use of the YouTube platform to host videos and deliver content directly to learners online. For several years, Khan Academy used partnerships with schools and school districts as pilot programs to inform how the software can be used most effectively. However, as the organization has grown and they have heard more feedback from teachers about the challenges in employing Khan Academy in one single use case in the classroom, the organization has moved away from an implementation model to instead creating programs that allow for low-touch ways for teachers to use the resource. Khan Academy’s distribution today focuses across three key channels - independent learners (‘direct-to-learner’ channel), school students (‘educator’ channel) and international markets. For independent learners, Khan Academy allows learning for a specific area (quadratic equations) to a specific course (6th grade math or SAT). The educator channel will be launching a new educator product focused on the classroom in 2017. In the international channel, in key geographies (Mexico, Brazil, India), Khan Academy has local portals that have translated and localized content, and develops localized distribution strategies with local partners. In January 2015, KA launched its first mobile app for tablet/iPad use that includes access to all the videos, articles, and exercises on the platform. Expanding mobile accessibility is a top priority, especially in regard to helping Khan Academy reach learners internationally, where mobile devices are much more prevalent than desktop computers. In August 2016, for the first time, learners can complete practice questions in our Android and iPhone apps, a big step in improving learning and accessibility Big data R&D: To push the frontier of education research, KA is developing expertise and a vast dataset—over 10,000 times the size of what an education researcher traditionally uses, for purposes of rapid experimentation to determine optimal pathways of learning. Goals here include optimizing the KA learning experience for students and teachers by developing adaptive assessments and a recommendation engine, and to advance learning science more broadly. KA continues to build new analytics capabilities and share their research with the broader research community. With the launch of LearnStorm and their new SAT prep product, a significant amount of the efforts on analytics lately have been centered around the infrastructure and learning science capabilities needed for those endeavors. Beyond that, they have continued to create improvements to their overall analytics work, including product analytics, to ultimately reach more learners with the best quality learning experience that they can. Nonprofit structure: Despite pressures to convert to a for-profit and tap private sector capital to scale, KA has steadfastly committed itself to a nonprofit structure, to stay focused on its mission, increase its reach, develop key partnerships and generate the necessary evidence required to drive education systems change in the U.S. and globally. This commitment is truly unique and has proven a competitive advantage in achieving impact goals to date.

Ambition for Change

Khan Academy’s mission is to provide a free, world-class education for anyone, anywhere.