Learning Resources | Q&A

Khan Academy Talks Analytics, OER, and iPads

Thanks in part to a recent 60 Minutes segment with founder Sal Khan, education wunderkind Khan Academy has become very popular. The nonprofit's video lessons have racked up more than 130 million views to date from a wide spectrum of learners, opening a dialogue among educators coast to coast on the merits of the flipped classroom and the promise of technology to differentiate instruction. At the same time, the company is still very much a startup--30 employees and growing--that admits there is a lot of work to be done before it achieves the lofty goal of providing a free world-class education to anyone, anywhere.

THE Journal Associate Editor Stephen Noonoo recently spoke with Khan Academy's Matt Wahl, who splits his time between the products and implementation teams, about the newly released iPad app, using data in the classroom, and how the company thinks schools can finally dump the "sage on the stage" model once and for all.

Stephen Noonoo: Where is Khan Academy presently in regard to K-12 education?

Matt Wahl: Right now Khan Academy has an immense amount of content. We have over 3,000 videos in subjects ranging from math to biology, chemistry, even spreading into some economics and finance. Recently, we've added some content in art history with some of our partners. It's really been very humbling to watch and see the impact these videos are having on students.

The other thing we're focused on is the exercise platform. We have a set of self-paced exercises that broadly cover K-12 and today we're focused on fleshing that out. We have a pretty strong gauge looking at grades 3 to 9 and we're really focused on developing our content for 9 to 12. We're excited about the impact on the individual learners outside of the classroom. On our Web site we have, to date, around 2 million-plus problems done every day, and we just recently approached 400 million problems solved.

The third thing we think is exciting is our analytics platform, which lets students and teachers track what's occurring on an individual level to be able to see everything from how a student is performing overall in math, to how they're performing specifically within algebra and within linear equations, to how they're doing on specific problems.

We recently started putting more effort into tools for teachers and we released a comprehensive set of teacher resources. The goal is to provide a platform where we can share some of the learning that we've seen in the classroom with the broader base. We now have over 10,000 schools that are actively using Khan Academy in groups of 10 or more students, so we're really trying to shape the learning that we work with directly, and then scale those out.

Noonoo: Tell us about your new iPad app. What is the potential for engaging students on tablets and how do you see it having an impact on schools?

Wahl: We're really excited about the iPad app because we see it as really a great video-watching experience. It's our first foray into the app world, but it's something that we worked really hard on and we hope folks will enjoy.

First, on the product side, there are a couple of features that we think are pretty exciting. This has our entire video library on it. Right now our video library stands at 3,041 videos, and recently we've revamped our content management system. In addition to Sal making videos, we also have Vi Hart, who is creating really rich math content. We also have SmartHistory who created these awesome art history experiences, and now all their content weaves into the iPad app.