Sal Khan talks about education and innovation

By Morgan McFall-Johnsen

1:16 a.m. Oct. 15 2015

Weinberg freshman Stanley Chan poses with Khan after the event.
“The best test prep is just being college ready,” Khan says as he talks about standardized tests such as the SAT.
Kahn highlights the importance of adopting a growth mindset—belief that abilities can be developed through hard work—as opposed to a fixed mindset—belief that abilities are inherent.
“It’s important to reach every part of the world—to localize it,” Khan says to the crowd. “We need to make education a fundamental human right.”
Sal Khan speaks to a crowd in Fisk on Wednesday. In order to to keep up with the growth of Khan Academy, Khan quit his job as a hedge fund analyst in 2009.
Weinberg sophomore Ben Zimmermann (middle), one of the event's organizers, says Khan really embodies the kind of speaker CTSS wants to bring to campus.
The auditorium is packed with students.

Photos by Courtney Kang / North by Northwestern

Q&A: NBN got a chance to talk to Sal Khan one-on-one, and the hedge-fund analyst turned education innovator shared his advice for college students.

You talk a lot about flipped classrooms, is that something that can be applied to college?

Flipped classrooms, it's not something Khan Academy came up with. But in this day and age, you can record explanations and people can access them at their own time and pace. The whole idea of a 300-person lecture – the whole idea of a lecture is actually a bit antiquated, I think. On a day to day basis, you’re trying to grapple with a new concept, lectures don’t make a lot of sense. When you take the trouble of bringing humans into a room together, make them interact. Make them have a dialogue, break them into small groups for projects or let them tutor each other and explain concepts to each other. It’s a way better use of time.

Is there room for personalized education in college?

The college of the future, I believe, is you show up and there’s a set of core skills you need to achieve by the time you graduate. You pursue those at your own time and pace. Part of that is, there’s going to be these breakout dialogues you can participate in when you’re ready. And simultaneously, you’re building things. You’re building a portfolio of work. I think everyone should be doing a little bit of writing, a little bit of engineering and art. And then you should specialize and build on the things you have a passion for. So when you graduate from college, you don’t say, “Hey, I have a 3.7 GPA and this is my minor,” you say, “I’ve achieved mastery in these core skills, I didn’t just get a B-, I know this stuff. And here’s my portfolio.”

As an employer now, we see resumes all the time and we’re most impressed by the people who can show us the stuff they’ve made. It doesn’t even have to be related to the job – it could be a short story, wow, that’s really compelling. It says a lot more about you than your GPA.

How do you make the trade-off between choosing a stable career and innovating and taking risks?

I think everyone has a different risk trade-off tolerance. The advice I give to my cousins and I’d give to my children or a version of myself when I was in college, is that if you’re Mark Zuckerberg and you’ve created something you see traction in, run with that.

For most folks, build up your skill set and experience base. Look for the opportunities that will invest in you the most and give you the most rigorous set of experiences or rigorous set of skills. It could be in a traditional corporate environment. Find good mentors, but as you do that, don’t completely buy into that track. If you go to a bank or a corporate job, that’s fine. But always remember what that passion and that dream is. If you really focus on that, when you’re in your late 20’s or early 30’s, you’re going to have an incredible set of skills.

The sad thing is I see a lot of people who do the first part of that but then they forget. They’ve lost the, “Is that what’s going to make me happy? Is that what, when I was 21, I really wanted to do?”

When Salman Khan, the founder and CEO of Khan Academy, spoke at Northwestern on Wednesday night, his voice was instantly recognizable for many students in the crowd, invoking memories of high school study-sessions on binary logarithms and exponential functions.

Khan, who was invited to speak by the Contemporary Thought Speaker Series, spoke about his non-profit, which provides free online educational tools for any student with an internet connection.

Khan Academy is used in over 190 countries by 26 million registered students, but for Khan, there is still work to be done in order to live up to the Academy’s motto: “A free, world-class education for anyone, anywhere.”

Khan was in Chicago to coordinate a program he’s working on with Chicago Public Schools (CPS) called LearnStorm, which is scheduled to start in November.

The program is built around the concept of the growth mindset, encouraging students to learn through application, effort and failure.

"We think this will be an interesting way of adopting these ideas, focusing on mindset and personalized learning," Khan told NBN. "We don’t think classrooms will change tomorrow, but I think it’s happening a lot faster than people realize."

Officials from Hyatt Hotels Corporation, which is sponsoring LearnStorm, said that the program will be a nine-week competition between different CPS schools for the best rankings on Khan Academy’s online mathematics program. The program is intended to encourage “grit and perseverance and hustle,” according to Jeff Semenchuk, Hyatt’s chief innovation officer.

LearnStorm has already seen success in the San Francisco Bay Area, and Semenchuk said that they hope to expand the program to other cities in the U.S., and eventually around the world.

Making its resources globally available is important to Khan Academy. Khan said he would be going to India in December to look into how he can launch educational programs there.

"We’re going to try and launch an effort there and build and create the content that is relevant to that student on a device like a mobile phone," Khan said. "If you could show education minsters that there is a path for some small expenditure, and you can actually deliver education, then it creates a better argument for people to invest."

Their global outreach has public appeal. For Sarah Khan (no relation), a Weinberg sophomore, it demonstrated that “he wants to see our entire human race advance.”

Khan hopes to make personalized education available to everyone through Khan Academy. His mission began when he set out to help his cousin, Nadia, who was struggling in math. As more relatives asked for tutoring, he made his first videos and posted them on Youtube.

He began receiving comments and letters thanking him for helping strangers’ children understand math. One user said that “Khan Academy was the private tutor that my family could not afford.”

Since then, Khan has never stopped making videos.

Even on Wednesday night, as the last few people were leaving the auditorium, Khan was in the middle of a tutoring session of sorts. Semenchuk approached Khan and asked him to explain to him, one more time, a physics concept that a younger relative was struggling with. Without thinking or pausing, Khan dove right into a comprehensive, concise explanation, engaging Semenchuk to make sure that he was following along.

Speaking as enthusiastically as he had all evening, Khan led Semenchuk out of the auditorium, leaving the room empty, the big presentational screen reading “For free. For everyone. Forever.”