Khan Academy - by Sharon Gong
What's in your mind when you think about a school? It consists of many individual classes and some top-level students learn very well while some bottom-level students are not good at learning? There is a fixed syllabus in the whole academic year in every grade? Every student ascends from a lower grade to a higher grade step by step and what grade they should be in is totally decided by age? This is exactly what the traditional school looks like. However, Khan Academy is challenging this "stable system" in many "disruptive" ways.
Created in 2008 by Salman Khan, Khan Academy is a non-profit educational organization with the mission of providing a free, world-class education for anyone, anywhere. The biggest thing that they are different from traditional education systems might be their core concept, "mastery-based learning". Salman Khan has talked about this core concept of Khan Academy in TED [1]. "Instead of artificially constraining, fixing when and how long you work on something, pretty much ensuring that variable outcomes, that A, B, C, D, F [1]. What's variable is when and how long a student actually has to work on something, and what's fixed is that they actually master the material." They want to build a grown based mindset.
We are very honored to have Mrs. Berns from Khan Academy International Content to share with us about what they are doing to achieve this goal. Mrs. Berns explains that Khan Academy is actually building a system [2], including high-quality course videos of all disciplines, practices, teacher tools to help teachers manage the students as well as feedback from all users. For example, the teacher tools that they build can judge the actual level of students in a smart way, which is different from judging the level of students in traditional schools. They not only interact with online users but also help teachers offline. For instance, they introduce the classes into some poor areas in the US to make sure the teachers can have the capability to use the teaching tools. Except for all this trial, they are also doing education innovation experiments in Khan Lab School to achieve their core concept. Notably, the students who learn at their school for years really perform well in the ACT and SAT test.
How do they ensure sustainability as a non-profit organization? I guess this might be the biggest question that you could ask. In the next stage, a member from their marketing team explained the non-profit model of Khan Academy to us briefly. Khan Academy determines, above all, to keep non-profit forever and this vision would never change. But simultaneously, they have a huge working team, need to do marketing and need a lot of facilities, etc., which means they need income to pay salaries for staff, marketing cost, and these facilities. How do they afford these expenses? Actually, they obtain income from different sources. One is the donation from people who trust them to do the right thing, such as wealthy people and some foundations. These people are not necessarily their users. Another source is some examination companies. They do some partnership with companies like SAT, ILEST, US teacher examination. In this way, their staff can get paid with salaries between those of profit and non-profit companies plus very good benefits. More importantly, they have a very stable income to support the salaries and the income stock can even pay the staff for 2 years with no further income at all. How they build the financial model as a social enterprise really refreshes our mind. That is to say, they do not charge their users, or customers, they call for financial support from the people and organization with the same belief. They also win income from organizations that can benefit from Khan Academy.
Next, the member from the marketing team also shared with us about how Khan Academy do marketing. Marketing is highly digital in Silicon Valley. It normally includes video and adds. They will pay for the Google search, Facebook and Twitter and the input amount to each platform descends in sequence. They also use google statistics tools to see how many contributions from Googles, Facebook, etc. But different from common method in China, they will not emphasize so much on influential people, although their CEO, Salman Khan, is indeed extremely famous. They also do advertising in many smart ways. For example, they could decide whether to put the adds on some platform by collecting age data from Mobile Apps when users type their birthday.
In the end, we have a Q&A session. Every student asked very good and in-depth questions. Here are some selected questions and corresponding answers.
Q1. Teachers who are good at teaching provide teaching, and professors who good at research do not have the need of teaching. These teachers can provide video contents for students to learn. Do you think it's a tendency in education?
A1. Face-to-face teaching involves a lot of real interaction, which is not covered in video education. In this sense, video teaching could be a very good supplementary for students but may not be suitable to be a replacement.
Q2. How could a non-profit business model perform well, even better than a profitable model?
A2. Except for the income sources that mentioned in this article, sometimes, non-profit models really attract investors because they have very long-term and valuable visions. Tesla is a typical example that aims to accelerate the world's transition to sustainable energy.
Q3. Study in Khan Lab School is based on mastery-based learning. Therefore, students have different learning pace to achieve mastery in a subject. That means, some students learn faster but some students slower. How do you deal with the condition that the student who learns slower compare with the student who learns faster?
A3: It is sure to occur in any school that different students have different learning pace. All the students will have peer pressure. Dealing with this problem, maybe students could have classes of Social Emotional Learning (SEL). In this case, they will know how to deal with this kind of peer pressure with a suitable mindset and action. (See [3], the recommendation for a very excellent Social Emotional Program)
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-MTRxRO5SRA