What started as a family project to tutor his cousins remotely in the US, Salman Khan's Khan Academy has become a global phenomenon in the world of education with 17 million users. Khan Academy, founded in 2008 in California, is a massive open online course (MOOC) platform and provides education free of cost.

In this interview with Business Line, Salman Khan, Founder of Khan Academy, talks about the future of free online education, its plans and future of jobs.

Khan Academy is a not-for-profit organisation and survives solely on donations and philanthropic fundings. From Google to Tata Group, several large organisations have contributed towards Khan Academy’s mission of providing free education to school children.

Tell us about the journey of Khan Academy in the last one decade and some of its important milestones

The first Khan Academy had nothing to do with videos. It was mainly a site where I was creating software that allowed my cousins to practice, and for me, as the tutor, to see how they were doing on that practice, understanding what they were getting right and what they were getting wrong. It was really a friend’s suggestion that I make videos and upload them onto Youtube to supplement the practice exercises that I was creating for my family. I immediately thought that it was not so great idea, I said“Youtube is for cat’s playing piano, not serious mathematics”, but I got over that and long story short, my cousins told me they liked me better on Youtube than in person.

Around 2009, I quit my day job. My wife and I figured we could try and set this up as a not-for-profit for a year and live off of savings. It was an incredibly stressful time but about 10 months into that we finally got support from people like Ann and John Doerr and then shortly thereafter Google and Bill Gates came out of the woodwork.

In 2010, we started hiring educators, researchers, engineers, designers to build out the practice platform. The core of Khan Academy, even though many people associate us with videos, is the idea that students should get as much practice and feedback as they need, and be able to learn at their own pace, so that they don’t accumulate gaps that become debilitating later on.

Over the last 10 years, we have had about a 100,000 thousand users. Now, if you look at some of the recent months, 17 million people taking some form of a learning action every month on Khan Academy.

What is the mission?

Our mission is free world class education for anyone, anywhere and we have a long way to go because there are hundreds and millions of learners, that we want to empower, learners of all ages, especially in places like India. We have really grown about a hundred fold over the last decade and I hope we can grow our impact a hundred fold over the next decade as well.

What all has Khan Academy done in India so far and what are the future plans?

In India, ever since we set up in 2016, our focus has been to ensure content alignment and that we secure as many school and government partnerships. Over the last two years, we have been successful in aligning all of our middle and high-school grade Math content to the Indian curriculum, with science soon to follow. We are also currently working on re-creating our content in four major local languages - Hinglish, Hindi, Kannada, and Gujarati.

We have partnered with four government systems and nine private school networks. Today in India, about 100 schools, 300 teachers, and 30,000 students use Khan Academy’s resources for in-classroom learning every month.

With these partnerships, we have always worked towards setting up the teachers and students up for success, and improving learning outcomes by using technology in classrooms. The Government of Karnataka has partnered with us to make available all of our educational content in Kannada.

With the Government of Kerala, we have entered into a five-year partnership covering 4,775 schools, one lakh teachers and 20 lakh students. In the first year of partnership, the state would link Khan Academy’s content to its education portal, provide training to all teachers in the state, and begin a 20 school personalized learning pilot. Learnings from this would be applied to a statewide rollout over the next four years.

What is the future of online education? What role is Khan Academy and India going to play in this segment?

Platforms like Khan Academy allow anyone on the planet to have access to the same world class quality of education. I’m excited that in places like India the cost of accessing the internet has gone down dramatically and so I’m optimistic that the access to education will also increase.

Also online education platforms offer a shift from a fixed lock-step model to a personalized, mastery-based instruction and practice.

I think in the next 10 years, significantly more people will have access to high-quality materials and training resources that are provably effective. I think we’re also going to see a shift from fixed paced instruction to personalized, mastery-based instruction.

The skills of future will be all related to AI and VR, so what will happen to traditional courses?

Things like Artificial Intelligence and automation are going to really make us think hard about what skills are going to not be replaceable by robots. And those skills are going to be the ability of humans to empathise with another and also around creativity. So if a student develops skills in AI, ML etc., they are likely to be very marketable. But that’s going to be a very small sliver of the society, I would imagine maybe 1% is going to be actively working on AI or VR. For the rest of the society abilities of empathy, communication, and creativity are going to be very important.

What will be the future of jobs say 20 years down the line?

To me this idea of how will automation and AI effect jobs is the central question of the next 100 years. People have always been concerned about technology and automation replacing jobs. This is true, even in the early Industrial Revolution. And some people have become complacent, because they say- “Hey look, the Industrial Revolution seemed to have worked out fine. Sure certain people lost jobs - weavers, horses - but overall it seems like jobs were created and we had a middle class emerge from the Revolution”. But what people forget is that the Industrial Revolution didn’t happen in a vacuum. Simultaneously with it, many nations, especially the nations that were the first to develop, instituted free mass public education. This was a huge societal bet, something that depending on the country, they spent 3,4 or even 5% of their GDP towards it. Something like this would have seemed audacious 500 or 1000 years ago, when most people couldn’t read. But during the revolution, we had established that everyone needs to be able to read so that everyone can participate and that we need this middle class. So I think the middle class that emerged out of the 19th and 20th centuries was not just a result of the Revolution, but really the Revolution in conjunction with free mass public education.

So as we go into this next - say third industrial revolution, or the age of automation or the artificial intelligence age- it’s going to go even deeper into what human beings are capable of. Traditional industrial revolution technology amplified human muscle. AI doesn’t just amplify the human mind, in some domains it can even replace the human mind. And so what’s key is we need to make a similar societal bet.We need to create mechanisms so that most people could be an entrepreneur, mresearchers, and artists. I think those are the jobs that are going to be very hard to replace, through automation and artificial intelligence.

Lastly, is the business model followed by Khan Academy sustainable? From where would you raise money to run your future endeavours?

When Khan Academy first started ten years ago there were a lot people who wanted us to be profit-making business and I even entertained some of those ideas, but it just didn’t feel like the right thing to do.

Education is a space where our value system comes into play, it’s not just about making a profit, but it’s about providing access to education to all that want it. That was the original thinking behind making Khan Academy a not-for-profit that maybe it could be something of an institution for the whole planet. Today I think this was absolutely the right decision. Khan Academy has been able to scale in a way that I think for-profit companies in edtech have not been able to and this is because at the end of the day the world wants to put its energy into something that they see has a very scalable solution but is driven by a social purpose.

Investment in edtech is important and the more resources, whether for-profit or non-profit, that are trying to solve problems in the education realm the better, but I absolutely think that Khan Academy and other non-profits need to be there for the world regardless of what happens on the for-profit side of things.

Sometimes there is a perception with non-profits or with an NGO that because it is free, that it might not be truly excellent. This is why it was very important for me when we started Khan Academy that our mission statement was, “a free world-class education for anyone, anywhere”.

From day one Khan Academy has always aspired to be the best education platform out there whether free or paid. I’ve heard of families that get sold on very expensive software tools that are frankly inferior to what we make available for free. If you look at families who are in the know around the world, they're disproportionately using Khan Academy because they know our motivation is to have the maximum positive impact on students, not profit.

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