Sal Khan and Amy McGrath on Khan World School @ ASU Prep

You’re listening to the Getting Smart podcast. I’m Tom Van Der Rook and today I’m joined by Salman Khan, the world-famous founder of Khan Academy. And our friend Amy McGrath, the Chief Operating Officer at ASU Preparatory Academy. Amy is a repeat guest for big fans of the innovation she’s leading there.

Today they are talking about their recently announced Khan World School at ASU Prep that will be opening in August. Sal and Amy, welcome. Thanks for having us. Thanks, Tom.

So we’ve lived through 26 or 27 of the strangest and in many ways awful global pandemic. I’ll start with a word of thanks for you and your team. So a huge increase in usage and demand and I guess the world’s in a better place because Khan Academy and related resources exist. What was the pandemic like for you and your team?

Yeah, it was wild as you can imagine. A week first caught wind that we might be relevant. This was February 2020 when a teacher in South Korea said that they were using Khan Academy to keep their kids learning during their school closures. And that’s when we started saying, okay, we should be prepared for this.

And then it wasn’t too long after that, about three weeks after that we started seeing the nationwide or global school closures around the world. And that first week we saw a normal school day in 2020, we were seeing about 25 million learning minutes a day. That hit 85 million by the end of that week.

So it was definitely interesting. And then we’ve just ever since then frankly been trying to keep up with all of the needs, not just the needs that happened during the pandemic, but now as we hopefully are entering into a post pandemic phase, how do we do the recovery effort is the way we’re thinking about it.

And this is where a lot of the notions of personalization, mastery learning, everyone talks about unfinished learning. Well, how do you fix unfinished learning? That’s mastery learning. That’s what we’re trying to focus on.

Sal, do you and your team have a sense that your resources were used in some new and interesting ways? Were they part of pandemic pots that came together? It’s not talked a lot about, but we already even pre-pandemic 80, 90% of homeschoolers were using us.

And you go into the pandemic state and people have pods or people are trying to find something to supplement. We just became that much more universal in terms of who is using it. But yeah, we are finding more and more off-label uses. Some universities used mastery on Khan Academy in order to understand what students knew

and didn’t know in a year where standardized tests were a little bit difficult. We’re seeing the state of New Hampshire is giving credit for students who can master things on Khan Academy. So I don’t think that would have happened as quickly if not for the pandemic. And even going into the pandemic, Sal, your team was actively partnering with schools

around the world. So more and more schools were pulling your resources into core curriculum or using it in a tutoring support for core curriculum. And so we know a lot of formal learning organizations incorporated Khan into their virtual response. And so just a big word of thanks, junior team, for being so flexible and responsive in the

last two years. Yeah, that’s our focus area. That we’ve we’ve always been used in classrooms. We have several hundred thousand teachers using us. But about five, six years ago, we said, if we really want to move the dial for nations

and really move scores and learning, we have to work formally with districts. And so that’s when we started building what’s known as the Confer District offering. And we have another partnership with the NWEA around the map accelerator. And it’s been obviously the pandemic has thrown a couple of curveballs at these efforts. But there’s now there’s about 20 to 30 million students who come to Khan Academy every month,

take a learning action. About half of them are in a classroom setting. We now also have about a million students who are in part of these formal district offerings. And we just got some preliminary efficacy results. The students who are able to put in even 20 minutes a day, three times a week, they’re

growing 50 to 100 percent more than their than their peers. So we’re we’re continue to be very bullish about growing that million to five or 10 million is their way that in five or 10 years, we can have 10, 20 percent of American kids having grown 50 percent more than they would have otherwise. That’s awesome.

Amy, you’re you’re both an executive at Arizona State University, the most innovative university in the world and chief operating officer at a sponsored K-12 network called ASU Prep, which is both a family of schools across the Phoenix Valley. But it’s also a statewide, a big statewide school in Arizona and and in fact used worldwide and as we noted in a podcast with you a year ago, ASU Prep was super responsive, both for

your own students, but for schools around the country, right? Yeah, absolutely. I think we were one of the many educational technology and school efforts that had strong and robust digital sides that exploded in a very good way. And thankfully, we were well prepared to support schools and districts to keep their students

engaged and also keep their students from an attendance perspective and a school of record perspective, working through their content so that when in person learning returned, they were they were back in their seats. So thankful to be a part of an innovative university that is able to come alongside school districts and empower that.

Amy, about five weeks ago, I had the chance to visit ASU West, your campus out in Glendale. And I met with about 30 ASU Prep digital students that were spending a day a week on campus at ASU West, working on climate projects with environmental studies folks and working with the communications lab on their presentations. And it was just such a cool example of adding in person experiences for digital learners.

Just one of the cool innovations that you and your team have been been piloting as we come out of the pandemic. Yeah, it’s all student led the demand from the kids to get together and add this social component is we’re just being responsive to that. And I’m glad you were able to see that.

I think that from a conroll school perspective, I think Sal and I have discussed this will be a beautiful picture of, you know, things that will happen organically because kids collaborate and come up with ideas so often. And so Mesa, which is local to the Phoenix area, experience that we’ve created for students just kind of came out of kids being at home and figuring out really well how to collaborate

together and then proposing to their teachers. How do we formalize this and give it a little bit of rhythm and routine so that we can always expect to come and learn in person, but also have that flexible option from home. So we anticipate that being a piece and a tentacle of what happens as the conroll school grows as well.

In our show notes, Amy will highlight that you’re opening an innovative elementary school in downtown Phoenix next month. You’re also going to be opening a couple hybrid micro schools associated with new ASU campuses, just some more innovations in new school models that leverage ASU resources. So check those out.

But we’re here to talk about the con world school, just a really exciting new offering that’s coming this fall. Sal, you’ve been thinking about this for a few years, but what was the inspiration and backstory for con world school? Yeah, in 2014, we started con lab school, which is under the offices of con Academy.

And the whole idea there was, okay, con Academy is doing what it’s doing. But given what the world needs and given the tools that are going to be available, like con Academy and others, what could schooling look like if we think about it from first principles? Some of these ideas were things that are very much aligned with what we talk about con Academy.

How do we personalize to the needs and the pacing of a student? How do we give them the opportunity, the incentive to finish unfinished learning? That’s mastery learning. But there’s other ideas that transcend the technology. Can you revisit the school day?

When learning not be bound by time or space, which obviously the pandemic really underlined that idea, is there a way to do more mixed age? Can you, in a world where you have tools like con Academy where students can hopefully learn and master their core skills faster, does it in some ways liberate time when human beings are together to do higher order things, to have conversations, to do simulations, to

do research, projects, whatever it might be? And so we started con Lab School out here in Mountain View seven, eight years ago to see if we could show that. And I always, I continue to tell the team at con Lab School, if all we did is start a successful independent, another independent school in Silicon Valley, that’s a failure.

We don’t want to do that. We want to show that there’s a new learning model that can be cost effective. And then we can get that model and we can scale con Lab School had its first graduates last year. So it’s a K through 12 program and a lot of, and we have our second graduates year this

year. And a lot of these ideas are bearing fruit. People were wondering, Hey, if you, if you go to colleges and you don’t have traditional letter grades, but you have your competencies, will that work? Well, it turns out it’s working great.

How the students are healthier and happier than they would be at a lot of other places, but they’re doing better than peer students in any form of measure of competency, whether standardized tests and now that they’re going to college, they’re really thriving and they’re getting into, you know, some of the most selective places in the world. So with that under our belt, there is talk about potential new con Lab schools, but I

think especially with the pandemic, there’s a thought about, well, maybe we can scale faster and it is an online is obviously the way to scale faster. But to the conversation you all just had, we don’t think online is exclusive, but if you can create an infrastructure that is online, then that opens up the possibility that if you have critical mass and certain geographies that that maybe they can set up pods or that

they can start meeting in person. So in the somewhat of an inspired weekend, I had written a vision document of this world school and it really has two or three parts to it. One part is, hey, what if mastery on Khan Academy can actually give you your credit? And we’re already seeing that we have a partnership with Howard University where we’re doing college

credit for college algebra. But what if that was like core to what you’re doing in your school? We do that at con lab school. There’s another not for profit. Don’t want to confuse people called schoolhouse.world, which is helps us, which is all about free

tutoring, but it also can certify people’s knowledge. So that’s one of the pillars of this vision document that was written six, seven months ago. But then the other ones is we also want to do competency and writing. What if you could have Oxford style tutorials where several times a week, you’re able to

meet in a small group and review your goals, maybe get unblocked on certain concepts. And then the real core is can we address, I would say not just an issue with online schools or some online schools, but or negative stereotype of some online schools, but also I would say the negative stereotype of schooling in general, which is there isn’t enough human to human interaction, live human to human interaction.

We might all go to school together, but we know in a lot of schools, you just kind of stare at the clock and try to pretend like you’re paying attention. The best classrooms are always the ones where students are talking to each other. They’re interacting. They’re debating.

They said, could we bring that element? And this is where this idea of a daily seminar came in. What if every day, not just have a discussion, but frankly, discussion about interesting things. Are there, is there intelligent alien life on other planets?

Should social media be held accountable for polarization in this country? Is CRISPR going to fundamentally change what it means to be a human being? I mean, these are fascinating things. People aren’t really having these conversations inside. People are having these conversations at dinner parties, but not in classrooms.

Why not? Because there’s so much that’s cross domain. So we had that and I started working with the KLS team to say, hey, how can we operationalize this? And we were introduced.

I was introduced to Amy by Michael Horn, whom we all know. And he said, well, you should talk to her. She’s done amazing things in the online space. Super creative. And Amy and I started chatting and about half an hour into it, you know, I’m kind of secretly

saying, wow, I would dream of doing this with Amy. And I hope I maybe she you can ask her how she was feeling. But but by the end of the conversation, I was, you want to do this together? She was up for it. So it sounded great to me.

Let’s say yes kind of place, right? Amy? That’s right. It was there was very little to disagree with in our conversation the first time and continues to be the same.

And I think that’s just because we’re intently focused on students and we believe that every student can. So with Sal’s and his, you know, he just described the universe of work that he’s doing to impact learners all over the world to that suite of assets combined with the ASU sort of infrastructure and the ability for us to deploy this in an already operating comprehensive accredited

school. It just seems like a no-brainer. And so it was one of those moments where I’m sure if we were together, we would have been high fiving because we were like, this is the right thing to do. So it’s been a very short time with aggressive goals to put together a school program with

a small team that has been very impressive to both of us. And so we’re excited for our inaugural students to be able to experience what we put together. So Amy, the details you’re launching with a small cohort of a couple hundred ninth graders in August, is that right? That is right.

200 incoming ninth graders. We actually don’t use the word ninth grade because it’s the students that have already met those mastery level standards and competencies and we’ve got some that are younger. So they’re skipping eighth grade because they’re ready to do so. And in their world, they’re underserved because they’re such accelerated learners.

But there are 200 of them that will cover ninth grade standards and then we’ll continue to grow that not by grade. We will actually go nine through 12 in the very following year and we’re building seminars and other content for that right now. So this will be a program of ASU prep, but and you’ll borrow some of the aspects of it,

including college credit opportunities, but it’s really going to be a separate program. He’ll demonstrate the efficacy of the program in the first year and then scale it. But Sal, some of the elements that you talked about are just they’re super interesting and they’re very unique. You mentioned that daily seminar.

I love that idea. What was the inspiration for that? Where have you seen that make a difference for young people and who would lead it? How many students would be part of it? Just tell us a little bit more about that.

You know, honestly, the inspiration probably if I really give credit where credit is due is probably goes back to business school for me. You know, I remember going to business school with my background as an engineering and computer science and math and I kind of came as a bit of an intellectual snob to business school, especially at HBS where I went.

They’re all case based. They’re very they’re like religious about the case. They don’t give any lectures. It’s all discussion. And as a, you know, hardcore math science person, when I show up there, I’m like, OK,

this is this is going to be fluff. But in hindsight, it was transformational to have daily conversations about relevant things and it just sticks with you more. There’s moments today when I’m facing tough decisions at Khan Academy where all of a sudden I remember something that someone said back in 2002 in my business school class.

I’m like, oh, now I understand what they meant when they said that because I’m facing that situation. Now, I don’t remember a lot more from my education. I don’t remember. I can’t even tell you the classes I took in undergrad, much less a lot of the actual topics. So that was there.

Then the last seven years at KLS, we’ve definitely tried to reinforce this. I’ve been running something I call it the seminar, but the kids affectionately at KLS called Sal seminar, where I go in there and I essentially have these same conversations with them about these types of topics. And I think this is something that I enjoyed as a teacher at KLS a ton and I think has been

hopefully very transformational for the students as well. And so we’re like, this needs to be the the the core experience in terms of what it is. It’s going to be diverse. It like, well, CRISPR changed humanity. That can that hits the central dogma of biology where if you want someone to learn one thing

in biology, it’s the central dogma about biology of DNA, RNA, proteins, evolution, natural selection, how does that work? But then it talks to us about social issues. What does it mean to change the human genome? What, you know, even if we have the power, should we still do these things?

We can and we’re hoping to have many, you know, some of these won’t be just one day. There’ll be a whole it could be a week. It could be two weeks where you build up to it. And one one day could focus a little bit more on the science. The next focus day could focus a little bit more on the ethics of it.

And this is, I think, a really, I think, especially in the country is polarized as it is. People are actually almost afraid to have conversations these days. And we hope to show that there’s ways to have conversations about these that does not start with the bias. We’re hoping we actually want to be very transparent about the topics that we’re going to put out. And we’re hoping that people have either political end of the political spectrum would look at that

and say, OK, that question is written in a neutral way. I can engage in that conversation. It’s not trying to lean folks one way or the other. We’re actually partnered with a group at the University of Chicago, Stephen Levitt’s group. It’s called the Risk RISC Group.

They’re helping us create a lot of these seminars. And we hope the seminars are leveraged heavily at Conworld. I mean, they will be leveraged heavily at Conworld School, but they’re also something that we can share with the rest of the world and teachers or frankly, families or parents or people at dinner parties can leverage them on top of that.

No, it’s a beautiful innovation. It’s in some respects old made new, right? This is what the best educations in both undergraduate and graduate have always included. And I’d love that you’re bringing it to a next gen high school. Amy, this is going to be complimented by self-paced online learning.

And that’s going to be an interesting combination of both Con Academy and access to ASU courses. What else can you say about that self-paced layer? Yeah, I think we’re being very careful on the students that we select that have an aptitude that is maybe unique from their peers and their self-starters or conversationalists

or they’re at least willing to be, I think really doubling down on what Sal said as it relates to these seminars, this is going to be a chance for students to apply their learning to demonstrate it to really develop their learning agility because things are changing so quickly and students need to really kind of grow their emotional intelligence and learn how to have hard conversations with, you know, taking a risk and discuss differences

with others that lead to new learning for one another. And I think that’s a real pillar of this mastery. So you don’t just learn and memorize, you learn and you discuss and you break things down and conversation and healthy discourse and dialogue with your peers. So we will use several different tenants of both the Con Academy assets,

the Schoolhouse.World platform for peer-to-peer mentoring to be able to track that and be able to even, you know, become a recognized peer mentor that maybe even is demanded by another peer because you’re so good at it. And then we’ll also draw down from the ASU prep learning assets because they’re dismantled in such a way that we can sort of look at the honeycomb of learning assets and drop

in what might be missing or what might be helpful from the prep platform. And Amy, you’ll even be able to invite learners that are ready, even ninth and tenth grade or first and second year learners, into college credit opportunities in the subjects that they’re ready for. And that’s one of the exciting areas of flexibility here in this partnership.

Yeah, I’m glad you said that. I think it’s important to highlight the fusion of a very integrated approach to content. So as soon as a student is ready and is showing that they can master high level content, then they’ll be able to get university level content or credit for that and carry it with them wherever they go.

So I think that’s a huge value proposition. Sal, the design is long on tutoring and tutorial. I’d love to have you talk about the small group tutorial and the role that you see peer tutorial playing over time. Yeah, I think there’s two really important dimensions.

Actually, just to follow on that last point, you know, we’ve also seen what you all just described at KLS. We have ninth graders and even next year we might start some eighth graders. Take classes at local universities to enroll them and they rock it. There’s some of the professor’s favorite students and so they’re doing really well. So I think the world has not pushed that envelope enough.

But on the tutorial, you know, we’re already in a world that is someone, let’s say in math or science, wanted to learn and we have letters from young people all over the world and not all young learners all over the world. There’s some people who are very motivated and they can go on Khan Academy and just that they can learn. Now, and they do amazing things.

I could tell you all some stories that would bring tears to your eyes. But we know that’s not most students. Most students need extra support, extra people to help coach, set goals, be held accountable to. And we see this at KLS and that’s why KLS, if you’re a math teacher or a science teacher or a humanities teacher at KLS, a lot of your job, yes, every now and then you’re facilitating things

like the daily seminar, but a lot of the times you’re sitting down reviewing students’ goals, just trying to figure out why they’re succeeding or not succeeding at their goals, how that could be adjusted, maybe giving them a little bit of a nudge conceptually so that they’re more likely to unlock. And so we wanted to be able to offer this at the world school. We don’t want to just say, hey, here’s all the material you’re off by yourself.

We want you to in some ways feel more supported than you would in any traditional school. I’m not saying that this is necessarily the status quo, but I remember, you know, my own school, and I had some amazing teachers and actually even sometimes when I had amazing teachers, they just had 30 kids in the classroom, so it was very hard to give personalized attention. But a tutorial model, which really comes from Oxford, where you’re able to meet with an expert

in a small group, roughly three students at a time on a regular basis to say, OK, how are you doing on your goals? What are you having trouble with? Here’s some new ways to think about the concepts. We think that’s the type of nudge that can keep kids learning, make sure they hit their goals

or get even faster than they need to go. And then on top of that, we have the whole peer-to-peer tutoring support. This is built off of schoolhouse.world, another related not-for-profit that gives free tutoring. And the way it gives free tutoring is it leverages volunteer ship. And that has two benefits to it.

One is it’s just another layer of human support that you can almost get on demand. You can get on demand live help. There’s free homework help on schoolhouse.world already every evening in US time zones, and we hope to expand that. But maybe equally important to that is things really stick with you when you learn to tutor to others.

And not only do you need to actually have to master the concepts, but then you have to communicate. You have to have empathy, patience. And those are skills that traditional schools aren’t able to really focus on or assess. And we think we will be able to. So these kids are going to be, I believe, very well-rounded.

They’re going to have content, fluency, and mastery. But they’re also going to be very articulate. They’ll be able to argue for themselves. And they’re going to be able to be giving a lot to others, including their peers. So this is such an exciting model.

What a cool combination of the historical benefits of online learning with the benefits of the seminars, plus the tutorial access to accelerated college credit. It’s just really an exciting agenda. We’re so happy that you’re launching this with ASU prep. This could get really big, don’t you think?

That’s our hope. And this whole family of efforts that we’re doing at Khan Academy and ASU, we obviously just want to have as much positive impact on the world as possible, have as many people be able to tap into their potential as possible. And this pilot that we’re doing in year one, it’s not a pilot like, it’s just a pilot scale.

We’re going to keep going for sure. But Khan Academy’s mission is free world-class education for anyone anywhere. And missions kind of feel like some of these very far off things that you keep striving towards and you may or may not get there. But what’s cool about this is this is already a free world-class education for anyone in Arizona.

And it’ll be a very accessible and hopefully reasonable cost education for anyone in the state that does not have a state charter. And we’ll see if we can work on more. But I don’t see any reason why this couldn’t scale to tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands or even more. Or even become, you know, one of the intriguing things is we, I run a, I help run a physical school,

Khan Lab School. We’re also looking at Khan World Schools. Like why don’t we leverage that platform to make the in-person more systemic and plug into something bigger than ourselves? So I think it could have implications on curricula in physical schools as well.

It’s super exciting. Amy, if people want to know more, what can they do? Where do they go? KhanWorldSchool.org and they will find all the information for how to submit for application. Our next deadline is June 15th.

We also have information sessions that are coming up on a weekly basis. Sal and I both come to those and get a chance to really just have a question and answer session and also learn what does the day in the life look like. So we would be thrilled to have students come check it out. And then there’s also admissions advisors that can answer questions based on what the family’s needs are as well.

You know, for somebody that’s been involved in online high school education for 25 years, I’ve never been more excited about an initiative. This is just such a, it’s such a great partnership. Sal, we really appreciate your contribution to this effort. And Amy, ASU and ASU Prep are just an extraordinary powerhouse of innovation.

Together, you’re going to do great things for kids. We really appreciate you being on the podcast and sharing the exciting path forward for KhanWorldSchool. We’re excited that you’re excited, Tom, and we’re going to have you guest lecture some of these daily seminars. I want to do a daily seminar. Pick the topic.

I’m in. Thanks, Amy. And thanks to Sal Khan. We’re talking, we’ve been talking about KhanWorldSchool today launching in August of 22. We appreciate you joining us today.

Thanks to our producer, Mason Pasha and the whole Getting Smart team for making this possible. Until next time, keep learning and keep innovating for equity. Thanks for tuning in to the Getting Smart podcast today. We want this podcast to be actionable and insightful and a great way to learn about what’s next in learning. In order to stay on the cutting edge, we need people in the field to tell us what they’re hearing,

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Thanks so much.