Killer apps and creative disruptions
Michael Horn: Tie funding to results
You’d have thought Salman Khan was George Clooney. After his keynote presentation and follow-up seminar at the California School Boards Association’s annual convention in San Diego on Friday, school trustees besieged him with questions and requests. A few sought his autograph; others mugged for a photo with him. Eventually, the event moderator gently reminded them, “Mr. Khan has family waiting for him in the hotel.”
Khan is the creator of Khan Academy, whose 2,700 online tutorials are viewed by up to 3.5 million people each month. Started four years ago as YouTube-based math help for his cousins across the country, they’re now being used independently, Khan estimates, in 10,000 classrooms. This year, following a successful experiment with two fifth-grade math and two seventh-grade pre-algebra classes in the Los Altos School District, the videos are being formally piloted with teachers in 16 California school districts as an element of classroom math instruction (see an article in today’s New York Times).
The growth of Khan Academy doesn’t surprise Michael Horn. He predicted phenomena like it in Disrupting Class: How Disruptive Innovation Will Change the Way the World Learns, which he co-wrote, after graduating from Harvard Business School, with Harvard Professor Clayton Christensen. Khan Academy is one piece of the larger shift to online learning that led Horn to predict that half of high school classes will be online within a decade.
“Khan Academy is a classic disruptive force. It has totally low barriers of access – it’s free – that make it a killer app” that will go viral, Horn said in a recent interview. “When you see that some kids in Los Altos are doing algebra in fifth grade, and you realize that those kids have a leg up to get to college, you’ll demand (Khan Academy), too.”
Khan videos are a tool, part of a strategy for individualized learning – the ability to “really create a student-centric education system where each child can learn at the pace and the path that makes sense for them, because every one of us has different learning needs.” (Go here for a video interview with Horn and here for a transcript of it.)
Horn, now executive director for education at the Innosight Institute in Mountain View, follows trends nationally and is supportive of efforts to break down the barriers to online learning in California. One of those is the California Student Bill of Rights Initiative, which would enable a high school student to take a college prerequisite course online anywhere in the state where it’s offered by a certified teacher in an accredited high school or college (see a commentary by David Haglund, a chief proponent of the initiative, elsewhere in TOPed today).
But Horn predicts that most online learning will be done in an existing school by integrating the virtual and physical classroom in a “blended learning” environment. Even those students who take online courses could be required to do so in a school’s computer lab, with advisers overseeing them, he said.
Rocketship Education, a high-performing elementary charter school organization with five schools in San Jose, has developed a blended model with a learning lab that students use 100 minutes each day. It has the added benefit of affordability: Rocketship employs one teacher less per grade and plows back savings to pay teachers more and hire academic deans to develop new teachers. Instead of cutting arts and physical education, districts could double down on them by using savings from a blended model, Horn says.
Changing roles of teachers
Teachers won’t vanish; their roles will evolve. “They’re going to be really important, but a group of them will be the mentors and motivators and facilitators of learning. A group of them will be content experts who can answer those content-heavy questions,” Horn said. “And a group of them will probably be case workers who help to fill in with the non-academic problems that have always held some kids back.”
Horn tempers his enthusiasm for online learning with a few caveats and a note of caution. In eliminating obstacles to online education, California should tie funding to student results. Florida to an extent does already, and now Utah will withhold significant reimbursements to online providers until the students demonstrate they’re proficient and have finished the courses. Accompanying that, California should eliminate seat time – the assumption that students cannot complete a course in less than a semester or a year. Money should follow students, based on however long it takes them to master the course.
“As it starts to walk into this, California has to adopt a very strong mindset that we’re going to be very concerned with student outcomes,” Horn said, and not repeat mistakes of states that have not focused on accountability.
As an attendee at the CSBA general session, my biggest takeaway for me was Salman Khan drive to “humanize the classroom”. It is not about technology but being able to create the circumstances where the teacher is given the opportunity to learn each child’s story. Implemnted correctly technology frees teachers to deliver inidividual attention. Salman’s numerous stories about the current model of “sage on the stage” and staying on time to the pacing guide even after the child demonstrates lack of understanding of the concept tells me the process needs help. Those innovative teachers/schools/districts that have been willing to “flip the classroom” will be the pioneers to a brave new world. Salman was the first to point out that his platform is NOT a silver bullet but a step in the right direction.
One other point. Salman’s bigger vision is to be able to a world class free education to everyone. Given the dropping cost of communciations and computing it is a vsision that is bold but attainable. Certainly, in the United States, it is extremely possbile to provide internet access and a computer for every five kids. Yes Salman is NOT advocating that each child have a computer. He believes one computer to five kids in the classroom and twenty minutes a day is all that is needed.
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I found out about the Khan Academy several years ago and watched quite a few of the lessons. For many students Khan’s stellar presentation will be a blessing and they will benefit. But without sounding like a Luddite, I do have a major caveat which Khan himself stresses. Math has a procedural component and a conceptual component. Khan’s lectures basically present a systematic explanation of the procedures but little on the conceptual understanding and strategic flexibility needed to solve, for example,complex percentage, proportion, and fractions problems. But even on the procdural side conceptual understanding of why it is done that way is helpful for many students. Why do you move the decimal of the divisor one place to the right in 400 divided by .2? Many students need to understand that a division problem is a relationship between the two numbers as in a fraction and that if you multiply both sides by 10 the relationship the quotient which quantifies the relationship stays the same. So 400 divided by .2 has the same answer as 4000 divided by 2 so if you clear the decimals and make the problem a regualr division problem. The lectures include some of this conceptual procedural knowledge, but not nearly enough.
More importantly, knowing procedures is only part of the math performance problem. For example, only about 40% of students will become proficient in solving percentage problems by learning the procedural knowledge of how to set up a cross multiplication solution. Most will need extensive practice with shifting bases, expressing in language what is being compared in a variety of situations, and sufficient time to develop the concepts. Teachers need to be able to identifty conceptual misunderstandings and figure out corrective actions and thus are indespensible for this effort. Of course, it would be very helpful if some of Khan’s lectures could be expanded to help develop conceptual understanding.
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Bill, I’d be curious to hear your opinion on this young organization’s online lectures: http://www.learnzillion.com/ They are geared toward developing conceptual understanding (and tied to the Common Core). Perhaps more importantly, teachers can use data from the mini-assessments to see where students are struggling and to tailor their classroom instruction accordingly.
(Full disclosure: I work for NewSchools Venture Fund and we are funding LearnZillion.)
John, have you done a write-up on the Khan Academy’s partnership with Los Altos? We need to hear from the local folks who know the beat, not the Gray Lady of New York…
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I like the Khan Academy and I’m glad it exists. It’s a great kernel of something, and an excellent place to go for quick tutorials for simple concepts. I can see turning a gifted, self-motivated student loose in it and watch them accelerate.
I have played with it with my 6th grader. What I find is that I really have to sit down and nurse her through it, maybe once every 10 minutes. The word problems are built with a very simple algorithm, such that to become “proficient” the student will do essentially the same problem with different numbers multiple times. There’s a learning to that, but it’s a lot less challenging than the problems that come from her homework. There are some areas where the Academy is really well developed … but it is not uniformly so. Not all the exercises have videos that are sufficient for someone who has seeing a concept for the first time.
There is much strength in the review of simple or already learned concepts. Running through the simple arithmetic exercises was very rewarding and helped my child become much faster at working problems in her head. The little badges helped make it fun to keep going.
Of course, more time and money invested in it will inevitably make it better. The concept of a great free site for learning is incredibly cool.
I too would be interested in hearing more details about how the program is being used in California schools. Of course, to use it for a full classroom requires moving to a computer lab or retrofitting more classrooms to become computer labs, and also requires broadband (if the videos are to be used).
Interestingly, because Program Improvement schools are obligated to stay with the heavily scripted curriculum, I don’t think it would be possible to integrate it for those students.
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Ben: I have not written about the Los Altos pilot, although I did attend a presentation in the district last Thursday, at which Sal himself spoke and answered questions. (I think saw him in San Diego on Friday). Los Altos happened to be chosen because the new superintendent, Jeff Baier, and others approached Khan Academy when it happened to be looking for its first pilot. Although Los Altos has the highest API scores in the state, I believe, the seventh grade pre-algebra students in the Khan pilot were basic and below basic.
There are many ways in which to view Khan Academy’s potential, and Mike McMahon touched on a key aspect — the ability of the teacher to know, in real time, how each student is doing, by using a dashboard that tracks each student’s progress, and then to work with them individually or in small groups. I believe the Los Altos teachers would agree that Khan Academy has invigorated their teaching.
There is also the recognition that students can excel when they proceed at their own pace until they get concepts or procedures (not to make light of your distinctions, Bill) and then often can excel once they get them. In the narrow measure of API progress, the percentage of students who were at proficient or advanced at year end in the Los Altos pilot rose from 23 percent to 41 percent (not sure if that’s both fifth and seventh grades or just seventh).
Rather than rehash Los Altos, Ben, I do plan to follow the next iteration. Khan is working with 16 school districts, mainly in the Bay Area, this year, and SRI will be doing a more extensive study of the results. It will be interesting to see Khan applied in districts where kids need to be taught rudimentary computer skills and may not have access to games and computers at home, such as in Ravenswood.
el: Khan might find your critique useful. I will pass on the email address of one of its local coordinators.
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One thing I love about Khan Academy is that it makes no assumptions about your age. I have used it to brush up on some advanced math for myself, and I can see lots of possibilities for unstructured self-directed learning for adults. Nowhere is there a sense that any unit should be too hard or too easy for you because of your age or past accomplishments. You can start anywhere that suits you. The promise here as a general community service – whether or not it proves to be useful in schools – is substantial.
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I would encourage to learn about the work Professot Eric Mazur of Havard. He has “flipped” his lecture hall where students view videos of content on physics and fill out a questionnaire before classroom time. Then Professor Mazur lectures on areas where students had trouble understanding the content. Here is an article: http://bostinno.com/2011/08/01/harvard-professor-ditches-lectures-for-interactive-approach-launches-startup-learning-catalytics/
Teachers have very little time and by getting exposure to procedural components prior to class, the teacher can spend more time on teaching conceptual material.
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One thing that kind of creeps me out about the hero-worship of Salman Khan is that there’s this impression that some people think he’s a revolutionary genius. The Academy, as I said, is a big public service, but it’s mostly an incremental kind of progress, a good guy with time on his hands and resources available rather than something only he could have ever done. As a lecturer he’s effective and reasonably good, but I’d say 75th percentile good, not 99th percentile good.
So I love what he does and I love that he’s doing it, but we have a lot of talent out there that hasn’t been tapped.
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