Free thinker

Anjuli Bhargava on how Khan is pushing all boundaries to bring every student on the planet into his fold

In February 2020, as the pandemic took grip and Sal Khan, founder of Khan Academy, watched school after school down its shutters, he recalls thinking: “Well, I guess this is us.”

If students couldn’t attend classes in person, they and their parents were bound to look for something familiar, comprehensive and trusted to ensure learning remained uninterrupted. Khan Academy, a not-for-profit that aims to educate students for free through online content globally, was an obvious choice for many.

From 30 million learning minutes, Khan and his team watched as the learning minutes on their platform shot up to almost 90 million a day. Although users were growing even earlier, Covid accelerated growth dramatically and in 2020, the site recorded 12 billion minutes of learning as new learners jumped on board and existing ones doubled in. It was a “redefining moment” for him and his team. And so, at a time when the world was winding down, Khan and Co prepared to gear up.

Khan and I are connecting over Zoom in early March when the crisis has begun to abate in the US. I had first met him at the Leela Palace in Chanakyapuri, New Delhi, back in 2015 when his Khan Academy was taking baby steps into India. At 8 am, this is my earliest chat since Zoom became the way to reach fellow humans around the globe. I am in Dehradun, with a glass of cold coffee by my side, and Khan is at his home in Mountain View, California, taking his evening walk while chatting.

Since 2015, Khan Academy has grown dramatically with its budget practically doubling. It has introduced Khan Academy Kids, an early learning app for 2- to 6-7year-olds; deepened its content, particularly in the sciences; and identified priority countries of the 50 it’s now accessible in. India, with its 250 million students, is clearly a priority with a 20person office in New Delhi and localised content in several new languages (Hindi, Hinglish, Kannada, Gujarati, Bengali, and soon Punjabi and Marathi).

As the pandemic worsened, Khan and Co spotted another glaring gap: Students were using Khan Academy for asynchronous learning but globally, synchronous learning had taken a huge hit. He was already aware that small group tutoring was really the “gold standard” but it had never been scalable. The pandemic presented a new opportunity: Leveraging volunteerism to tutor students around the world for free.

School house. world was born, a personalised live tutoring app that allows an engineer in, say, Russia or Korea to tutor a student in Roorkee or Kanpur over 20- to 40-minute sessions. Unlike a Khan Academy video, this is a live, interactive session where students’ doubts can be tackled there and then. “The students also get to rate the tutors — kind of like Uber,” he laughs. In typical Khan style, the product is evolving even as it’s being rolled out. For instance: Can they have a cohort-based model with multiple sessions so the group gets to know each other; or how to fine-tune “office hours” where volunteers are available any time of the day.

Launched this January, the tutoring community had already touched 10,000 when we spoke. Students around the globe — and especially in India, where tutoring is a norm — were actively looking for and connecting with tutors worldwide. “In many cases the tutors have day jobs but see value in helping students who may not be able to afford it,” Khan explains. Three states in the US have already signed on to make this their state’s tutoring platform to try and bridge the learning loss on account of Covid. “For teachers, it’s like having an army of teaching assistants around the world,” he laughs.

Colleges, including prestigious institutions like the University of Chicago, have started giving credit to certified student tutors for college admissions. “It’s one thing to have a good SAT score but quite another to demonstrate that you tutor the subject and are empathetic enough to do it for free,” explains Khan. He is, as usual, keen to push the boundaries and see if he can get the younger cohort of tutors to earn college credits based on this tutoring.

I interrupt to ask about Khan Lab School, the experimental school he set up in 2014 when his oldest child had to enrol for school since he felt it would be “hypocritical” to allow his own kids to attend a regular school when he went around bashing conventional education. More like a creative start-up than a school, the full-day model encourages children of all ages to work on stuff together, learning from each other and having fun. All three of his kids now attend Khan Lab, which he tells me is a “constantly evolving entity”. It has grown from 60 students to 200 across K-12 and its first batch is currently applying to college, “without the usual anxieties that beset college applicants”.

It has been “fascinating” to watch how students who on entry were in the bottom quartile have managed to make their way up to the top percentiles when the environment is “supportive” instead of “competitive” — and is a rigorous, nonjudgemental space where students have more agency. Now that it’s a proven success, Khan says they are open to working with good social entrepreneurs who might want to start Khan Lab Schools in their towns and districts or replicate aspects of it.

Everything Khan Academy offers is for free — forever. So how does he finance his annual budget of $60 million?

His budget requirements do stress him from time to time but just like investors look for return on capital in the commercial world, funders and donors look for the social return on investment or societal benefit to cost ratios. New York-based Robin Hood Foundation calculates a social benefit to cost ratio for non-profits and on this a “good” non-profit has a ratio of 5:1, a “great” one has a ratio of 10:1 – and Khan Academy has a ratio of 500:1!

He explains that the way Khan Academy is structured, overall costs rise very slightly with every incremental student. So if 300 million students use Khan Academy a month instead of 30 million, costs don’t rise commensurately. This low cost scalability makes Khan Academy an attractive proposition for its financially and tech-savvy donors.

As we wind down, I think to myself that 44-year-old Khan and his dream are truly a double-edged sword. He’s set out to make the world a better place by offering every student on the planet, rich or poor, access to everything they need to know — and it’s all for free. Yet, if he manages to achieve even a fraction of it, he’ll put many others out of business. Being a free thinker in today’s world evidently comes at a huge price.