Salman Khan is a true pioneer of online education. The Khan Academy videos he started making in 2005 have been viewed over 1.8 billion times, and his work has helped to accelerate the learning of more than 100 million people. His creative approach to distance education—removing long-winded lectures from the equation and focusing on mastery learning—has revolutionized the way people acquire new knowledge and skills.
How does Sal Khan generate his creative insights while maintaining a feverish pace of productivity? What approach has helped Khan to redesign education from first principles, while larger institutions have struggled to adapt?
Fresh out of business school in 2003, Sal Khan joined Wohl Capital Management, a small hedge fund outside of San Fransisco. Fund managers are notorious workaholics, so Khan rolled up his sleeves and prepared for an onslaught of 14 hour workdays. He was getting ready to stay late one evening, when his boss, Dan Wohl, took him aside. He told him that he should go home, and leave his work at the office. During this exchange, Wohl shared an important insight: his job wasn't to burn himself out working around the clock—it was to make a few key strategic decisions and avoid a bunch of poor ones.
During this found time at home, Sal Khan began tutoring his cousin, Nadia, in mathematics. He also started writing the algorithms that became prototypes for Khan Academy's educational platform. Sal credits this 20-30% time as where he came up with many of his creative insights.
By carving out time to engage in tasks that are seemingly unrelated to your line of work, you can free up your mind to think divergently and approach problems from new angles. Barbara Oakley, creator of the massively popular Learning How to Learn course, refers to this process as diffuse mode thinking.
It can feel counterintuitive at first. We've learned—both through experience and education—that working on a problem requires a constant barrage of effort until it is completed. However, the best ideas often arise when you shift between intense focus and creative mind-wandering.
Sal Khan also believes that having blocks of time to pursue individual interests can ignite one's desire to learn. In an interview for the Harvard Business Review, he cites one transformative example:
Every day, starting in second grade, they took me out of class for an hour, and I would go to another room, with a mixed age group. The first time I went, I thought it was the biggest racket. I walked up to Miss Rouselle’s desk, and she asked, “What do you like to do?” I was like, I’m seven years old—shouldn’t you be telling me what to do? But I said, “I like to draw. I like puzzles.” She said, “OK, have you used oil paints? Have you done Mind Benders?” Soon I looked forward to that hour more than I did to spending the night at my friend’s house. And I learned more that applies to what I do today than in the five other hours of the day combined."(1)
When it comes to learning, autonomy fuels discovery—which ignites curiosity. This is true whether you are in second grade, or just starting out in a competitive career.
One of the principal missions of Khan Academy is to provide the raw materials and structure to support self-paced learning. This offloads much of the rote, lecture-based pedagogy that takes place in the classroom, and frees up valuable class time to work on creative, exploratory projects. More children deserve the opportunity to discover the world around them on their own terms, as Sal did.
Learning for Mastery
Under the traditional classroom model, teachers deliver instruction for a given unit over the course of weeks or months. Students are tested, and then it's on to the next unit—regardless of student performance. Over the span of many successive units, students develop gaps in their understanding that compound until they aren't able grasp new concepts at all.
Mastery learning is different. When students aren't able to attain levels of proficiency in a subject, progress is halted, lots of feedback gets generated, and students have multiple opportunities to try again. Only once they demonstrate a solid understanding of the idea of skill at hand can they continue to the next lesson.
Sal Khan captures the efficacy of mastery learning in a conversation with Jennifer Gonzalez, the author of Cult of Pedagogy:
Arguably it’s the oldest way of learning, that you should learn at a pace that’s comfortable for you and then master concepts as you go on. Benjamin Bloom famously coined this in the ‘80s in his famous 2 Sigma study where he showed that if students are able to learn at their own time and pace in a mastery learning framework, which to him he defined as a framework where if the student’s at 70 percent or 80 percent correct, that they should have as many chances as necessary to get to 90 percent-plus correct.
If no one disagrees with the premise of mastery learning, why is it so rarely implemented in the classroom? Sal Khan points out that, until now, mastery learning has faced serious logistical challenges. How can you ensure that 30+ learners in a classroom are able to proceed towards an in-depth understanding of content at their own pace?
This is where Khan Academy excels. With their latest Mastery challenges, the process of reaching mastery can be systematized to a considerable degree. As students watch videos, complete practice quizzes, and take unit tests, they earn mastery points which allows them to visualize and gamify their progress. Once they accumulate enough points, they achieve proficiency and can move on to the next topic.
Mastery is not a one-size-fits-all intervention. Just as the creative process happens by alternating between focused and diffuse modes, the future of education lies in alternating between in-class engagement and technological coursework.
What does all of this mean for self-directed learners?
Benjamin Bloom's work on The Two Sigma Problem was an effort to find something that worked as well as tutoring. The upshot? Nothing really comes close. It comes as no surprise that Khan Academy uses a one-to-one model to facilitate learning.
The benefits of working one-on-one with an expert tutor are unparalleled. They can target instruction to your individual level, conduct effective drills with you, and offer you continuous streams of personalized feedback. Writers, musicians, artists, sculptors, poets and even doctors can benefit from a tutor or coach—regardless of skill level.
Are you looking to learn something new or improve at a skill? Here are some more resources on rapid skill acquisition and mastering new skills.