Last spring, with schools closed to curb the spread of the coronavirus pandemic, educational apps became a lifesaver.
As parents, educators, and students adapted to the virtual classroom, many relied on applications and technology to help bridge gaps in learning.
Among them was the popular Khan Academy, started by founder and CEO Sal Khan in 2005 to provide videos and tools to help students learn math, science, and more.
In an interview with USA TODAY, Khan said he first learned of school closings due to the pandemic in February, after receiving letters from South Korean teachers using Khan Academy. In the following months, schools began to close in the United States in favor of virtual learning.
“When it became clear that school closings could happen, we started to make a bit of a war around ‘OK, we have to provide more support to teachers, to parents,'” Khan said. “We need to put in more structures on how you can use not only the Khan Academy but other resources to structure a day that can approach home schooling or quarantine or whatever you want to call it.”
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Khan said that before COVID-19, the site averaged 30 million learning minutes per school. At the peak of spring, Khan Academy had an average of 90 million learning minutes.
Last week, the Amgen Foundation awarded the Khan Academy a $ 3 million grant to support initiatives including virtual biology lessons and a collaboration with LabXchange, an online science learning platform.
USA TODAY spoke to Khan about what to expect this fall and how parents can cope.
Question: Where do you see apps like Khan Academy that fit with the changing school curriculum?
Khan: We call ourselves a strategic supplement. It’s kind of an ambiguous term, what does that mean? Pre-COVID has this notion of a basic curriculum. When you and I went to school, that used to be some kind of combination of a textbook, a teacher’s manual, and maybe some reading notes or rhythm guides developed by the teacher or the district. Now, there are some more developed core curricula that have day-to-day lessons that teachers can work on.
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Regardless of the study plans you look at, be they text based or some of the more modern ones, they are good at prescribing day-to-day lesson plans. Where they are lacking, and this is pre-COVID, is that they are not good at giving students enough practice, especially practice where they get immediate feedback. They do not necessarily provide support where teachers can know in real time what students are doing, what they know, what they don’t know.
And traditional core curricula are really weak on how to tackle the problem of every student having gaps in the school year. You are giving them a synchronous lesson every day. But what if the children are not ready for that lesson or if some children are ready to move on? How do you make this differentiation and personalization? And so that practice, that feedback, monitoring teacher progress and that personalization, mastered learning, those were the areas where Khan Academy saw its role in the classroom, where we could add value as a strategic supplement.
Now that you enter a COVID world, something really interesting happens because that traditional curriculum that you were actually anchored in no longer necessarily works the same way. Most traditional curricula are based on having: just imagine a math classroom, five 55-minute sessions a week, and then go on to solve some problems on your own. Now, at best, you will have two to three Zoom sessions per week, much more has to happen remotely, distance learning, using some form of online tool.
We see ourselves as the strategic complement to that practice, feedback, teacher progress monitoring and personalization space, but we are imagining, and this is what we saw in the spring, that people will lean much more on why you can’t having so much synchronous time together in this world. It’s the same idea, but I think the value these online tools provide is much more important right now.
Q: What are some of the new features or offers you hope to introduce this fall?
Khan: There is the preparation for grade level courses. Not only is that a way to understand if children are ready, but it is also an outlet to help them prepare and prepare for grade level, or even if they advance to grade level simultaneously so they can fill in the gaps that might have been accumulated even pre-COVID, but especially during the COVID period.
On top of that, we are creating learning plans and weekly schedules just to give teachers and parents a view of what at least a distance learning baseline might look like. The reality is that most districts are walking out of the room with epidemiologists to find out what is physically possible, and they really haven’t had a chance to think about what the curriculum looks like in this world. How do we teach, what are our learning objectives, how do we really do it?
Therefore, we have a role even beyond the tools we offer to give people a clear point of view of what that learning could be in that sense. We have been working with McKinsey & Company, we will publish it in two weeks, a report that analyzed what were the best spring practices during distance learning, what did not work and, from now on, what are the best practices, what is the book of plays, how a district or school can assess their readiness for hybrid or distance learning. We will also continue to provide much more support and training for teachers and parents to help as many people as possible through this period.
Q: What advice do you have for parents helping their children navigate a virtual school experience?
Khan: My advice is, first, take a deep breath. Don’t even impose the expectation that you need to replicate the entire school. That is not practical. No one is understanding it. So even if you’re looking at your relatives and it seems like they’re getting an amazing hybrid experience, it’s probably not as surprising as you might think.
But I would say that the other thing is to focus on those fundamentals. There are two scenarios: There is the scenario where the school is supporting the family quite well. The main role of parents is to stay committed to what the school is saying, to make sure that you can form habits and patterns with your child, to look at the calendar together, so that the child introduces himself and participates in the activities that the teachers want them to do.
There is another scenario, and, unfortunately, I think this could be quite common, is where families don’t get the support they need and have to do it on their own. That’s where I would say they focus on the basics. Depending on the child’s age, math, reading, and writing, if they can get at least 20 to 30 minutes a day, will not stunt and progress.
Follow Brett Molina on Twitter: @ brettmolina23.
