Salman Khan Shows TED What’s Better Than TED

March 10, 2011, 1:28am

Above, Salman Khan at TED 2011 last week

“Here I was, an analyst at a hedge fund. It was very strange for me to do something of social value.”

It was the perfect TED line: self-effacing, modest, crowd-pleasing. But also so blatantly an understatement. Salman Khan didn’t do something of social value. He nearly accidentally gave birth to an educational network bigger than any the world has ever seen.

Videos by VICE

It started in 2009, when Khan (not the Bollywood one) began giving a few math lessons to his nephews on Youtube and in Yahoo IM’s doodle app. Since then, the not-for-profit Khan Academy has provided 40 million video lessons for free online, with topics ranging from geometry to college-level calculus, from biology to world history.

Google gave him $10 million. Bill Gates invited him to speak at TED last week (the talk is above). Singularity Hub called Khan Academy “the best thing that has happened to education since Socrates.”

But breathless and beaming utopianism aside, Khan’s paradigm and vision is hard to deny, especially given the educational state we find ourselves in: teach almost everything through video – a format that, unlike a human teacher, can be paused and rewound and watched anytime – and then throw a rich data analysis system on top.

That latter part (see the video above) is a leap ahead of other open source educational tools out there (MIT’s OpenCourseWare the most famous), and it may be just as powerful as the former. If teachers can visualize in near real time their kids’ weak and strong points, they can make their lessons more personal and more social, and even network students together for some valuable peer-to-peer learning. The classroom gets scaled in space and time.

Before I go back to watching my lecture on plate tectonics, I have two questions:

How does Khan Academy continue to grow while staying accessible, a question begged by Salman’s noting at one point that the site is totally free for now. Will school districts and governments buy licenses? Will ads, gulp, find their way into the virtual classroom?

What can TED learn from this so far brilliant lesson in online lessons? TED, with its thousands of hours of free streaming online lectures, is a grown-ups version of Khan Academy, but with a greater emphasis on spectacle, magic and branding, both personal and corporate. Could the organization somehow port the magic of person-to-person idea sharing that happens at its physical conferences to the impersonal space of people’s computer screens? Until it can, the event will be less like the new Harvard than a shiny 21st century version of The Learning Annex.

In any case, Salman Khan’s talk proves the great value of TED as a forum for “ideas worth spreading.” Wonderfully, it’s an idea from which TED itself might learn.