Let's face it: We all start "in-a-bubble" of sorts that is a life-support system. After about nine months we emerge out of that cocoon gasping for air and screaming into this world. In the past nine months we are forced into a new world by air-borne pandemic particles - everything has changed. The shift to remote learning in the pandemic is one of those changes that’s here to stay — but it’s hard to separate what’s valuable from what schools have been pushed into doing. As always with Decoder, the goal is to explore how technology, policy, and opportunity are linked as we build the future of education
Remote learning is here to stay — can we make it better?
An interview with Sal Khan, founder of Khan Academy
" Parents everywhere have had to quickly become experts in virtual learning and remote classrooms as the pandemic has shut down schools around the country — and the results haven’t been universally positive.
But there are some things that remote learning does better than classrooms: kids can learn at their own pace and rewatch lessons, they can interact with more of their peers, and they learn to set goals and achieve them. The challenge is balancing what online learning does well with what it can’t do — what we need classrooms to do.
For this week’s episode of Decoder with Nilay Patel, I talked to Sal Khan, the founder and CEO of Khan Academy, a nonprofit online learning platform for students in kindergarten through high school. Khan Academy is an organization that can only exist because of technology. Sal started tutoring his niece in math over video using off-the-shelf cameras and software, and Khan Academy has since grown into an organization with nearly 20 million users per month in 46 languages and more than 190 countries.
Sal and I talked about the future of learning, what online education is good at and where it struggles, how Khan Academy is growing, and how he’s thinking about handling trickier subjects like history and social studies. After all, math is mostly just math, but school districts around the country and the world have very different views on how to handle the humanities. That’s a hard problem to solve for a nonprofit in a deeply polarized world.
The shift to remote learning in the pandemic is one of those changes that’s here to stay — but it’s hard to separate what’s valuable from what schools have been pushed into doing. As always with Decoder, the goal is to explore how technology, policy, and opportunity are linked as we build the future of education.
This transcript has been lightly edited for clarity.
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