KindlED
The KindlED Podcast explores the science of nurturing children's potential and creating empowering learning environments. Powered by Prenda, each episode offers actionable insights to help you ignite your child's love of learning. We'll dive into evidence-based tools and techniques that kindle curiosity, motivation, and well-being in young learners. Do you have a question, topic, or story you'd like to share with us? Get in touch at podcast@prenda.com.
KindlED
Episode 57: AI Supported Personalized Learning. A Conversation with Dr. Kristen DiCerbo
How can technology reshape education to cater to every student’s unique learning journey? Join us as we explore this question with Dr. Kristen DiCerbo, the Chief Learning Officer at Khan Academy, who shares her transformative insights into personalized and mastery-based learning. Discover how Khan Academy's new AI tool, "Khanmigo" is revolutionizing learning as it helps educators address the diverse needs of students worldwide, breaking free from the constraints of traditional educational models.
Dr. DiCerbo highlights the challenges teachers face, such as managing large classrooms and addressing special education shortages, and how technology can alleviate these burdens. By leveraging platforms like Khan Academy, educators can provide tailored learning experiences that empower students and nurture creativity. We delve into the ways technology can reduce teacher burnout, foster stronger student-teacher connections, and transform teaching roles to be more focused on creating meaningful educational experiences and maintaining a healthy work-life balance.
More About Our Guest
Dr. Kristen DiCerbo is the Chief Learning Officer at Khan Academy, where she leads the content, design, product management, and community support teams. Dr. DiCerbo’s career has focused on embedding insights from education research into digital learning experiences. Prior to her role at Khan Academy, she was Vice-President of Learning Research and Design at Pearson, served as a research scientist supporting the Cisco Networking Academies, and worked as a school psychologist. Kristen has a Ph.D. in Educational Psychology from Arizona State University.
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About the podcast:
The KindlED Podcast explores the science of nurturing children's potential and creating empowering learning environments.
Powered by Prenda Microschools, each episode offers actionable insights to help you ignite your child's love of learning. We'll dive into evidence-based tools and techniques that kindle young learners' curiosity, motivation, and well-being.
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That's the promise of technology. The technology can help scale the teacher and help them think about how can we make sure that students are getting that extra practice. The teacher doesn't have to make up a worksheet with. You know, make up 30 different worksheets with different problems and all that. The technology can do that for them.
Speaker 2:Hi and welcome to the Kindle podcast where we dig into the art and science behind kindling the motivation, curiosity and mental wellbeing of the young humans in our lives.
Speaker 3:Together, we'll discover practical tools and strategies you can use to help kids unlock their full potential and become the strongest version of their future selves. Today we are talking about personalized learning and using online tools and mastery-based learning. Katie, tell me a little bit about those things. What do you know? Oh my gosh my gosh, have you seen that it's been an impact in your house with your kids? Because your kids have been learning this way from the get-go right.
Speaker 2:Yeah, we are going into our sixth year of micro schooling and doing personalized learning. So typically you know you don't get personalized learning in traditional classroom or even you can homeschool and personalize that learning, but then you have to personalize the learning for all of your kids at different levels and it's very overwhelming. So we're going to talk to Dr Kristen DeServo today, who is the chief learning officer at Khan Academy, and Khan Academy has been a really interesting player in the academic ed tech world for the last like 20 years, honestly, and they've really helped pioneer personalized learning and access to personalized learning, cause it's not, you know, in the like now, of course, like there's all this AI stuff going on, like there's there's lots of ed tech, but it really has been over the last 20 years that it's really been even possible to um provide a child with a with a personalized learning experience that isn't um directly given to them by a one-on-one tutor. So lots of research, lots of studies have been going on around this since the 80s and it is a fascinating part of education. So super excited to talk to Dr DeSerbo today. She leads at Khan Academy. She leads the content design, product management and community support teams.
Speaker 2:Dr DeSerbo's career has focused on embedding insights from education research into digital learning experiences. Prior to her role at Khan Academy, she was vice president of learning, research and design at Pearson, served as a research scientist supporting the Cisco Networking Academies and worked as a school psychologist. I think that's really interesting. Kristen has a PhD in educational psychology from Arizona State University. Let's go talk to Dr DeServo. Let's do it, kristen. Welcome to the Kindle podcast. We're super excited to have you on today.
Speaker 1:Thanks, so much for having me.
Speaker 2:Yeah, okay. So I want to get started by giving everyone a chance to understand your background. You know, tell us your story. How did you come to the work you're doing currently in education? What's your big, why your motivation for doing the work you do?
Speaker 1:I have been interested in how people learn and helping people learn for a long time.
Speaker 1:I can almost point it back to this experience I had in high school where I was a tutor and so, as you know, part of I think was part of National Honor Society or something we the high schoolers would go tutor middle school students and like, to be honest, school was kind of like high school, kind of easy, like I worked hard but I didn't really struggle with a lot of things, and it was such this an eye opener for me to see these middle school students who were really trying and were struggling with math in particular, and it just, even at that age, started me thinking of like, oh, how do different people learn differently and how can we help support these learners that are struggling with this content? And since then, I mean it's been a long and winding path, but everything has really been around that idea of how do we help more learners learn more, and so that's really the why of what I do, and I've spent about 20 years now in researching and designing digital learning environments for students.
Speaker 2:I love that, and you're also a school psychologist originally, right.
Speaker 1:Yes. So when I first started looking at graduate programs, didn't know what I was going to do and this idea of how do we help identify students that are struggling and provide them support. School psychologists for those who don't know are not the counselors in the school, they're the folks who work to evaluate students that are having learning difficulties, working with teachers to help develop their individual education plans, and doing a lot of that work. So, yes, after the PhD program, I went to was what they call research practitioner. So I did a lot of research into how people learn, how we measure learning, but also then did a, you know, practica and internships and a lot of work in schools and then worked for three years in Arizona, where I'm based, as a school psychologist.
Speaker 2:That's awesome, and take us through your career a little bit. You were at Pearson and now you're at Khan Academy. Tell us your like, take us on the journey, and now you're at Khan Academy.
Speaker 1:Tell us your like, take us on the journey.
Speaker 1:As I was in the schools, started to really think about the challenges that we face in schools, including things like shortages of special ed teachers.
Speaker 1:So I was doing this work as a school psychologist to be able to, you know, give students access to these special ed services, be able to give students access to these special ed services. And then a lot of the teachers were just overwhelmed with the amount of students they had and the amount of paperwork they had to do and all of these kinds of things and started thinking about how technology could help and really reached a kind of branching point in my career where I was thinking I might go into academia and be a professor and do research and that kind of thing but got connected to some folks that I had worked with in graduate school who had gone to work for Cisco Systems, the networking company of all places, which sounds bizarre. This is like the big leap. And the Cisco was developing what they call networking academies where they developed curricula and assessments around how to teach students computer networking that they give away to high schools and community colleges to help support students.
Speaker 3:I was wondering where Cisco played in. I was like, oh, Cisco.
Speaker 1:That's awesome.
Speaker 3:Thank you for sharing.
Speaker 1:Yes. So it seems you know it's at that point it was. People have asked that same question You're going to where? What are you doing next?
Speaker 1:But they, you know there were a lot of engineers who were building these curriculums. It would be great if we had more people who knew about learning so we could help bring that as well. And there were a couple of things there that were really transformational too. The first was we started working on a simulation tool, because these students were practicing on this networking equipment and it would break a lot, and they were like I don't know, we don't know how to fix this. And schools would be like we don't know how to fix this. So we started developing these simulations of the networking equipment, and students then could say you know what, if I hooked up 150 computers to this router, what happens then? And in addition to that, they could visualize packets of data moving through the network, which is not something you can actually see.
Speaker 1:But I started to think about technology not just as how can it help us do what we already do better, but can it help us do things we couldn't do before and help improve learning in that way? So that was really, I think, a formative piece for me. And then while we were doing that, I was doing a lot of presentations of this work on simulation-based learning and all of that out in the world and Pearson who, for folks who don't know, is a major global educational publisher saw some of that work and they were building what they call a research and innovation network at the time and basically recruited me over to do some of that more kind of research and simulations and game-based assessment and some pieces there. And I was lucky enough there to also get a lot of experience got through, you know, promotions and things in learning how to lead people, which is a whole other skill. When you are in a kind of a PhD track and doing research, you don't get those skills and so I was. I'm grateful for that time of kind of helping me to and giving me the support I needed to start to learn to do that.
Speaker 1:Pearson at the time sold off their K-12 division and I love K-12 and wanted to be in K-12. So that was an impetus for me to start thinking about what's my next step and I started thinking about someplace. So Pearson has 36,000 employees and I was thinking, gosh, I'd like to be someplace smaller. I think that, definitely in the K-12 world. What might this look like? And three weeks after I had kind of described what I thought I wanted my next role to be, khan Academy posted their first ever chief learning officer position and I was like, yes, this is the thing that I was describing, that I was made for you, that's awesome.
Speaker 2:I love it. And tell us more about your role as the chief learning officer.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so I lead a bunch of teams at Khan Academy. So I lead our content team, which is the team when you're on Khan Academy and you're engaging in the exercises, answering questions. They write all those questions. They work with Sal to make all the videos. They are writing articles, putting the courses together. So that's the content team, Our product management and design teams, who are the ones who really flesh out.
Speaker 1:What does that experience look like? What should happen when you're on Khan Academy? What kinds of rewards do you get? How do you move through the whole experience and what that looks like. How do teachers assign things? What reports do they get when they get them back? All of those folks are all part of my team.
Speaker 1:And then, most recently, we're also building a small assessment team, because a lot of what we do isn't what we think of. We're like, oh, sit down and take a test, but what we are doing is getting a lot of data about what students know and can do. That we can feed back to parents and teachers and help them understand where students are and what they need to work on and what other things they may want to focus on. So that's the big piece of it and so a lot of what I do. In a traditional technology organization I would probably be a chief product officer, but because I bring this whole learning side of things to my what I do and have this background of how do we build these things with learning in mind, I have achieved learning.
Speaker 2:I love that and what. Tell us a little bit more about Khan Academy as a company and like the mission of Khan Academy.
Speaker 1:I have never been in an organization where everyone knows the mission and is so dedicated to it. Our mission is to provide a free, world-class education to anyone anywhere. Just a little thing that we're trying to it. Our mission is to provide a free, world-class education to anyone anywhere. Just a little thing that we're trying to do. Why not, sure? So that's the exciting part of like. How do we think about making sure that any student anywhere has access to the kinds of materials they need to learn and practice skills that they need to be successful in their lives? So that is what we do. We, a lot of us.
Speaker 1:The Khan Academy initially was very known for Sal Sal Khan is my boss, founder of Khan Academy, love him. He does videos and he just has this great way of explaining things and making it approachable and all of that, which certainly launched Khan Academy. But we also know that to really learn something, you have to practice it. You have to engage with the content. You can't just kind of passively watch a video. So we offer both of those things, both the instruction side and then the opportunities to practice, and that whole practice system is based in mastery learning.
Speaker 1:So the mastery learning is the idea that you keep working on a skill until you get to a level of proficiency that makes it likely that you'll then be able to apply that skill in new situations. You'll be able to remember it in the long term. So before you start building on new skills on top of it and particularly in math, that's really important. A lot of skills build on top of other skills and if you're missing the foundation it gets really shaky, like if you're building a house without a strong foundation. When you start building layers on top of it, it's going to get pretty rough.
Speaker 2:So how do you see, go ahead, keep going, no, go ahead. I'm just interested to know like that seems like such a fundamentally logical idea, right, that we wouldn't like, no, no, like contractor would be like the foundation 70%, good yeah, put the next layer on. Like in no other area of existence Do we move forward without a sure foundation. But in education it's like well, we're moving on, gotta move on. And like, talk, talk about that, cause you've been, I've, I've, I'm actually I was a speech language pathologist in schools, like I, it's just so hard to provide that in the traditional model. Like, just talk about that a little bit and how Khan Academy is going about solving that and I don't know, just riff on that.
Speaker 1:It's a huge issue because, systematically, we've got these hundreds of thousands of kids that we are trying to get through the system and so and we have, you know, one teacher for 25, 30 kids. They it just isn't possible for one teacher to have kids on all of those pathways and, you know, be at 30 different places in their learning journey. They just can't be able to manage that. So we've ended up with this system where we're covering unit one for two weeks, we're covering unit three for two weeks and when we're done, wherever you are, we're moving on. So that's just been, I think, the response to the constraints of the system of we've had all of these students and only a few of these teachers.
Speaker 1:That's the promise of technology. The technology can help scale the teacher and help them think about how can we make sure that students are getting that extra practice. The teacher doesn't have to make up a worksheet with, you know, make up 30 different worksheets with different problems, and all that. The technology can do that for them. So that's the promise of what Khan Academy and, you know, digital learning in general has had to offer.
Speaker 3:Yeah, it allows the teacher to step into a different role than what has traditionally been a teacher. You know I am the holder of all the content. I'm going to pour this into, you know, the students. Instead, they can guide their learning and really attune to the individual needs. And I was thinking about how Khan Academy can be used and it is used in so many different facets of education, because I just look at my three kids, they've had a totally different educational journey started in a very, very traditional charter school. I have one in a hybrid school Actually, he's down by where you live and they use Khan Academy, so he's using it in a charter school. I have another son that used it whenever he first started Prenda in a micro school and he has some cognitive flexibility challenges. So it was at the time. If you got like one or two wrong, you had to start all the way at the beginning again. I don't know if it's still that way and it was really challenging for him. Go ahead, I know you want to talk about that.
Speaker 1:No, we heard oh my gosh, we heard so much from students that they hated that we had a tweet that we were just laughing at that we ended up pulling out that said my villain origin story is having to start over. So we now have a button where, if you get it wrong, you actually don't have to go all the way to the end of the exercise before you can start over.
Speaker 3:You can start over and write that, okay, so I need to tell him that because he is terrified of Khan, but it's such a great tool. And then, but we have used it in a homeschool setting too. So it's like you, khan is really diverse because it can work with parent educators, with micro school educators, with teachers and just kind of like as a sidekick, to come along and help these kids have a more personalized learning. So can you define a little bit about what personalized learning is and explain why it's really important in today's educational landscape?
Speaker 1:So first I'll say we've been talking about personalized learning. I think I remember back in 2012,. It was the buzzword and we were going to personalize learning for everyone.
Speaker 3:And here we are, you know all these years later, Between personalized and mastery-based like, is it essentially the same thing?
Speaker 1:Yeah, Well so you can personalize learning in a lot of different ways. You could personalize learning by making the experience relevant to the kids' interests. So you know, if you're interested in space, my math problems, my math word problems will be set around space and the planets and rocket ships and those kinds of things. So that's one way to personalize. We can personalize by just thinking about the pace that students go through things with, and sometimes you'll need to go through some topics slower, some faster.
Speaker 1:I know for me, like I was good at math but man trigonometry, I needed time because it did not make sense in my brain. So having different paces is another way to personalize. Personalized and thinking about how do we make sure that the students are getting the right skills at the right time, that they need them in order to practice. So the mastery learning piece, when we talk about it, has two pieces of that, both the working on the right skills at the right time and the pacing piece of it, and so, but generally, as we think about personalized learning, it's just doing anything that isn't the set instructional program that every student in the class is marching through in the same way. So lots of opportunity to be a little more flexible and we hope that, as you said, that Khan Academy can work in a variety of settings to bring in some of that.
Speaker 2:Do you find that there's like a hesitancy towards incorporating technology, trusting technology, like what's what's the vibe there?
Speaker 1:Yes. Let me throw some numbers at you. So 12 million students hit Khan Academy every month. So that's a lot, but only 1.2 million. So 10% of them get up to two hours of practice on Khan Academy in the month. Now, two hours does not sound like a lot, but only 10% of students who hit Khan Academy get to two hours. Why is two hours important? Because our efficacy studies that show whether does Khan Academy actually help people learn show that if you get to that two hours, you'll see greater than expected growth on lots of external assessments.
Speaker 1:So this is two hours a month, two hours a month, 30 minutes a week Not a lot hours a month, 30 minutes a week not a lot.
Speaker 1:But to your question of does you know? Is there resistance? It's not even always necessarily active resistance, it's just people aren't clear how to fit technology into the classroom, into their lessons. Where does it fit? What does that look like? We, you know, we think if we could get 50% of students to do two hours, we would see huge gains at scale, you know, at a state level, a country level. But it is the hardest part of what we do is not actually making sure students can learn when they use our platform, but getting people to that level of usage that's going to be effective for them.
Speaker 2:That's so interesting because at Prenda we run a completely flipped model where we are like technology is the primary instructor and then we use an adult to encourage, coach, nurture, mentor, tutor when necessary. But it's totally flipped and we, I think, going that far into the extreme, instead of like, okay, we're sticking with the normal course, like you know, we're going to teach all the ninth or the all of the fourth graders about X, y or Z, and then we're going to use Khan Academy to augment. We see crazy amounts of growth because they're always at their learning frontiers, that we call it their zone of proximal development, right, and there's tons of research to support that. But it's like we've really had to work hard with parents in Prenda and with our guides to help them realize, like, when a child isn't learning, when you are administering like whatever the normal program is, there's only a handful of kids in that class that are really tracking with you. Right, we have a lot of variance in any given group of 25 or 30 kids and you're essentially saying to a third of those kids you need to wait, I'll make it harder for you in a minute and you need to wait, I'll make it easier for you in a minute and with technology, everyone can be learning at their what we call their learning frontier most of the time, you know, and when you take all of those minutes, like like our kids will get, I don't know, like, when you take all of those minutes, like like our kids will get, I don't know like, six hours of digital math, like in a week or so, like like a lot of it, right, and we see, like these really amazing results and I just want that for everyone.
Speaker 2:But I experienced this resistance to this idea because we have a lot of very wise people which I trust, saying like, hey, we need to be careful about screen usage, right, so we want to be careful about technology. Can you talk about the difference in quality in in like what? Like how is Khan Academy different than Roblox or Minecraft or social media? Like it's just not all screens are created equal. Can we just like address that?
Speaker 3:Or even even other learning tools that are very, very gamified, because looking at Khan Academy, it's not as gamified. So yeah, can you explain, like the difference?
Speaker 1:Yes, so I will just repeat not all screen time is the same. That's a big lesson for people, and especially coming out of the pandemic I think a lot of people really just wanted to get back away from the screen Totally, so I get that reaction.
Speaker 2:So understandable yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah, fundamentally kids need opportunities to practice with feedback, to get to learning. There's a recent academic paper that came out that was the title was the astonishing regularity of learning that showed that if you just focus on getting kids opportunities to practice with the support they need to do the work, so you call it learning frontier, we call it learning edge. You know, when you're right at that edge you're probably not going to be able to do everything totally independently. You're going to need a little bit of support to get oh, I get it now, I forgot that. Oh, yeah, that's how that works. So the support to do that and then feedback on what you're doing.
Speaker 1:But if you can get on, say, a particular math skill, the average student when they looked across hundreds of thousands of students if you can get about seven opportunities to practice on a skill, you're you know, if you're starting at kind of the average achievement levels, you'll probably get there. Some kids may need 13, 14 opportunities to practice on a given skill. Some kids will get it in two or three. But the point that the thing that we are always trying to drive at Khan Academy is how do we maximize the opportunities that students have to practice and get that feedback. So a lot of to practice and get that feedback. So a lot of you know there's now if you had to do that eight hours a day, all day.
Speaker 1:That's going to be, you know, too much Exhausting. Learning is cognitively hard work, and so we need to recognize that and give students, you know, breaks, opportunities to do other things. Roblox can be great, but they're not going to have the opportunities to practice there that they're going to, but they're not going to have the opportunities to practice there that they're going to get as they're racking up Khan Academy. So how do we put those together to be, you know, a whole system that we're thinking about for students learning?
Speaker 2:I want to. I want to ask you about the magic of immediate feedback, so we'll put that on the shelf for a second, but how. It seems like it's just so important to create a balanced learning day where, like, yes, we're using technology, but then that frees us up, because it seems like what I've seen and my kids have been learning this way for the last six years and I have one son who was in the first kindergarten class and he's going into fifth grade this year Like, so we've lived this right. What I see is that it's so much more efficient that they have so much more time to go, like make things with mud and go on all of these like creative adventures and read high quality literature, like they're just freed up. Um, so is that what you guys see as well with kids that are using Khan Academy? Like the efficiency.
Speaker 1:Yes, so we there's. Also, sal has about a million ideas a day. Some of them he turns into things. So there's a Khan Lab school. That's an independent school in the Bay Area. That's an in-person school. They actually happen to be on the first floor of the building and Khan Academy is on the second floor. So we have a lot of interaction with them.
Speaker 1:Their total K-12 are about. I think we're at 300 students now, so it's small, you know, not a huge representative sample or anything, but we see the same thing. So they work on Khan Academy and, of course, work towards getting master on Khan Academy, but then they do these passion projects that are amazing because they have all this time in the day and so, yeah, we do find that if you focus, you don't have to spend your whole day doing this, that if we can get that focus time with those opportunities to practice, it does free you up to do more creative things and build all those you know things that we all want our kids to be able to do and find the things that are really meaningful to them.
Speaker 3:Yeah, but then I would time to yeah and we're not just freeing up the students, though.
Speaker 3:I would think we're freeing up teachers that are utilizing it too. Or we just got an email from my son's school. They can't find a math teacher to hire for high school and school starts on Monday, so they are like scrambling to figure out okay, what are we going to do? And thankfully they do partner with a community college across the street for advanced math and they have some resources and they found a company that provides live instruction, but I would think that a tool like Khan Academy also helps free up the teachers as well. Do you guys find that?
Speaker 1:I know this makes teachers very nervous when they start thinking about is this going to result in now saying you can have 50 students in your class and you can?
Speaker 3:Okay, and that's not what I'm saying, what we're saying. That is not what we we're saying it should make their workload manageable, so they are not working evenings and weekends, and we're burning teachers out because it's yeah, and you're collecting the data for them too, and they're not having to go through and assess and grade all the grading and all of that work.
Speaker 1:Yeah, absolutely.
Speaker 2:I've heard this. I used to be in charge at Prenda of choosing all of the learning tools, the digital tools that we use for curriculum, khan Academy being one of them. But the pitch that every single company starts with is here's how this doesn't replace teachers. There's a lot of conversation about that and I would say like you don't have to worry about, like you don't, I don't need that spiel. Like I'm, I don't experience this risk. I see it as a promotion where now, instead of like being a um, like frontline, like manager of of lots of of 30 tiny people, I'm now like a CEO and I'm helping them use a tool to manage. I'm like curating that suite of tools that is going to help them manage themselves. And so I've found that it really is like what you're saying, like we're moving from complete burnout, like out of all of the positions.
Speaker 2:Gallup just did this poll a few years ago that said, like K-12 educators, the highest rate of burnout something like 60% of teachers experiencing actual physiological health issues due to stress. This is the problem. We're not trying to replace anyone. We're trying to create an actual sustainable position where you can actually have a healthy life balance and enjoy being with kids and still be friendly and warm, because so many of these teachers are burnout that when kids are trying to interact with them they're grumpy. And it's like I know that I used to my speech language pathology office used to be right next to like share a door with the teacher's lounge, like I know, like it's so hard in there and I want to make it easier and more sustainable, so I just think teachers are amazing.
Speaker 1:Okay. So I think we know that when kids have a relationship with a teacher, that they feel like someone in that school building cares about them and their outcomes. They have higher graduation rates. They have higher post-secondary school attendance. Like that relationship building is so important.
Speaker 2:But yeah, so it's not just free. Go ahead, Katie. It's hard to ask a teacher to do everything you're doing and be friendly and have a relationship, right, like, one of those hats has got to change, and I think technology is that. Like what you said before, the school system is the way it is because of the constraints of the day, right? But hey, we have released one of those constraints now, right, we have a new tool.
Speaker 3:And so we don't have to keep pretending that we, that the constraints are the same right, we need to incorporate those. It's not just freeing up the time, because that is a big chunk of it and that I'm sure that leads to burnout, but it's freeing up the mental capacity and the mental space that these teachers, like you said that blows my mind, 60% are struggling with, just like health conditions and, I'm sure, anxiety and all these things. So it's freeing up that as well, so that they can get to a place where they're in their social engagement system and they can truly connect with these kids and and help empower them and get them excited about learning.
Speaker 2:And so just trying to get through the day, the drudgery of getting through the day, literally. Just having a conversation with a gal in Arkansas the other day day who she's going to start a front of micro school, um, but she said that last year on the first day of school, like they were doing their teacher prep, she was taken to the hospital in an ambulance due to like anxiety, panic, uh, and like no teacher should live with that and that's not why teachers go into the profession you know they go into because they love kids and they love learning.
Speaker 3:So how can we be part of that solution to where? I mean, we talk about students a lot around here, but I feel like there's this whole other category of humans that we need to care for and to help them. So I feel like both of us, Prenda and Khan Academy, are part of that solution.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and this is probably a good place to drop in. For the last year and a half, we've been really working with generative artificial intelligence. Yeah, let's talk about that. As most folks know, you know chat, gpt, those kinds of things. We have been building tools yes, student tutor tools, but also teacher tools that help teachers have an assistant tools yes, student tutor tools, but also teacher tools that help teachers have an assistant to again free up some of their time so you can use generative AI on Khan Academy as a teacher, for example, to help write a lesson plan, start a draft, so you're not starting with an empty page of paper and start working things through.
Speaker 1:Help write your class newsletter All of those kinds of things. Help brainstorm that lesson hook. What's that thing you're going to do to spark students' curiosity and activate their prior knowledge right at the beginning of a lesson, like those kinds of things that teachers spend a lot of time and effort thinking through. If you have a partner to help, you know brainstorm and give you ideas, A partner that happens to be like semi quasi omniscient, like yes, and knows everything it's pretty valuable, and so we've been.
Speaker 1:We started off with, I think, four things that it could do and as soon as we started showing it to teachers, they said whoa, can it help me unpack standards into learning objectives? Could it help me write a rubric, could it help me? And we said well, let's try. And so now we have about 25 tools for teachers that are all free for teachers to use and, again, help maybe free up some of the time that they spend on those kinds of activities.
Speaker 2:Let's get a little bit more into Conmigo, tell us what it is, what it does, what you've seen. Like you know, this is the forefront of the future of education right here, and I know there's a lot of like fear around AI and especially AI and kids. So, like I've been reading um Sal's new book, um, brave new words, brave new word. Yes, it's wonderful. So really really powerful stuff.
Speaker 1:Um so, so Sal and I, in September of 2022, so remember that was before most of us had heard of generative AI got a sneak preview from one of the companies, openai, that builds these models of what we now call GPT-4. They were going to launch that in March, but were interested in thinking about education applications for it. And they said, you know, sal is widely, you know, known in the arena. They said maybe Khan Academy is a good place for this and they asked if we wanted to try it out. And they gave us access through a chat interface on Slack. For those of you who know what Slack is, it's, you know, one of the messaging features.
Speaker 1:And so Sal and I spent the weekend like asking all these crazy things, everything from, yes, learning things to oh, can it? You know, sal was like can it write a bedtime story for my kids? You know all kinds of things. We're like this is pretty impressive. But one of the things they were showing us was how it could answer AP biology questions, and this is great, but we don't want it to answer the questions.
Speaker 3:We want kids to answer the questions. We want the kids to answer the questions.
Speaker 1:We want the tutor to help students get to the answer to those questions. But we saw what we thought was the potential there and so we said, yes, we'd like to partner with you on this, and in March of 2023, we launched Conmigo, which is an AI powered tutor for students and an assistant for teachers. On the student side, when you're working on Khan Academy, if you're, say, working on a math problem, you can bring up Khanmigo and we feed into Khanmigo the problem that you're working on, the answer to that problem and also a whole bunch of instructions to the model of how to act like a tutor. So then, let's say, the student just says I'm stuck. Well, it already knows what problem they're working on and you know how to act like a tutor. So it might respond with something like well, what do you think the first step is? And starts walking students through how to get there, which is, of course, very much in opposition to like if you just put the problem in chat, gpt, it'll work it all out and give you the answer, but not what we want for students, and so we started building on that. We also put in some more safety guardrails kinds of things, so teachers and parents can view the chats that students have. So there's always some level of human oversight there. And we also flag. We have a moderation system that flags any harmful content, violence and hate and self-harm and things like that to kind of build in some more safety mechanisms, because we didn't know what students were going to do when we gave them access to the ability to chat with an AI.
Speaker 1:We found that, overall, students are definitely, you know, understand. This is an education application and don't, after the first couple of attempts where they try to see what they can do with it, understand. Okay, this is for you know, this is for helpful learning, so you can use it on Khan Academy with Khan Academy content. But we also have a bunch of things. We have a tutor me math and science. So if you're working on, you know, problems on math homework or science homework that aren't Khan Academy, you can, you know, students can bring those in and have the same kind of interaction. And then we also have launched a writing coach. So we have had writing feedback for about five months and then two weeks ago, hot off the presses, we launched an end-to-end coach that starts with what's your assignment? Do you have questions about the assignment. What do you think you might do? Let's start with outlining. What might your paper look like?
Speaker 1:And then they draft and then get feedback on the writing. Um, and so we've just been, yeah, working through. What are the things that, if we take this new technology, what are some of the problems that we've had historically? One, for instance, being students don't get enough practice writing because it takes so long to grade Um. What are problems that this might help us solve?
Speaker 3:Yeah, that's great. Yeah, sal Khan, he had the Ted talk. You know how AI could save, not destroy, education. That really helped me see it in a different light, because he's like it's here, you know. So we're going to use it for good or, in the wrong hands, it's going to be used for not good. So let's use it for good, and it sounds like what you guys are doing is using it for really, really good and helping kids still learn and still engage in their learning. But it's more of you know, like I said, I use the word psychic earlier, but that's what I keep thinking that you know it's helping. And then you mentioned that teachers can use it too. So is it helping them with ideas and lesson plans and things like that?
Speaker 1:That's right. Yes, so I'll put the plug in for teachers. If you just go to Conmigoai, you can get free access and you'll get just a screen that has 25 different activities that teachers can do, including lesson plans. My sister's a high school math teacher in Massachusetts and when she looked at it, she also. We have a help. You write letters of recommendation and she teaches a ton of high school seniors and every year has to write so many letters of recommendation. So there's a piece there. There's a help of drafting IEP goals.
Speaker 1:I was talking about as a school psychologist, you know the amount of paperwork around developing those individual education plans. It can help start drafting some of those, those, those kinds of things. So yes, a lot of teacher tools as well.
Speaker 2:So, when going back to students, when ChatGPT first came out, like everything in the news was like this is just going to make kids cheat, right, so talk about that. How have we, how have you guys, shifted this to a, a tutoring tool instead of a cheating machine?
Speaker 1:Definitely we see. So I mentioned the the you know chat histories before that students can see, we think with writing in particular, because students are writing in the system. Now teachers can see what did the students write, what did the AI write, how did the AI, what feedback did the AI give and how did the students respond to that? So all of that becomes visible to the teacher or the parent now. All of that becomes visible to the teacher or the parent now. And so that's one I think, big you know. Just hey, I'm not going to cheat if it's clearly, you know, visible to my teacher.
Speaker 1:And a lot of the research on student cheating isn't that students, it's almost like an opportunity. If it's there to take the easy way, students will do it. But if it's clear what the expectations are and there's some systems in place that at least slightly discourage it, students won't take the opportunity to do it. So it's definitely putting those kinds of things in place. But we also saw, for example, we have some activities like chat with a historical figure. Well, some you know thinking students said what if I say I want to talk to Pythagoras and then get Pythagoras to do my homework about the Pythagorean theorem? That's great.
Speaker 3:And you're supposed to be the one who does the work.
Speaker 1:So we had to do again that you can. We have found that we can do quite a bit with what they call prompts, which are how you give instructions to the model, and so we give it a lot of instructions about how not to answer student homework questions or questions that look like student homework questions, and help it, you know, just kind of lock down where, where some of those things are. So the system will just say oh yes, that is a question that I know the answer to.
Speaker 2:Why don't you tell me what you know about that? That's interesting. I think it's fascinating because, as an adult that has a job like there, is nothing that Kelly, my boss, the CEO of Brenda wants more than for me to use AI as much as possible to do my job right.
Speaker 2:So it's like he wants me to my time and my efforts and thoughts to be freed up, doing more creative work, more. You know, like we want to use this tool, and so, when I'm thinking like we want to take kids through, like, use, use AI as a scaffolding to build a skill that can stand on its own right, like if, if needed, I could write a 30-page academic paper, like I've done that, right, without using AI, I can do that, but um do, is that the best use of my time in my practice? Right? Like wouldn't it be to to have that take an hour instead of two weeks, Right? So, like then, we want it's like you use AI to train them to do it by themselves. And then, on the other side of personal capability and capacity is, and now we want to use AI to be to free ourselves up and to to move humanity forward and not have humans be doing things that computers can do right.
Speaker 1:Yes, we talk about augmenting human potential really. So how can it help us do things better? And I think what we may find, and we're working with some other organizations on this is defining what AI literacy means.
Speaker 1:So, yes, if these are tools that students need to know how to use to be successful and move ahead in the workplace, how do we build their understanding of how to use the tools, how to be successful with them, when, when they can provide value and what that looks like? So I do think there's a whole role to be played around giving students the skills to be able to prepare them for that future. And, of course, everything's moving so fast that the other skill that students need to know is how to teach themselves things like learning how to learn new technologies, because what we know now is not going to be what's you know the new technology in 10 years. What we know now is not going to be what's you know the new technology in 10 years, but you need the skill of how do you start to approach a new technology and understand what it can do and understand what it can't.
Speaker 2:yeah, what do you think those skills are in the future? I was just uh doing the. I think I talked about this on a just a recent episode, but like what, like kids that are going into kindergarten now they're going to be? What like kids that are going into kindergarten now they're going to be going into their like primary earning years in like 2065 or something like that just sounds like so futuristic. Like what do you think those skills are that the kids are going to need? Just spitballing? Like obviously nobody really knows. But what do you? What are your hunches?
Speaker 1:Well. So one of the things I do is look back at my own trajectory. So when I graduated from college, there's no way I could have said I want to be the chief learning officer of Khan Academy. We barely had the internet, we barely had email. Like there was nothing. Not even just Khan Academy didn't exist, like the idea of what we do doesn't exist. But the things the college that I went to had two things One was an emphasis on writing and one was an emphasis on speaking and those kinds of skills that have, I think, been certainly contributed to my success through my career, and it hasn't again. It hasn't necessarily been writing a you know five paragraph essay, but just how to communicate well with words, I think is an important skill, both written and orally, that I can't imagine is going to go away because we still have all of this communication we're doing. Another skill that we don't teach well but I think is really important is teamwork and working together, and everyone hates those group projects in schools.
Speaker 3:But I think I love them, but the reason okay, listen, you're not normal.
Speaker 3:Adrian. This is why I love them, because I was very controlling and so if I got in a group, I would just be like, just let me do it and I. And so if I got in a group, I would just be like, just let me do it and I. And so, literally, I kid you not. There is this kid, or I mean he's like you know, a young adult in college that would ask you my schedule every single semester because I was a communications major and so we had a lot of projects, and so I he just got in the groups with me and knew he didn't have to do any work, so hopefully he ended up. But we're talking about like Conmigo, not being like a team. You were his Conmigo, adrienne Conmigo. So I'm sorry but go ahead.
Speaker 1:Collaboration, teamwork is very important. It is and we often just set kids free and be like, here's a group, go do a thing, like we don't actually teach them how, how, maybe, to delegate oh, they had someone like me that just ran in the show, right? And then, if you're like me cause I have a little bit of that too but then I have the other side of my personality that's like I can't believe I'm doing this whole thing and I like turn into myself, into a martyr, which is no good for anyone either. So, um, so anyway, yes, thinking about how do you break up work, how do you bring it back together, how do you hold people accountable, like those are all really important skills that last, yeah, and skills that we should start teaching when they're really young, I think about too.
Speaker 3:I had a college class it was called group discussion. We learned all. It was such an amazing class because he literally would film us having these discussions and we would have to solve really complicated problems and he would not interrupt us, not tell us, and then we would watch the replays and he would talk about what was happening within our group dynamics and how to better communicate, and that was such a life changing class. But I didn't take it until I was 20 years old. I mean, how powerful would that be to start teaching these skills to five-year-olds and six-year-olds, especially at that age where it's very egocentric and everything is theirs, and so we can start helping them have these collaboration skills? That would be really amazing.
Speaker 1:Absolutely, absolutely and to your point, katie. It's not like kids don't need academic skills in 2060. You have to know enough to be able to judge the accuracy of the technology. To be able to you, it should still be your assistant, not your, not your boss.
Speaker 2:So you need to have the knowledge and the skills to be able to you know and also I want my kids in 2060 to be the creators of this, not the consumers of it.
Speaker 2:Right necessarily like that all the time. Yeah, creator, not consumer. So in order to be the person that is prompting and you know you like training, that model like you have to have all of those skills right, it's not like sometimes people will be like, well, no one needs to memorize anything anymore, cause you can just Google something. I'm like, yeah, but you really want an internal knowledge store of like a lot of stuff so that you can be the judge of what's like accurate, and you're gonna be really easily led to some not great places if you're just trying to google everything.
Speaker 2:I was literally teaching this class the other day with a bunch of high schoolers and I was asking them kind of like a I was asking them the definition of a word so that I could understand their, their understanding of it, and they literally totally just did not understand that that's what I was doing and this girl was just like I got you pulled out her phone and just like I was like no, no, I know what this word means. I want to know if you know and like what it means personally to you. I want to know if you know and like what it means personally to you.
Speaker 1:But imagine if you had to Google every word you heard to understand what it like there. Yeah, that wouldn't work.
Speaker 3:So yeah, and I really think you can't just Google.
Speaker 3:Yeah, and parents can use these online tools and resources like Khan Academy. Or we had Audrey on the podcast for episode 22. To me, or we had Audrey Wish on the podcast for episode 22. And so she has a company called Curious Cardinals and she matches people, or matches students, with mentors, and so my son would like to play Roblox all day long and or whatever you know games that give him lots and lots of dopamine, and so instead he has this incredible mentor, and it is all through online. So we're using, we're teaching him how to use the internet and use zoom as a tool, and he is learning how to create his own video games from scratch. He is learning really complicated coding, and that's why I want him to get back onto Khan Academy, cause you guys have a lot of coding on there too.
Speaker 1:Like I said, now he has a little bit of PTSD, but I will tell him he can use it as a tool and our Python coding course is the most creative, actually, of probably all of our courses. Yes, our doing Python, doing coding, doing some projects.
Speaker 3:Yeah. So instead of being afraid of technology, we can really use it as a tool and, like Katie said, teach our students and teach our kids how to use it to create and as a tool, not just to consume and sit and watch YouTube all day long or play video games, in the same way that like knowing how to go to the library and find the encyclopedia and look something up used to be like.
Speaker 2:That is a skill that we need and we have to train that it's like well, right now, like knowing how to Google something and find an like reliable, reasonable answer on the Internet is a skill, and the next wave of this is knowing how to use AI to do that and how to how to use that as a human.
Speaker 1:And how to evaluate the answer AI gives you, because these answers can be wrong. They can not Anything you read on the internet can be wrong.
Speaker 3:I think it's really important to look at it because we had Michael Strong on with Socratic experience, and he talked about that, how he really helps students read something and then go, okay, how do you know that's true? How do you know it's not true, and really start getting into debates about it. I think that's really important too. So it's not just looking at AI, but anything that we read on the internet or hear from anyone.
Speaker 2:Yet that's probably one of the things we should put on our future learning skills list, right, like the evaluation piece. Yeah, okay, let's wrap up, but I have a silly question who I just want to know? I want to give this whoever thought of the, the, the name Conmigo. It's such a beautiful pun and I love it so much and I just really love puns. I just want to know who thought of that.
Speaker 1:So there's a whole story. So naming things is really hard and what we've come to, conmigo for Spanish speakers Conmigo means with me and it's a portmanteau of con and amigo. So whatever, however you access it, we really liked that, liked that had done me. We had probably, you know, a couple hundred names that we had brainstormed. We're trying to figure out. We had settled on a different one, which I'm not even sure I remember at this point what it was, and we started calling it that and then, after we started doing a deep dive into, like, all the possible meanings, you know, oh, that one didn't work out and other things were copyrighted and already taken. But we knew, if we use con that it's less likely that someone else has it already, and so I think it was actually one of our designers came up with this suggestion.
Speaker 2:And they should get a raise and a trophy and a pizza party. I just think it's so great.
Speaker 3:And Star Tarts. I love it Okay, let's wrap up. Okay. So this is a question we ask all of our guests who come onto the Kindled podcast. So who has kindled your love of learning, motivation, passion, or like in what you're doing today?
Speaker 1:My answer actually fits into much of what we've been talking about. I had a fifth grade teacher named Mrs O'Leary and I was always a reader to this and by the time I was in fifth grade those kind of standard reading books were kind of like I knew what was in them. I kind of mastered to use our terminology now mastered that she for the whole year just had me read books and every Wednesday afternoon she and I would have book talk and talk through the books. And here's what I was reading and read all kinds of things in different genres and different you know, fiction, nonfiction, all those kinds of things. You know fiction, nonfiction, all those kinds of things and really sparked interest in lots of different areas for me, because she said you know what? I see that you are in a different place here, you need something different and I can help make that happen for you. So, mrs O'Leary, fifth grade, it's amazing.
Speaker 2:I love that. And how can listeners learn more about your work or Khan Academy?
Speaker 1:I mentioned conmigoai, so that's, if you're interested in the AI pieces, you can go there. Khanacademyorg certainly is free for everyone, so dive in and just click on the courses menu and see all the different courses that we have. There's probably something there that will spark your interest and work your way where we are.
Speaker 2:I love that. Thanks so much for coming on the Kindle podcast. This has been such a fascinating conversation.
Speaker 3:Thanks for having me. Thank you so much. It was nice meeting you, kristen. That's it for today. We really hope you enjoyed this conversation with Kristen as much as we did. So if this episode was helpful to you or you want to dive more into mastery-based learning or personalized learning, please like, subscribe and follow us on social media. At Prenda Learn Well, you'll even find Katie doing a really fun rap about joining and finding a micro school. So if you have a question that you would like for us to address on the podcast, all you need to do is email us at podcast at prendacom, and you can also go to our website and you can subscribe to our weekly newsletter. It's called the Sunday Spark.
Speaker 2:The Kindle podcast is brought to you by Prenda. Prenda makes it easy for you to start and run an amazing micro school based on all the ideas that we talk about here on the Kindle podcast. If you want more information about becoming a Prenda,
