Bill Kerr: Welcome to the Managing the Future of Work podcast from Harvard Business School. I’m your host Bill Kerr. This episode is one of a series of special dispatches on the sweeping effect that Covid-19 is having on society, the economy, and the future of work. In addition to our regular podcast episodes, we’ll be bringing you shorter and more frequent interviews with business leaders, policy makers, and leading scholars on the coronavirus [pandemic].

If you were to create an online education venture as a public service response to the Covid-19 pandemic, it would probably look a lot like Khan Academy. The nonprofit, founded in 2008, offers thousands of free online classes in dozens of languages for students of all ages. Not surprisingly, it has seen a massive increase in use during the coronavirus [pandemic], serving now more than 100 million users across 190 countries. I’m joined today by Khan Academy founder Sal Khan. Sal is a graduate of Harvard Business School, who also studied computer science and engineering at MIT. He has been recognized as one of Time Magazine’s 100 most influential people and is author of the book The One World Schoolhouse. Welcome to the podcast, Sal.

Sal Khan: Great to be here, Bill.

Kerr: Sal, most of our audience will have heard of Khan Academy, but some of the details may be a little bit vague. Can you give us a brief overview?

Khan: Sure. So we’re a not-for-profit with a mission of providing a free world-class education for anyone, anywhere. And the way that we attempt to deliver on that mission is by giving access to interactive software, videos, teacher tools—starting as early as pre-K all the way through elementary, middle, high school, and even the core of college—so that students … we’re most known for math, but it’s actually, we’re expanding into language arts. We’re expanding into the sciences. They can get as much practice and feedback as they need, learn at their own time and pace. Teachers can understand where students’ strengths and weaknesses are. And it’s available in over 45 languages.

Kerr: With the school closures and a lot of people having time out of work, it’s not surprising that demand for the materials you just described has skyrocketed. We’re recording this in early June. Bring us up to date on how user demand shifted during the pandemic. And have you noticed any subjects that have become more in demand recently?

Khan: Yeah. About—what is it? It seems like a lifetime ago now—it was back in February, I believe, early February, that we started to see some of our traffic pick up in Asia. Two-thirds of our traffic is North America, but we still have a lot of users. There’s a South Korean—there’s a Korean version, I should say—of Khan Academy. And we saw that traffic pick up. And then we started getting some emails. There’s one teacher, in particular, who was in South Korea, in Seoul, and telling us how they had school closures. And they were using Khan Academy. That was the first time it dawned on us that, “Wow, this Covid thing might create school closures. It’s definitely already happening in Asia, and maybe it’ll happen in then the rest of the world, and even in the US.” Although it seemed like a very kind of unusual education at the time. And then you get into late February and early March, and then that’s where even my own children’s school that I’m on the board of, and I helped start, we started having conversations, “All right, this is a real thing. Does our school shut down?” And it was still probably about three or four days before we started hearing states talk about it or counties talk about it. But that’s when it really dawned on the Khan Academy team that it’s one of those moments where you look left, you look right, and you’re like, “I guess this is us.” We built Khan Academy over the last many, many years, imagining worlds where many kids around the world don’t have access to school, and we could be that support for them. Or if they do have access to a school, they don’t have access to all the courses. Or when they are offered, they’re not offered at a rigorous world-class level. And even when you do have access to a great school with great teachers, you oftentimes, the teachers don’t have the tools to support personalization for students to make sure that they have really strong foundations. And that’s what we’re built for. But when we thought about, well, if schools started closing in a big way in the United States and the rest of the world, people are going to need something that covers across subjects and grades. They’re going to need something that is deep, trusted, has efficacy studies behind it, that’s accessible and close to as free as possible, that’s trustworthy. And you keep adding some of those constraints on it. You’re like, “Wow, we have to step up.” And so we immediately started stress-testing our servers saying, “Maybe we’ll get 2x, 3x traffic.” This was before we saw what the real traffic would be. We said, “We’ve got to start planning for webinars for teachers and parents. We’ve got to start creating learning plans, daily schedules, so that parents know how to structure students’ days in constructive ways without feeling overwhelmed.” And then, that Monday, when pretty much we had California and then shortly afterwards, frankly, most of the rest of the US by mid-that-week—I think this was the middle of March—shutting down, our traffic was up 80 percent on Monday, 125 percent on Tuesday, 150 percent on Wednesday. And it kind of stabilized at a steady state of about 250 to 300 percent of normal traffic. Normally on a weekday during the school year, we would have about 30 million learning minutes per day, but we were seeing closer to 80 million learning minutes per day. And we saw registrations go through the roof. Parent registrations were 20 times what they normally are; teacher and student registrations were 5 times to 10 times what they normally were. So it was just kind of a full-court press for us. We just tried to keep up with the demand and then realized, “Well, what else can we do to support people? How do we keep them learning through the end of the school year?” Because it was pretty obvious within the first few weeks that it would be through the end of the school year. And now we’re working on ways to keep people learning over the summer. And then, as we start to think about back to school, which is happening faster or sooner than—everything’s happening fast—you realize that students are going to have, every year students have a huge variance in their preparedness for their grade level. And that’s something that we’ve talked about forever at Khan Academy, that every kid learns at different paces, has different gaps. And every teacher knows in a class of 20, 25, 30 students, they all have different needs, but it’s very hard for an individual teacher to cater to those individual needs. So they essentially go through the motions of fixed-base instruction. But this year, it’s going to be that much worse. Some kids would have kept engaged on things like Khan Academy, while other students would have been completely non-engaged in learning for five or six months, where they’re not only not learning, but they’re forgetting. So we’re doing a whole series of courses calling called “Get Ready for Grade Level” courses. So let’s imagine a sixth grader. We have a sixth grade math course, but you could have a course that you can do it—all of these things you can do at your own time and pace—where you start at the very basics of the prerequisites for sixth grade, and it quickly accelerates through what you know. But it allows you to focus on what you don’t know, so that when you enter into sixth grade, you’re optimally prepared and, ideally, continue to work at your own time and pace on the sixth grade course, and then keep moving to seventh and eighth grade and beyond.

Kerr: Sal, our family is part of those 80 million minutes per day that you were having. So thank you for that. And let me also continue on a personal side. The word on the street is that for our school resumption in September, it’s going to be more of a hybrid model—that we’re probably going to have to have some of these elementary school kids some time at home, some time in the classroom. Are you guys preparing anything special for that type of environment, where it’s a mixture of in-class and also virtual?

Khan: Yeah. This is a world … by definition, if you have a hybrid model, and as you mentioned, that hybrid model might be kids coming in shifts. There’s going to be some subset of the families that just don’t feel comfortable sending their kids until we have a broadly available vaccine and the health risk isn’t there anymore. And so all of—whatever—the instruction, the curriculum, the learning has to have an accessible online aspect to it. And so what we’ve already seen over the last several months during the first wave of closures, that teachers who might’ve been using Khan Academy as a bit of a supplement, say 45 minutes a week, an hour a week, were now leaning really, really heavily on it. But you need more structures above and beyond that. You need some form of synchronous connections over video conferencing. You need ways to make sure that students are keeping track, setting their goals, being held accountable. And so they’ve been leaning on things like Khan Academy much, much more heavily. It’s become maybe 60 percent of what they do. And so when we go into this very uncertain environment, what we are working on—actually we’re working on a project, it hasn’t been publicly announced, but I guess we’ll talk about it. It’s nothing controversial—we’re working with McKinsey & Company on essentially, you know, can we document what were the best practices over the last several months, and also come up with a playbook and even a bit of a checklist and guide for districts and educators, as they try to navigate what things look like over the next six months or so? And in my mind, at the Khan Academy layer, these “Get Ready for Grade Level” courses are going to be important, to fill in people’s gaps, diagnose their weaknesses. The grade-level Khan Academy courses, above and beyond just offering them, we’re going to be creating learning plans so people can understand goals over the course of the year—essentially, what’s a reasonable pacing. I think we’ll also be sending out archetypes or guidelines—and this could be related to the study we’re going to do with McKinsey—around what should the whole system look like in hybrid learning. As to your point, a lot of districts, they’ve consulted the doctors, and the doctors have told them, or the epidemiologists have told them, okay, you’re going to have to do some form of shift-based or social distancing, but no one really knows yet or has a clear idea of what that means from a curricular point of view. And I think we can help share what a reasonable baseline curriculum—that’s reasonably easy to implement for folks—could look like. It’s not going to be ideal. I don’t want to pretend like it’s a replacement for the ideal that folks were doing before, but I think it will be helpful to give people something to anchor on.

Kerr: Yeah. Along those lines, do you have any of the large school districts coming to you and asking for very customized or special programs for them? And maybe a related question is, is there anything that you hear from teachers or from schools, perhaps around accreditation or some kind of scoring, that you guys have to say that’s too far for what Khan Academy wants to serve?

Khan: Well, the simple answer is yes. We were already working with several large districts. The large district that we had a very deep partnership with has been Clark County, which is greater Las Vegas, which is the fifth largest school district in America. It’s on the order of 300,000 students. And we’ve had a partnership with them for over a year, where they take their standardized assessments, and then that’s integrated with Khan Academy, and then the teachers and the principals and the district officials all have dashboards to understand not only what the engagement is, but how that’s driving growth in student learning. And so you can imagine, we’ve continued to have those conversations with them. And as we’ve gone into Covid, the number of conversations has only, you know, it’s been growing exponentially. And we’re a lot bigger than we used to. A lot of people still think Khan Academy is Sal in a walk-in closet, although I have had to go back to the walk-in closet. We’re over 200 folks now. But still, we’re relatively small, relative to the problem. We’re a budget of a large high school, and trying to serve over 100 million students a year. And so we’re trying to, frankly, just do what we can. Some of these notions of accreditation or credit, it has been brought up, even in this world where a lot of the traditional assessments can’t be administered. When folks think about it, they’re like, well, Khan Academy is, by definition, standardized. And in some ways it’s better than a traditional assessment, because, as students practice and get feedback, it forms a much more granular view of where that student is for the moment. But it’s not a high stakes in that students can always improve on it. But it does hopefully give a reasonably accurate read of where they are. And my view is we’re trying to … I do have some skunkworks projects, where I am trying to talk to governments and accreditation bodies about, look, if a student is able to show mastery on Khan Academy in, say, algebra II or college algebra, they should get the high school credit for it, and maybe they even should get the college credit for it. That’s a whole other topic. But college algebra is often known as the killing field of kids who are entering into community college. It’s the course that is the single biggest course that weeds them out, when they frankly should have learned it in 10th grade. And so, yeah, we’re trying to look at every possible way that we can step up. And this is a moment, a lot of the stuff we’ve just talked about, we’ve been thinking about for a long time. There’s three pillars of our organization. One is accessibility, that everyone in the world should have access to world-class material across subjects and grades. The second one is that they should be able to access it in a way that gives them opportunity incentives to diagnose and identify their gaps, learn at their own pace. And the third one is, they should be able to, as they learn, they should be able to signal to the world that they’ve learned it, and so they can get economic opportunity or get academic credit. And obviously, that’s that much more important right now, when everyone’s experience is inconsistent and kind of scattershot.

Kerr: Yeah. This scattershot and inconsistency can relate to something that the pandemic has really highlighted, which is inequality, both in the United States and internationally. And especially over the last couple of weeks, as we’re recording this podcast, the protests around Black Lives Matter has been very widespread. What role do you think Khan Academy can play in addressing some of these forms of inequality and helping to lower the education gaps that exist in America?

Khan: Yeah, it’s something I’ve been thinking a lot of. I mean, we’ve always thought about it, but obviously between Covid and some of the cases of police brutality we’ve seen, and the killings and the marches, it’s increased our focus on what is our role and how we might be able to play a role. You know, obviously, our core mission—free world-class education for anyone, anywhere—I think over the long run actually is the most important lever for not only empowering the oppressed, but also enlightening the oppressor, so to speak. Sometimes they’re oppressing without even knowing they’re oppressing, and that’s where education can play a role. In the short run, there’s definitely forms of inequality that are very stark, that we’re seeing out of the Covid crisis. The most obvious one is internet accessibility. And obviously, for Khan Academy to do its work, it’s kind of based on the assumption that someone has a reasonable device access and internet access. And we know that that isn’t true for everyone, especially the kids, frankly, that we want to serve the most. Our role is to use whatever soap box we have to say, look, this internet access, it’s not frankly just an academic issue. It’s an economic issue. It’s frankly a mental health issue right now, to be able to stay connected with the world. The good … the silver lining is we are seeing, you know … change has been happening over the last decade or so pretty quickly, but the Covid crisis, I think, has been an ultra-catalyst for making people serious about closing the digital divide. School districts like New York City distributed close to 300,000 devices, created partnerships with the local telecom carriers for free internet access, at least over the course of the crisis. We saw similar things in Las Vegas, in Los Angeles, in Miami. So that’s a silver lining there. But there’s more work to be done on the access issue. Obviously, as you start thinking globally, still even more work. Maybe this is a cop-out, but also some comfort for me, is that, as much as it pains that we can’t reach every child or everyone who wants to learn today because of internet access issues, the adoption is as fast or faster than almost every technology that we’ve seen before. And so, if you look to where the puck is going, so to speak, in five or 10 years, I do think that we can deliver on most of humanity; unless they have some kind of tyrannical government who is shutting down the internet, or there’s some war or famine, that we should hopefully be able to reach them. In terms of the anti-racism movement, this has obviously been a huge conversation in our organization. I framed it with our team as, look, number one, it’s obvious that we should express solidarity with the anti-racism movement. I have trouble fathoming how you cannot. What the counter argument is to expressing solidarity with the anti-racism movement … and frankly, that’s easy because yeah, everyone is doing it, so to speak. So I don’t think any organization should get major points for almost stating the obvious. I think the next layer after the solidarity is we do have thought leadership, and I’m a curious person, and I’m constantly on a learning journey. And I have outlets similar to the outlet that you have with this podcast, where I have a live stream, and I interview guests, and I have said, I want to interview more guests about issues of race, issues of policing, issues of systemic inequality, because I want to learn. It’s not just to talk about platitudes. I really want to understand these issues on a more nuanced level. And as I go on that journey, I want other people to as well. And I also want it to be about solutions. What are the actionable things that people can do to move society forward? I think the third place that Khan Academy has a role is, we have courses in American history, in world history, in civics. And those are clear outlets where ... I’ve always prided that Khan Academy is a non-political organization. We strive for the truth, and I think we’ve done a good job at it. We’re not going to be perfect. Everyone has biases or collections of biases. But we definitely strive for it. But I think this does make us think, okay, as we create these archetype or reference curricula or resources around American history and civics, let’s make sure that we get all the perspectives. Let’s make sure we get the voices. Let’s make sure that we get as close to the truth as we can, given that a lot of history is ... it’s lost, but a lot of it is there, and we’ve just ignored it. So I think that’s that. And then I think, as someone who’s running an organization, there’s hard questions, that we have to introspect about our own organization. What biases do we have or do we not have? And one thing I do tell the team though, is when we think about diversity inclusiveness, it should be a conversation that makes all of us a little bit out of our comfort zone. Even those of us who think we’re very progressive, are we diverse? Are we open to diverse perspectives who disagree with us? Are we inclusive of people who are not on the other side of the political spectrum? I think it’s a real conversation. Openly, it’s a conversation we’re having inside the organization right now. I think we do have ... sometimes we are living in our own echo chambers.

Kerr: We appreciate you thinking about those roles as a manager and how you’re having some of these hard conversations. Let me just ask you to continue on that vein, but perhaps even broaden the net out a little bit more. Many leaders are struggling to figure out how to manage teams virtually for the first time or how to conduct meetings. And Khan Academy is obviously in one of those beneficial positions, where this has led to a huge surge in demand and a lot of race to keep up. Other companies are not, and unfortunately, are going to be going in the opposite direction. But any reflections on what worked for you—or didn’t—as you’ve steered Khan Academy through the Covid crisis?

Khan: Yeah. In terms of how virtualize-able we’ve been as an organization … well, first of all, the benefit, I agree with you. We feel very lucky that we’ve been able to play a role and that our impact has gone up by a factor of two or three. But, on the other side, there’s real issues. Our “business model,” so to speak, is philanthropic donations. And you can imagine our server costs have gone up. We’re trying to accelerate all of these programs. So our budget has gone up dramatically. And what I’ve told the team is, this is the moment where we have to do the right thing and hope that the philanthropic community, the corporate sector, that they will also recognize that Khan Academy is an incredibly high leverage, high return, or high social return on investment. And hopefully they step up. So that’s introduced challenges of its own in terms of the resourcing. We are more aggressively dipping into our reserves than ever. I’m happy to talk about how we navigate that. But on the virtualization of our execution, so to speak, we were already about ... 35 percent of our workforce was fully virtual or distributed or remote already pre-Covid. And then, I would say, of the other 65 percent, about half of them were a hybrid. They would come into the office, but they might live an hour, an hour and a half away. And so they would maybe spend a day or two working from home. So we always did have a lot of practices. Almost any meeting in our organization, always had at least one person who was virtual. So it was pretty easy for us to transition there. In fact, it was frankly seamless on that front. I think what was more difficult—and this is true, I’ve got to believe, of almost any organization in the world right now—is people had stuff going on in their life. All of a sudden, their kids’ schools are closed. The kids are screaming in the next room. And I’m speaking from personal experience. They have parents they’re worried about. They’re worried about the health and safety of their own family. That’s stressful. And if you’re in a business where the finances are getting that much tighter, there’s economic uncertainty, that’s incredibly stressful. And so one thing that we did for our team is we said, “Look, we recognize that this is a tough scenario.” And you can imagine our team—many of the same people whose productivity was getting hurt because their kids were screaming in the next room, they’re feeling guilty, because now’s our time as an organization to step up. And that causes a lot of stress on the individual. They either feel like they’re neglecting their family, or they feel like they’re neglecting work, and they’re not even able to do either. And so we definitely told our team, “Look, you’ve got to take care of yourself first and foremost. You can try to be a hero, but that can only last so long, and you’re going to end up burning yourself out. You’re going to end up burning your family out. You’re going to end up not treating your family right. And you’re probably going to end up having to take some form of leave anyway from work, because you’re going to get so burned out. So this is a time where you have to take stock of where you truly are, invest in yourself. Do what you need to do for your family. We aren’t going to be judging folks. We have a perspective of who’s performing well in the org, who might not be performing where they need to, pre-Covid. But we’re not going to do dramatically modify those. We trust folks that they’re not going to take advantage of what we’re saying.” And I think that really lowered the stress level for a lot of team members. But as you can imagine, the more that Covid has gone on—and obviously we’re living right now, and not just Covid is out there generating stress; there’s economic uncertainty, there’s protests in the street that are for the great majority, peaceful. But we have coworkers who have said, “Hey, there’s some looting going on across the street from where I live.” That’s stressful. Even if you’re super supportive of the protest, that’s stressful to see that type of thing. So yeah, we’re just trying to make sure people take care of themselves. And then, those of us who have the right supports, who are in a good place, that we’re able to pick up a little bit of the slack so that we can deliver, because a lot of the world is depending on us right now.

Kerr: What would you hope Khan Academy would do—now that this is also your moment—over the next five, 10 years? What’s the vision of where you want this organization to go?

Khan: Yeah. When I set up Khan Academy as a not-for-profit back in 2008, I was just some guy. I had my day job. I was an analyst at a hedge fund, but I was like, “Yeah, let me...” I live in Silicon Valley, and a lot of my friends from school are VCs and entrepreneurs, and there was a lot of temptation to turn it into a for-profit organization. But I just did a thought experiment of what a home run would look like in the for-profit world. I said, “Well, that’s great.” But when you think about the scale, the swath of history for generations, it is hard to point to for-profit organizations that have been able to stay true to a global mission. And I obviously, given my previous job—an analyst at a hedge fund—I believe in markets. And I believe that a lot of good and innovation, arguably the majority of it, the great majority of it, happens through a free enterprise, but I think there are parts of society where either markets don’t function well or, when they do function, they lead to outcomes that aren’t consistent with our values. And I do think education and health care, there’s space for, for sure, there’s a lot of good, for-profits doing great work in there. But as a society, we don’t want someone’s access to learning to be dependent on the zip code that they live in or whether they have a credit card accessible. And you want to stay true to that mission. And even when I was an analyst at a hedge fund, I saw so often how capital structure drives incentives over and over again. And I wanted to take the long view. So anyway, that’s why I set it up as a not-for-profit. It was a little delusional for a guy in a walk-in closet to say, “Hey, maybe this could be in the next great institution. Maybe this could be like the Smithsonian or Oxford.” And frankly, even back then, when Khan Academy was only serving 50,000 or 100,000 people, we were already serving more learning minutes than a lot of universities had done over hundreds of years. And it’s like, “Maybe it’s not that delusional.” And so you fast-forward to today and where we’re going in the future. I think it’s … Khan Academy has shown that it was good that we started with that little, somewhat delusional view, because it’s turning out that it’s doable. And not only is it doable, but it’s a necessity for the world. Obviously we’ve been talking about the Covid crisis, but when you just think about the broader trends that are happening with automation, artificial intelligence, that traditional labor pyramid is either going to turn into a much smaller pyramid at the very top, where everyone else is like, “Well, what’s my role in society?” And then, you’re going to have to have a stable society, extreme wealth redistribution, or unrest. Or you figure out ways for more or most people to operate at the top of that pyramid, arguably invert the labor pyramid. And I think, if we’re going to do that, if we’re going to do that at scale, it’s got to be the existing education system, but also organizations like Khan Academy, supporting them, building the tools for them. And when there are gaps, as there are in many communities, we can fill in those gaps. So I’m hoping 10 years out, everything we talked about, that literally anyone on the planet in pretty much any major world language can access their potential—from pre-K through elementary, middle, high school, college in math, reading, writing, social sciences, sciences—and they’re able to do it in a way that is engaging, at their own time and pace, and essentially prove what they know to the world so that they can have healthy, happy lives and participate in democracy in a robust way.

Kerr: A wonderful way for us to end this. Sal, thanks so much for taking time out of a very busy day to join us. Sal Khan is the founder and CEO of Khan Academy, which is part of many of our lives right now during the Covid crisis and will be in the months going forward. Thanks, Sal.

Khan: Great. Thank you so much, Bill.

Kerr: Thank you for listening to this special episode of the Managing the Future of Work podcast. To find out more about our project on the future of work and for more information on the coronavirus’s impact, visit our website at hbs.edu/managing-the-future-of-work and sign up for our newsletter.