Lenny Gonzales

By Katrina Schwartz

As the blended learning movement grows in the U.S., schools will need to experiment with what works best in different types of settings. There’s still a lot to learn about different types of blended learning models, and a new nonprofit called Silicon Schools will raise and invest $25 million toward that effort.

With partial grants from the Bay Area’s Fisher family (owners of Gap), and the advice of board members Michael Horn from the Innosight Institute and Salman Khan of the Khan Academy, the nonprofit, which has raised $12 million so far, aims to fund new and innovative approaches in existing blended learning programs with grants to each school.

The effort is led by Brian Greenberg, who chronicled the successes and challenges of piloting the Khan Academy in Oakland’s Envision Schools on the Blend My Learning blog. During that process Greenberg and his staff were very open about the pros and cons of integrating technology into the classroom, and other educators added their perspectives to what worked and didn’t work on the blog. Greenberg points to the parts of the program that worked well, namely letting the technology do some of the heavy lifting in terms of grading, lesson planning and collecting analytics that free up teacher time to focus on students.

Giving students more responsibility for the learning process was also a significant outcome of the Envision pilot program. “What we’re finding is that if you make the steps clear and make them accountable, the more you put them in charge of the process the more they amaze,” Greenberg said, referring to students. The pilot program also helped move the class toward “proficiency-based learning,” in which a student is responsible for an intended outcome, but not penalized every step along the way.

Greenberg intends to apply one important lesson he learned from the program to the schools funded by the Silicon Valley Fund: Technology in no way replaces the teacher. At some point the usefulness of technology runs out and the educator’s role is crucial. He also says that technology doesn’t preclude the need for a good classroom management systems and positive school culture. Kids can get off track or “fake” work on sophisticated software just as easily as they could in a traditional classroom.

And lastly, Greenberg says it’s hard for schools to navigate the many tools that populate the ed-tech space, especially when each is tailored to a different subject and use. He says the whole field needs to become more integrated, almost like an app store for ed-tech, and one that works across platforms. Schools don’t have access to endless money and as a result, ed-tech entrepreneurs and businesses need to design more precisely with the client in mind.

What’s interesting about the fund’s goal is that very little is proscriptive. Greenberg was clear to recognize that this movement is in its infancy. There is no blended-learning canon that can be taught to teachers. Rather Greenberg says the educators need to write the playbook. They need to be at the table and in the laboratories of innovation. And if all goes according to plan, in five years the various Silicon Schools will be networking with one another, sharing ideas with schools from around the world and thinking about how to scale up and replicate best practices.

The fund sees itself as the infusion of cash that schools need to get these expensive and technology-heavy programs off the ground, but they have no intention of funding them forever. “The schools that we fund, all eventually balance on California public dollars,” Greenberg said. “The hope would be that by finding new models and new ways to meet the needs of each kid that we can still make excellent schools work on California funding rates.”

Greenberg says the fund will focus on schools in Silicon Valley to try and build an “innovation hub” in an area already known for taking risks. The idea is to connect educators interested in integrating technology into the classroom with tech entrepreneurs who can create the software, apps and tools that will be most useful to teachers. “This combination of world class entrepreneurship with front line educational expertise is extremely promising. And if we can’t make that intersection happen here, at the heart of Silicon Valley, then we don’t think it will be easy to make it happen anywhere,” Greenberg said.

HOW IT WILL WORK

Greenberg says the fund is willing to give up to $700,000 to about 25 schools if they can demonstrate a unique idea or way to implement blended learning that pushes the conversation forward. Grantees also must have strong leadership teams, a track record of success and a financially sustainable model. The fund expects schools to be able to offer their innovations on the same budget as a traditional California public school.

The fund isn’t pushing any particular model of blended learning like Rocketship, Khan Academy or the flipped classroom. Rather, they want teachers to evaluate what works and what doesn’t from those “1.0 models” and then collaborate with ed-tech entrepreneurs to develop new tools for the areas that have been neglected or don’t work well. “You start to mix those things together in a real school, with really good educators and really good kids who are bought into this vision and that’s when it starts to get exciting,” said Greenberg.

Blended learning is a relatively new concept with a mixed track record. Integrating certain types of technology into the classroom gives teachers and students real-time feedback so that each student can work at his or her own pace, and can give teachers accurate information that can help them better group students according to comprehension levels on a specific subjects. But educators point out that too often ed-tech focuses on improving test scores rather than on building creative thinking and a passion for learning in students and that schools still need passionate, innovative and dedicated teachers, no matter how kids absorb the content.

Greenberg agrees that it’s too early to expect schools across the country to buy into a blended learning model. But he does hope that some of the strategies that are piloted in schools funded by the Silicon Schools Fund will inspire other teachers and administrators to take elements back to their own schools.

“We see creating new schools that are essentially laboratories of innovation, that are trying many different approaches, all with the idea of making education more powerful for each student and each teacher,” explained Greenberg. In five years, he envisions that the Bay Area will have somewhere close to 25 examples of how blended learning could be done. Some of those schools could be charter schools, others public, some built from the ground up and others a transformed existing schools. He wants to see it all so that lots of new ideas and ways of doing things can be tested.

The Khan Academy "Knowledge Map," which suggests working exercises, will be made available to crowd-sourced videos chosen by the Khan Academy.

As of today, there are more than 2,700 videos on the Khan Academy site. All of them have been created by Salman Khan himself, with the exception of those produced by the SmartHistory team who Khan hired a few months ago.

Over the course of a few short years, Khan has accumulated a vast library of education videos that are now used in schools and homes across the country.

But no man is an island, as they say, and Khan is opening up his academy – at least in part – to the great Internet expanse.

In the very foreseeable future, teachers will be able to upload their own videos to the Khan Academy, but also be able to create their own “knowledge maps” or repositories of content for their classes, using videos – within or outside of the Khan Academy – and all of Khan’s analytics, and reporting tools, in order to customize their own curricula.

Khan describes it this way:

“In the first iteration, let’s say you teach gender studies at U.C. Berkeley. You could put up your own videos, exercises, and everything you want for the class. Plus, you could leverage all the tools we have – a dashboard, analytics, reporting tools – and you could create your own island for your own class.”

Eventually, the site will serve as a highly curated repository of educational videos – those considered valuable by Khan and his team.

“The deal will be, you can use our tools if we can put your stuff onto our noncommercial public domain,” Khan said. “We don’t know how it’ll turn out, but we suspect there will be some amazing things put up.”

And rather than big buckets of random videos, Khan hopes the site will house, for example, “the definite course on technology,” which might be a combination of a few different people’s content.

“We have all these fancy tools and modules we’re building that are just supporting my videos. Why can’t it support someone who’s teaching a different language, or quantum physics, or gender studies,” he said. “We want to expose our tools so that everyone can use them to help kids learn at their own pace,” he said.

But the curation part of this effort is key. Though there will be a “Wild West part that someone can dig through if they’re in the mood,” he said the designated subjects will be heavily curated.

Khan will also hire a few new teachers and expand the topics of coverage to go beyond his specialties in the STEM field and into the arts and humanities. Stay tuned to hear who these personalities might be.

The most recent influx of cash came from the $5 million donation from the O’Sullivan Foundation. Khan has also received funding from other sources: Reed Hastings, founder of Netflix donated $3 million; Scott Cook, co-founder of Intuit, and his wife donated $1 million; Google last year donated $2 million; and Bill Gates has donated more than $5 million in total over the last few years, Khan said.

And now with this new crowd-sourcing project, the 3.5 million unique visitors every month is poised to explode.

Read more about Khan’s plans to launch a hands-on project-based summer camp.

Khan Academy

In just the past couple of years, Salman Khan has built a huge following for the Khan Academy. He’s created more than 2,700 educational videos that have been viewed tens of millions of times over. He’s been on CNN, NBC Nightly News, PBS News Hour, and other major media. His videos are being incorporated into school curricula across the country.

But the videos are just the beginning. Using part of a $5 million grant from the O’Sullivan Foundation, Khan is planning the next iteration of the Khan Academy, which will soon find its place in the physical world. This summer, he will run a camp for kids very similar to the program he co-organized at the We Teach Science camp in Silicon Valley two years ago.

Far from just watching videos, kids at the We Teach Science camp got their hands on a slew of math, science, and engineering projects. They organized a Sumo wrestling match between Lego robots they’d built using Lego NXT kits. “Whichever robot falls off loses. If no robots fall off, it’s a draw after three minutes,” Khan said.

They played a “paranoia” version of the game Risk to understand the theory of probabilities using Monopoly money, where kids trade securities based on the outcome of the game. “Some of the kids couldn’t see the board, which is indicative of what a lot of traders are doing right now,” Khan said.

They orchestrated a crowd-sourcing project to test the wisdom of the crowds by posting a one-day online photo contest that drew more than 1,000 participants. The kids put together a pile of objects, took a picture of it, posted it on Mechanical Turk, and asked players to guess the measurements. What happened? “The people who guessed online did better than any of our experts,” he said. “We didn’t know how it would turn out because it was totally open-ended. We had a fun discussion about wisdom of the crowds, when it works, when it doesn’t work, why does it works.”

The upcoming summer camp will be similar to We Teach Science. “It lets you rethink what the physical experience should be like, what I’d call deeper, higher order type of stuff that most schools don’t touch on right now,” he said. “The videos are great for learning things at an academic level. You can learn intuition for what a derivative is and about Newtonian mechanics through the online exercises, but this is another level of learning.”

Kids will learn a little about probability, modeling, negotiating skills, game theory, and once they go through it, “maybe they’ll look at the stock market or the housing market differently,” he said. “One of the things I hope these kids will have is a more visceral, ingrained, intuitive sense of science and analytical thinking about the world around them than even most adults do.”

At this early stage, it’ll be a bit of an experiment, too. Khan wants to see which of the exercises engage students best, which they’re really learning from, and which might be replicable for other teachers. “Maybe we can build software that can help others replicate the proejct,” he said. “That’s where it’s valuable to our mission as a whole.”

But the details are still fuzzy about logistics. At the moment, one person is dedicated to organizing the camp, but if the demand is high enough, Khan will allot more resources. It should be noted that the first year of We Teach Science in 2009, Khan brought a total of seven kids – three of whom were his cousins (the now-famous Nadia, for whom he created the very first YouTube video was one of them). The second year, 26 kids signed up. No doubt the demand will be somewhat higher this year.

Khan can confirm that it will take place somewhere between Portola Valley and Sunnyvale in Silicon Valley and will not be organized by grade level. They’ll probably target middle- and high-school students, but wouldn’t turn away the enthusiastic fifth-grader who showed initiative. Those interested can sign on to be considered here.

Beyond this coming summer, a physical, brick-and-mortar Khan Academy school is well within the realm of possibility. But when or if it were to come to fruition, it would be attractive to kids and parents who are comfortable with open-ended learning, he said. “People who don’t want predictable answers. It’s not about writing a lesson plan where after 45 minutes, you know what the outcome will be.”

Right now, Khan is focusing on building a full curriculum online first. “We have a long way to go before we can do a full curriculum,” he said. “I don’t know if there will be a physical school called the Khan Academy. I would like for something like that to happen.”

He added: “If nothing else, I’d like a kid who’s gone through the Khan Academy to be able to say, ‘I’ve learned accounting, law, and I can write as well as someone who’s graduated from Andover. That’s empowering.”

Read more about Khan’s plans to allow educators to upload their own videos and create their own curriculum using the Khan Academy’s analytics and reporting tools.

Take a look at a clip the Lego Robot Sumo Wrestling at the We Teach Science camp:

B. Gilliard

You’ve heard the stories: Cheating in Atlanta, Georgia. Cheating in Washington, DC. Cheating in Long Island, New York.

Academic dishonesty, plagiarism, and cheating are hardly new. And as the history of the banking industry and baseball demonstrate, cheating scandals aren’t just limited to schools. With numerous incidents making headlines in recent months, however, questions are being raised about the validity and the pressures of standardized testing, as well as the security of testing practices. And some are asking if it’s time to scrutinize the underlying behaviors and motivation for all this cheating.

Is the pressure to score high — not just on standardized tests, but in all facets of school life — leading to a rampant culture of academic dishonesty? Or is it simply that technology is making it easier to cheat?

Some studies indicate that cheating is at an all time high — or at least, students’ willingness to admit they’ve cheated. Some 75% of college students admit that they’ve cheated at one point or another during their academic careers. That’s up from 20% of students back in the 1940s.

According to these studies, the types of students who are cheating has changed, too. It isn’t necessarily the student who’s struggling to do well in class who’s cheating; it’s top-performing students who are feeling the pressure to perform better. A recent article in Psychology Today cites one student saying, “I was in honors classes in high school because I wanted to get into the best schools, and all of us in those classes cheated; we needed the grades to get into the best schools.”

The pressures to test well are extending beyond students now too, as the cheating scandals in Atlanta and DC and elsewhere suggest. Students are cheating. Teachers are cheating. School administrators are cheating.

That Psychology Today article, written by Peter Gray, a research professor of psychology at Boston College, posits that there may be something about the structure of the school system that is becoming a “breeding ground for cheaters.” He argues that by being forced to spend time doing work they do not choose, students are unmotivated to learn. Furthermore, in a climate where they’re told what really matters are grades, students turn to cheating (rather than to learning) in order to do well.

“One of the tragedies of our system of schooling,” he writes, “is that it deflects students from discovering what they truly love and find worth doing for its own sake. Instead, it teaches them that life is a series of hoops that one must get through, by one means or another, and that success lies in others’ judgments rather than in real, self-satisfying accomplishments.”

Despite all the new ways that students can learn now — via Web tools and mobile phone apps, for example — it seems as though without a shift in this culture, cheating will continue. Indeed, I stumbled upon a Web site yesterday with instructions on how to cheat the point system on Khan Academy. Rather than earn badges by watching (and hopefully learning from) the videos, the author of the post demonstrated how to artificially inflate one’s points. Khan himself said he’s heard from teachers that students try to “game” the system, and his engineers are working on finding ways to thwart those efforts.

Many people point to Khan Academy as a site that epitomizes a system that encourages self-paced, self-motivated learners to thrive. What does it say, then, that there are already cheating sites aimed at gaming that system?

Getty

Disrupting the entrenched education system is daunting. There are 7.2 million teachers in the U.S., 76 million students, and more than 98,000 public schools, according to a government census (as of 2008).

So what’s the most effective way to unshackle the current archaic system from ineffective tactics that no longer work in the digital age?

Google, the world’s go-to for answers, has an idea for the most impactful place to start. Last week, the company’s educational overseers organized the Google Faculty Institute, to which they invited the faculty from California State University (CSU) schools of education. The mission: to show those who teach teachers the most effective, useful, and helpful digital tools.

Why the focus on CSU teachers? Simple math — 60% of teachers in California and 10% of teachers in the U.S. — are trained through the CSU system.

“We want to make California a model for the rest of the country,” said Maggie Johnson, director of education and university relations for Google. “We wanted to find a mechanism for talking about education technology and all the ways of using it in transformational ways — not just ways to support teaching as it’s always been done.”

Over the course of three days, the 39 attendees — mostly faculty who teach at the CSU schools of education — were tasked with coming up with proposals that would demonstrate the use of technology in new and inventive ways. They had to show how the proposal could be scaled and how it could go viral. For its part, in addition to hosting the event and providing experts and resources at the workshop, Google will donate $20,000 to each group, which has six to nine months to implement their ideas.

Here’s what they came up with:

• The Math of Khan: Documenting, testing and disseminating the process by which a teacher can flip their classroom using Khan Academy videos.
• Making Teachers ‘Appy’: Encouraging a “maker” philosophy with pre-service educators (teachers-in-training) by teaching introduction to programming in an educational technology course.
• Birds-Eye Detective: Teaching pre-server educators how to use Google Earth, Maps and fusion tables in the context of project-based K-12 instruction.
• Team-Teaching Classroom Innovation: Identifying a large number of pre-service teacher pairs to develop technology-rich science and math modules, test those modules in their classrooms and share with each other.
• Transforming STEM Educators: Delivering short workshops on how to use technology to do formative assessment, while saving faculty significant time.
• Examining Climate Change: An integrative math/science/technology approach to learning about climate change by developing a module for a methods course showing the power of technology in the context on relevant issues and to address misconceptions.

For these educators of educators, learning the tools of the trade for themselves deepened their understanding of how they can be taught to their students, and in turn used more fluidly in classrooms across California.

“They now understand the ability to manage some of these tools that can make teaching more fruitful and more exciting,” said Jaimie Tasap, Google senior education manager.

Though there were “bumps in the road,” namely legitimate obstacles that faculty would face in taking these ideas back to school to implement, Johnson said she’s confident they’ll follow through.

“We want them to influence the rest of the faculty at their schools,” she said. “You get the attention of hundreds of these faculty members, then you make a real change in California.”

jurvetson / Flickr

Salman Khan's library of free instructional videos has reached millions of people, and now his videos are reaching into classrooms.

If you’re curious at all about the future of education, you should know about Salman Khan. He’s the charismatic brainiac who’s created more than 2,000 instructional videos about everything from photosynthesis to the Bay of Pigs invasion. As former New York City schools chancellor Joel Klein recently noted, “Sal Khan has 50 million people on a site that doesn’t sell sex.”

Self-effacing (“Any joker in his closet can reach millions of people”), fast-talking, and pragmatic, Khan spins his big-picture views about education in the same way he describes subjects like valence electrons or mortgage-backed securities: as a bemused observer pointing out the obvious. “If Isaac Newton had made YouTube videos about gravity, I wouldn’t have to!” Khan said at a recent TED Talk.

But rather than quarterbacking from the sidelines, Khan is intentionally getting in the game. Some, including Bill Gates (who’s donated millions of dollars into Khan’s vision), believe his free YouTube videos, the full collection of which are called The Khan Academy, will profoundly change what we know as classroom instruction.

Here’s how it works: Students watch the videos in class (all of them produced by him), take “gamified” assessments that determine whether they understand the concept, and move on to the next level when they’re ready. The teacher can monitor each student’s progress with a dashboard: the green bar shows they’re proficient, blue indicates they’re working on it, and red alerts teachers that students are stuck on a problem.

This approach seems to work for one simple reason: The fact that students can go back and replay the videos as many times as they need to understand a concept eliminates what Khan calls the “Swiss cheese” gaps in knowledge. Unlike with traditional classes, a student can’t move to the next level until he’s understood the one before it.

Though he’s the buzz of education circles – at two conferences in Silicon Valley where I saw him speak in the past six months, long lines of fans waited to thank him for his work– Khan has his share of critics, too. Some educators think Khan is arrogant in believing that videos can replace the human touch in a classroom, and in the process squeeze teachers out of the equation. Others believe his focus on basic skill drills misses more important learning ideals, like critical thinking and collaboration. As an institution, education does not so easily adapt to newfangled ways. “Entrenched systems don’t go away because Sal Khan is charming,” Klein said.

I spoke to Khan about these questions, and more.

Q. How do you answer teachers who say your videos will replace them in the classroom?

A. Depending on the teacher’s mentality, I think this can actually make it a lot more fun. If I was a teacher, this is exactly the type of class I’d want to teach, because for the core skills, I don’t have to prepare in a traditional sense. But I do have to prepare for projects and all that, so I have to prepare for creative things. As a teacher, when I’m in a room, I’m relying on my innate skills and teaching abilities, I haven’t scripted it ahead of time. I’m doing like a doctor would. I wouldn’t have a script about what I’m going to say to the next patient. They look at the patient’s data, they ask questions, and they try to diagnose the patient and somehow cure the patient. It’s the same exact model here.

But it’s going to be hard for teachers who have trouble letting go of the idea that they’re the sage on stage, that they have all the information, “Do not question me, be quiet,” and it’s all about classroom management. It throws all that stuff out the door. But the people who are attracted to this model is exactly the type of people we want and who this will work for.

Q. Are you adding any input from teachers?

A. Yes, we’ve had input on both the videos and creating the software, from teachers and students. In Los Altos, it’s a very tight design. We have our engineers in the classrooms on a regular basis. They’re talking to students and teachers. In fact, they figured out that some kids were gaming the multiple choice, and we realized we had to fix that.

Sometimes we see what teachers are doing in class, and we realize that it should be a feature in the videos or the software. For example, we’ve created a profile of the students for the teachers to look at. But teachers have started to use it in a different way. They’re asking students to look at their profiles and come up with their own goals. And right now the kids are looking at it and writing their goals on notecards. So we thought we should automate that process and build it in.

And using that profile, Khan Academy can make suggestions too. So students can say: “These are my 20 goals for the month.” “These are my three definite goals and these are my three stretch goals” and you can look at it at the end of the week compared to where you were.

So we’re learning a ton from the teachers themselves. And we’re actually going to hire some of them. There are teachers who were laid off, some of the best teachers the district has. It was a travesty at first, then we thought, Gee, we could hire them. These teachers have been masterful with the technology and what to do with it. They weren’t afraid of the ambiguity.

Q. How is the teacher’s dashboard and assessment piece working out?

A. It’s been working well. A teachers has an iPad now, so she’s walking around with the students’ dashboard, which highlights who’s doing what, who needs help. Before she helps a student, she can flip to their profile, see what they’ve been working on, look at their goals, then she can talk to the student, and she intervenes. It feels like a doctor with a patient’s medical history, but way more advanced because they know the history of the student going into the intervention. Also it’s cool because it looks like the future.

Q. Did you create an app for the teacher’s dashboard?

A.  Right now, it’s a Web interface, so anyone can use it without an iPad, but we’re building a dedicated mobile version. And that’s where most of our resources are going, hiring engineers and designers. Any teacher in the world can do this right now, and they are. If you’re a teacher, you could get all your kids an account, and you give them your I.D. and they sign you up as a coach, and they designate you as their teacher.

Right now, it looks like 500 to 1,000 people are using this in classrooms, based on the numbers we see. They’re working in groups of about 30 and it looks like they’re using it as a classroom would. We don’t know for sure, but it looks like that’s what’s happening. You can do this homeschooling with two or three kids. The idea is we perfect the use in Los Altos, but anyone can use it.

Q. What are your plans for the Khan Academy in the near future?

A. We’re definitely ramping up team to do school implementation. We’re going to new schools and classrooms and school districts.

Q. Do you think this kind of learning is appropriate for every student?

A. We’re not saying it’s not for every student, but we’re not sure. Our goal right now is, on videos and exercises, let’s as quickly as possible do a really solid first pass, use as much data as possible to iterate on it, and improve it. Then we’ll learn from the data. We know from the data that it’s much much more appropriate for a lot more people than what they’re getting now.

Q. Where do you think the Khan Academy fits in with the debate about high-stakes testing, core curriculum, and the need to teach students intangibles like critical thinking and collaboration?

A. Our thinking is that if you take a test or a series of tests, you should be able to get your credential and you’re done. And what I love about that is it kills the monopoly on the credential, it levels the playing field on the learning side, and I think Khan Academy will be a strong contender on the learning side.

When it comes to we shouldn’t be teaching this, we should be teaching that; we should be teaching it this way or that way. I don’t disagree with some of it. For example, I think we should be teaching computer science. But I think it’s an impractical approach, or naïve approach to sit on the sidelines and complain about it.

You’re still not addressing the issue of students still being assessed by the world, you know, on the SATs. And if they really do want to go to med school, regardless of your personal opinion of what’s important – and you might have a valid personal opinion – but that’s still not going to help kids go where they want to go if you refuse to teach something based on ideological grounds.

So our point of view is, go where the need is, address the need, and once the need is addressed, we’re now in a position where we can start delivering other things – things that are maybe more relevant, more useful. More projects, more computer programming and things like that.