Special Edition 13: Sal Khan - Philanthropy in a Different Light

Welcome to another edition of "Around with Randall", your weekly podcast for making your nonprofit more effective for your community. And here is your host, the CEO and Founder of Hallett Philanthropy, Randall Hallett.

It's a terrific day here at "Around with Randall". Thank you for joining me and of course I'm Randall. We jump back into our great philanthropist series and take a little bit of a different spin on today. And that even may be the way you might think of philanthropy. But I've experienced, based on some personal experiences which I'll talk about here in a minute, but today we highlight Salman Khan who you may say I don't know who that is. But if you've ever heard of the Khan Academy, an online platform for education, then you know more about him than you think.

So let me go back a little bit about him and then we'll talk about his philanthropy, which is really a platform for education for all. So he was born in Metairie, Louisiana, suburb of New Orleans back in 1976. Incredibly bright, was taking university-level, high level math classes in his early days in high school. Upon graduating went to MIT, received his degree there, also as a master's in business from Harvard, and eventually kind of started his professional career more in the financial, commercial investing space.

And then in 2004 his cousin Nadia, Uncle who was really good at math to help tutor her from her challenges or with her challenges in mathematics, but she didn't live close so he began a process as the internet was blossoming to figure out how to teach math over the internet and Yahoo had what they called at the time a doodle Notepad and he could teach her. And they began to record these, and then there were other students who would watch her progress and go gosh can I join you, and then he began to move his tutorials to YouTube and all of a sudden there was a following of people, and pretty soon he's tutoring a lot of people through videos and he believed in a certain philosophy of education that allowed him to teach differently. And that led to, in 2009, kind of the founding the beginning of Khan Academy.

If you've never been on, it is a fascinating opportunity to learn to be taught on subjects that are so vast it's remarkable - well past math nowadays. Really where he got his jump was when a couple of of Angel Investors but a name you'll recognize here in a moment got behind him because they were kind of watching. But one in particular needed some help and interestingly enough that was Bill Gates. And according to the stories Bill Gates didn't need help with his math but his daughter was going through some challenges and all of a sudden he found this opportunity to help teach her, support her by watching these videos and helping her at home. And pretty soon after that the Gates Foundation came in along, then followed by Google, to fund the building of Khan Academy.

The reason I'm doing this today is I've been fascinated because if you've listened to any of my webinars, or you know me personally, or read my blogs, I talk about my family quite a bit. I have a nine-year-old son and he is mathematically inclined and we'll kind of leave it at that. He does really well and because of his understanding of math at an elevated level they're moving him along in third grade well beyond third grade. And because there are a lot of kids in that class there's about 21 of them who need more attention than Jay does they've moved them on to this online platform. Because he's mastered third grade and he's mastered pretty much all of fourth grade math even and so they're trying to figure out what to do with him, and they're using Khan Academy as a platform for his teaching, and he's still nine and he's incredibly bright, but being nine as my dad always said and particularly as a boy his brains are in his socks and sometimes it doesn't all make sense and we began to realize there was a little stress in his life and we figured out that it was he was learning as much by Khan Academy than he was his specialized teachers. They were bringing in twice a week to meet with him. That's when I got involved and at night we began doing some of this work and I began studying Khan Academy.

I'd never, I have way too much education, all these degrees almost a thousand hours of credits in different ways, shapes, and forms from my undergrad days. I've never taken an online class. I've, every class I've ever had has been in face-to-face versions in some way, shape, or form so this is new to the 52-year-old, and I'm blown away. The simplicity of the way that it's built, the manner in which it teaches, the ability for them to speak to someone who's nine-years-old and makes sense and in the same vein have the 52-year-old which, by the way, if you have kids you probably will laugh at this they don't teach math like they did when I was in school. You line them all up, multiply, add, divides crack whatever. Nowadays, they're grouping and all kinds of stuff. I'm sure it's conceptual but at the end of the day I understand it. So we got two people, 40 years apart learning math with different perspectives and it's brilliant. And that got me to think a little bit more about who is this guy that created this?

The first time I ever heard of him was a 60 Minutes piece probably, I don't know, 10 years ago when this was all just getting going. And in learning more about Sal Khan, he's a philanthropist at heart. Remember, philanthropy as we talk often isn't just about love or just about money it's about love of mankind. It's about how do I make the world a better place. And is he getting paid for being on you know Khan Academy? And they built out a couple of other things around more teaching about the lab school and now this dot Schoolhouse world I'm sure he's getting paid, but he's giving Khan Academy away for free. My son doesn't have to pay for this. Millions and millions of kids and probably some adults are on Khan Academy for free. And then I realized that my daughter, because of the blue bear and the the little fox and she's on Khan Academy at kindergarten learning her stuff supplemental to the school. You're not paying for that either. And it's all because of his philosophy. The philosophy is driven by philanthropy.

So he talks about the concept of the Level Playing Field and that education is a mechanism to help people change their life in ways they don't even understand, which I completely agree with. But beyond that he talks about, and this is what Khan Academy I think does, doesn't teach to the test it teaches to mastery of a subject. And so when you go through these lesson plans brilliantly put out, let's say there's four. If Jay's not a hundred percent they bring you back around into another way of looking at it before you take a quiz that tests for mastery, not for a grade. He doesn't get an A, he takes a little quiz to see if he's mastered the subject matter in small bites.

Sal Khan has talked about education is kind of a broken world. I think the direct quote is something like "we identify the gaps in children and then we ignore them because we lecture, we do homework, we lecture, we do homework. There's no cycle to figure out how they mastered the subject." And that's what I see in my son. Fortunately in math at least it may be the only advantage he has with his dad, everything else, but should be because of the genius of his mother. I can help him and I push him, but I think about all the people who need an assistance in education, particularly coming out of the pandemic. Think about what we've read recently all across the nation and all across the world about the deficit in education, and maybe your school district or your private school where your kids go is doing okay. Because I happen to be in one of those kind of unique school districts, but I need all these kids to do great because they're going to live in my community, and they're going to need jobs, and they're gonna want to have a life and buy a house, and a car, and send their kids to college possibly ,or whatever it is that they value.

Where I think the genius of Saul Khan is that he's not satisfied with what he has. He's now talking about how do we create personalization online to supplement the needs of a kid from a classroom in that artificial intelligence. He's leading that conversation. How it fits into education, not to ban it but to utilize it effectively. Not to write your papers like in this chat bot conversation but to use it for education. How do you help someone grow, maximize learning at their own speed in time, which is probably going to become more important because some kids are one place and other kids are another. But we all have the same goal is to get them to mastery level of the subjects that they meet. He's doing this for free. Now is he getting paid again? I don't have as much detail on that. There's not as much of that out there. But could he be making a heck of a lot more money if he was monetizing this, selling the concept to some venture capital group that would allow that group to maximize its revenue options, yeah. But he's not.

Think about this. Two billion views on YouTube or on Khan Academy for educational purposes. Millions and millions of kids using it to either educate or supplement their educational journey. The lesson today, the tactical is a reminder that philanthropy isn't always about big donors I.E dollars. Philanthropy is about impact. Philanthropy is about changing the world. I would never argue that someone, because I live in Omaha, like Warren Buffett isn't changing the world. He is. He's giving all of his money, and now you know in the last parts of his life hopefully nothing to announce here soon but he's not, he's a lot closer to the end than the beginning that he is going to leave all of his money minus just a little bit for his kids to world improvement in various ways. That's certainly critical. But I look at the impact of someone like Sal Khan and think maybe that's even more impactful. But they have the same goal. They want to help people. They want the world to be a better place, and they have both found whether it's Warren Buffett or Bill Gates and his wife Melinda, or whether it's any other of the philanthropists or most of philanthropists we've talked about on these podcast series who give money, Sal Khan is just as impactful just in a different way. And the lesson is who are the people in your community may not be able to give you a lot of money but can make a world of difference, that can impact the community in ways that someone with money can't to get outcomes and value, that someone who gives money can't, to make your organization better. It's important to realize there are multiple mechanisms in which people express their philanthropy. Sal Khan found his in, his philanthropy has made it its way into my house and that's why I think it's pretty cool to talk about someone who is changing the world one kid, one video, one educational lesson at a time.

Don't forget to check out the blogs at HallettPhilanthropy.com. RSS feed. You can get them right to your computer, front door or phone and if you'd like to contact me don't forget that's podcast@Hallettphilanthropy.com. The world's challenging right now. I might argue it's going to get more challenging. The question becomes how does your nonprofit, how do you help others? Some people make things happen, some people watch things happen, then there are those who wondered what happened. What we're talking about, we do this correctly, is you and people you partner with, your community, are people who make things happen who are doing such and so for people who are wondering what happened, or the things that are the most valuable in our community, education being one. Today's case, in today's podcast case I'm hoping that we all can find a way to help each other through this lens of philanthropy to make our communities all that they can be. And today Sal Khan gives us a lens into a little bit different way instead of just money, seeing a vision and executing it that can be replicated and affect billions of people over the next five, 10, 15, 20 years. Thank you for joining me today. I appreciate it. We'll jump back into the normal process of issues in the nonprofit world. Don't forget make it a great day.