Two giants of online learning discuss the future of education
Scratch the surface of online education, and you’re destined to run into the names of two men. The first, Salman Khan, never intended to be an education icon. Instead, he simply watched with increased interest as videos he had uploaded to YouTube to help his cousin learn math were seized upon by a world apparently eager to learn via his thoughts on the subject. By making his sideline into the non-profit Khan Academy, which now offers more than 5,000 free online lessons on an array of topics, Khan has since become a central figure in the “what should we do about education?” debate.
He also inspired the second key figure. Sebastian Thrun was a computer scientist whohelped build Google’s driverless car before seeing Salman Khan’s TED2011 presentation and deciding, pfft, autonomous driving was no challenge at all. Taking inspiration from Khan’s model, he resolved to do his part to redesign higher education, first via his computer science class at Stanford and now through Udacity, an organization that offers massive online courses.
TED got the pair on the phone to compare notes and discuss what both interests and worries them about the world of MOOCs and technology-inspired education. An edited version of their conversation follows. First a question for Thrun, who caused a recent ruckus when Fast Company magazine reported his announcing a pivot away from higher education toward more vocational style courses. What was up with that?
Salman Khan: On some level, Khan Academy being a non-for-profit could be considered a little strange. It was started in the middle of Silicon Valley; I have a lot of friends who are venture capitalists and entrepreneurs, and there was some talk about it being a traditional venture-backed business. And I don’t think that there’s anything fundamentally wrong with that. But from day one, Khan Academy was never intended to be a business, so when in 2008 I started seeing it could be a real thing, I decided to set it up as a not-for-profit because I want to make sure there were never any barriers for people to access it.
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