khan academy case study

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Khan Academy: Scaling and simplifying

About Khan Academy

Khan Academy is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization with the mission of providing a free, world-class education for anyone, anywhere. Its free resources include practice questions, quizzes, videos, and articles. Offering preschool through early college learning on a range of academic subjects, Khan Academy has been translated into 36 languages, and 18 million people learn on Khan Academy monthly.

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Google cloud platform results.

• Supports 3.8 million unique visits each month, along with 1.5 million practice questions served and answered every school day
• Gains functionality that lets students chart their progress through profiles built via App Engine
• Focuses resources on improving the user experience
• Easily handles usage surges
• Deploys App Engine to host and maintain KhanAcademy.org

Based in Mountain View, California, Khan Academy is a not-for-profit that produces and posts a vast collection of free educational online videos about math and science topics ranging from algebra and trigonometry to biology and economics. Millions of students, educators, and self-learners around the world watch the videos, both on the Khan Academy’s YouTube channel and on its hugely popular website (www.khanacademy.org), where students answer some 1.5 million practice questions per school day. The Khan Academy development team continually tweaks the site based on how visitors choose to learn.

Khan Academy’s beginnings date back to 2004, when Sal Khan’s cousin asked him to remotely tutor her daughter in math. Khan was happy to help and more than qualified, given his three MIT degrees and his Harvard MBA. As more relatives and friends asked Khan for tutoring assistance, he began videotaping short lessons and posting them to YouTube. His knack for distilling complex concepts into easy-to-follow tutorials helped the videos go viral.

Khan maintained a website for his growing video library for several years, but the platform experienced limitations as traffic increased. At the same time, media attention was growing, and technology industry leaders, including Microsoft founder Bill Gates and Silicon Valley venture capitalist John Doerr, began lending their support and evangelizing Khan’s mission and work. It was at this point that Khan quit his job as a hedge fund analyst to devote his full-time attention to the site’s growing potential.

“With Google App Engine, we don’t need a system administrator or anyone dedicated to deploying our app, so 99 percent of our time is spent working on our application," says Ben Kamens, lead developer, Khan Academy.

“Sal knew he needed to offload the technical and maintenance concerns so he could work on what was important, which was to make more videos for the Khan Academy library,” explains Ben Kamens, lead developer for Khan Academy. “To grow, it was important for him to be able to stop worrying about things like deployment issues and running his own server.”

Khan Academy chose App Engine as its hosting and application development platform because App Engine could easily house its growing collection of 2,000-plus videos, resolving the organization’s overall server and maintenance issues with a single solution.

Using App Engine freed the team to focus on the user experience and the array of content that makes the academy such a powerhouse.

“A lot of what the Khan Academy is about is collecting data on student behavior so we can teach them better,” Kamens says. “Did they use a hint? Have they watched the video before? That data is being stored on Google App Engine so we can figure out what the most effective videos are, or where students struggle the most.”

Khan Academy provides individual profiles to students so they can analyze their learning progress, which means the organization needs systems running in the background to collect and track of all this data. Because App Engine takes care of server support, Khan Academy’s five developers can spend almost all of their time improving site functionality.

“If we didn’t have Google App Engine, we’d be spending a lot more time figuring out server setup and working on routers,” Kamens says. “Our ability to focus on the actual product is the benefit of Google App Engine.”

With the App Engine dashboard, which provides information like response time, uptime, and error rates, the development team also has an easy way to watch over site performance. “It lets us see what the average response time is, so we can keep it really low,” Kamens explains.

During the US school year, Khan Academy receives more than 3.8 million unique visits a month — all served through App Engine. To support this much traffic, a typical company would need an internal system administration staff.

“With Google App Engine, we don’t need a system administrator or anyone dedicated to deploying our app, so 99 percent of our time is spent working on our application,” explains Kamens. “Our application lives on Google App Engine, and we bank all of our scalability and traffic concerns on Google App Engine. Even huge traffic spikes from Sal’s media appearances don’t worry us since we know that Google App Engine will handle the spike.”

Kamens also likes the fact that he and his team can turn to the Google App Engine support team for assistance when they need it. He also finds helpful tips on the Google App Engine blog.

The Khan Academy staff has come to completely rely on App Engine. “We are constantly using more of Google App Engine’s capabilities and have been happy with the performance,” Kamens says. “It’s nice to have an easy deployment process since we deploy the site on average at least once a day, [and] sometimes up to nine or 10 times [a day].”

Generative AI in Education: A Case Study of Khan Academy

Education is a fundamental pillar of society. Technological advancements have opened new opportunities for more accessible and personalized learning experiences. Artificial intelligence, or AI’s emergence in education, has revolutionized how students learn, and educators teach. One platform that utilizes AI’s power to create personalized learning experiences is Khan Academy’s latest offering, Khanmigo.

Khan Academy has been at the forefront of online learning since its inception in 2008. The non-profit organization provides free access to high-quality educational resources, including instructional videos, practice exercises, and assessments covering various subjects, from math to science, history, and literature. With Khanmigo, the organization aims to further its mission by providing students with a more customized and interactive learning experience.

Also Read: CBSE to Introduce AI, Coding, and Data Science from Class 6th 

Personalized Guidance and Mentorship

One of the most significant benefits of Khanmigo by Khan Academy is the platform’s ability to provide personalized guidance and mentorship to students. According to research, having a dedicated counselor or mentor can significantly improve a student’s academic performance and overall well-being. Unfortunately, not all students have access to such resources due to the shortage of counselors and academic coaches in many parts of the country.

Khanmigo addresses this gap by providing every student with a dedicated counselor, career coach, academic coach, and life coach. Even more exciting is that these mentors aren’t just ordinary humans. They are AI-powered versions of historical figures, literary characters, and natural phenomena. For instance, students struggling with physics concepts can interact with an AI-powered version of Isaac Newton. In contrast, another student seeking career advice can consult with an AI-powered Warren Buffet.

The AI mentors are designed to engage students in meaningful conversations, listen actively, and provide insightful feedback. By interacting with these virtual mentors, students can gain invaluable insights into their academic and personal lives, receive guidance on overcoming obstacles and challenges and develop a growth mindset.

Enhancing Critical Thinking and Analytical Skills

Khanmigo doesn’t just stop at providing guidance and mentorship. This platform by Khan Academy also equips students with critical thinking and analytical skills through various activities such as debates and collaborative writing exercises. These activities challenge students to think beyond the textbook and apply their knowledge in real-world contexts.

By working hand-in-hand with the AI mentors, students can hone their writing, reading comprehension, and math skills while receiving detailed feedback that helps them improve. For instance, when a student submits a writing assignment, the AI-powered platform analyzes the text for grammar, syntax, and coherence and provides feedback on improvement areas.

Saving Time and Energy for Teachers

The benefits of Khanmigo aren’t limited to students only. The platform has a teacher mode to help teachers create lesson plans, prepare materials, generate progress reports, and perform other tasks. This feature saves time and energy for teachers, allowing them to focus on providing more personalized instruction to each student.

Addressing Ethical Concerns

Although AI benefits education, we need to consider potential ethical implications. One primary concern is data privacy. AI-powered educational platforms like Khanmigo collect and use vast student data to personalize the learning experience. To address this issue, Khan Academy has implemented strict data protection policies and measures to ensure student data is secured and used only for educational purposes.

Another concern with AI in education is the possibility of perpetuating biases. Developers create AI models based on data from various sources, including partial or incomplete data. Without proper oversight, AI-powered platforms could potentially reinforce or create new biases. Khan Academy continuously monitors and updates its AI models to eliminate emerging preferences to address this issue. Additionally, the platform offers personalized learning experiences that cater to each student’s unique needs, regardless of their background or demographics.

Khanmigo by Khan Academy represents a significant step forward in the evolution of education technology. By leveraging the power of AI, the platform provides students with a more engaging, personalized, and effective learning experience. As we continue to explore the possibilities of AI in education, we must do so to ensure equitable and positive outcomes for all learners. With Khanmigo, the options for creating a better learning experience are endless, and it’s exciting to see how technology can reshape education for the better.

Also Read: Generative AI in Education: Visual Storytelling From Text 

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• October 15, 2023
• AI Case Studies

Case Study: Khan Academy Blends Traditional Learning with AI

Khan Academy, an esteemed educational nonprofit renowned for online lessons, embarked on a journey to harness the power of AI to enhance the learning experience. By leveraging GPT-4, a state-of-the-art language model developed by OpenAI, Khan Academy developed an AI chatbot tutor named Khanmigo. This chatbot was designed to guide students through a Socratic method, prompting them to think critically and solve problems independently, rather than handing them direct answers.

Key Takeaways

• Khan Academy introduced Khanmigo, an AI-powered tutor, to facilitate enhanced learning.
• Khanmigo uses the Socratic method to encourage independent problem-solving.
• The chatbot covers diverse subjects and offers interaction with fictional and historical characters.
• Feedback mechanisms have been incorporated to improve Khanmigo’s accuracy and efficiency.
• While promising, Khanmigo faced challenges, especially in precise mathematical calculations.

Deep Dive: Khan Academy Blends Traditional Learning with AI

Khan Academy’s primary goal was to use AI to guide students in their learning journey rather than just serve answers. The chatbot was engineered to employ the Socratic method, urging students to elucidate their thought processes, thereby promoting independent problem-solving.

Implementation

To bring Khanmigo to life, Khan Academy utilized the GPT-4 model by OpenAI and further trained it on its own educational content. In addition to offering guidance on various subjects, Khanmigo was endowed with features that allowed students to engage in conversations with AI-powered historical and fictional characters. Real-time response rating mechanisms were also embedded, enabling users to provide feedback when Khanmigo made mistakes or offered insightful assistance.

Since its pilot launch, Khanmigo has been tested and utilized by over 10,000 users across the U.S., with more than 8,000 teachers and students participating in its classroom testing during the upcoming school year. The feedback mechanism allowed for continuous improvement of the tool, ensuring its refinement based on real-world classroom requirements.

Challenges and Barriers

Despite its promising features, Khanmigo, like other AI models, isn’t free from errors. Particularly in math, the AI sometimes struggled with calculations, giving incorrect results or guiding students inaccurately. Such “hallucinations” are attributed to the inherent nature of models like GPT-4, which predict text based on patterns from vast amounts of online data rather than having explicit knowledge. This method of prediction can sometimes lead to errors, especially in niche subjects or complex calculations.

Future Outlook

The integration of AI in educational settings appears inevitable. As MIT professor Rama Ramakrishnan suggested, completely preventing AI’s use in education may be shortsighted. Instead, the emphasis should be on equipping students with skills to harness AI’s potential while being critical of its limitations. For Khanmigo, continuous feedback and improvements, coupled with a potential broader rollout, will determine its lasting impact in classrooms. The vision is clear: AI can be a powerful ally in education if utilized thoughtfully and critically.

Sources: New A.I. Chatbot Tutors Could Upend Student Learning Instructure, Khan Academy Announce Major Partnership On AI Tutoring, Teaching Every student will have their own AI tutor, according to Khan Academy’s founder

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UX Case Study: Redesigning the Khan Academy App

Akshat Vats

Khan Academy is committed to providing a free, world-class education for anyone, anywhere. With an extensive library of educational resources, the Khan Academy app is a vital tool for learners globally. This case study outlines the process of redesigning the Khan Academy app with a focus on improving navigation, engagement, and performance, specifically tailored to meet the needs and preferences of women.

Problem Statement :

Redesign the Khan Academy app to improve navigation, engagement, and performance, tailored specifically for women.

Initial thought :

Upon encountering the problem, we realized the need to understand and address the unique challenges faced by female users. Our goal was to create a more intuitive, personalized, and engaging experience tailored specifically for women.

Research and Analysis

Due to the one-day time constraint, I focused my research solely on users’ current experiences.

Pain Points :

• Navigation Challenges: Users found it difficult to locate specific courses and resources. The app’s layout was not intuitive.
• Engagement Issues: Lack of personalized content and community features led to lower engagement.
• Performance Concerns: App performance was inconsistent, especially on older devices.

Current Design :

New design :.

Link to Figma file

Written by Akshat Vats

Experienced UX Designer specializing in intuitive SaaS website and mobile app experiences. Let's create seamless digital journeys together!

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• Harvard Business School →
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• January 2020
• HBS Case Collection

Khan Academy 2018 (Abridged)

• Format: Print
• | Language: English
• | Pages: 26

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William A. Sahlman

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• Angel City Football Club: Scoring a New Model  By: Jeffrey F. Rayport, Jennifer Fonstad and Nicole Tempest Keller
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Kim Perry and Eric Athas have worked in dozens of newsrooms leading change, including The New York Times, NPR, and public media member stations. For this piece, they looked outside of journalism to find out what news organizations can learn from other industries.

Newsrooms are facing the next great wave of change — they’re bringing people back to hybrid office set-ups, reimagining culture to prioritize diversity and inclusion, and facing continued digital disruption. But they’re not alone in grappling with a changing workplace. There’s a lot to be learned and borrowed from industries outside of journalism. Organizational transformations look very similar when you break it all down.

Khan Academy is one such example. The educational nonprofit started as an organization that catered to individual learners. Some teachers used it in their classrooms. But in the last few years, in addition to the free platform, it’s launched formal programs for partnering directly with school districts to put Khan Academy into classrooms. The goal was to disproportionately reach more students from low-income communities and students of color. Now, while continuing to offer free learning, Khan Academy is working with over 250 school districts across 45 states.

Before launching into this new direction, the organization piloted with multiple school districts across the country, learning how to best support schools, teachers, and administrators — and ultimately students in the classroom.

“District partnerships really changed the way every function works at Khan Academy,” said Marta Kosarchyn , Khan Academy’s chief technology officer and VP of engineering.

This is a case study of how Khan Academy changed how they worked on the inside to meet the needs of students in the classroom — and what newsrooms can learn from how they tested new ideas, tackled challenges, and found success.

Start with a high-touch pilot and learn as much as you can

Khan Academy’s partnerships with schools might seem like an expected evolution for the company. And in some ways, they were — teachers were using Khan Academy courses in their teaching, and sometimes in their classrooms. But Khan Academy wasn’t originally designed for classrooms. It was aimed at individuals who wanted to access free learning online. When the organization launched a pilot program in 2017 with the Long Beach School District, it had a lot to learn. They started with a “high-touch” model: fewer schools and more hands-on, dedicated attention.

“At that point we were saying yes to every request because we’ll learn from it,” said David Herron , who leads district partnerships at Khan Academy. “Open house for parents? Any way you can fly down? Yes, we’ll be there. That was our guiding principle for year one: Say yes, but make sure we document what we perceive is the lesson.”

School districts needed different things individual users accessing education content online: Administrators needed to track progress across the district, and teachers were gatekeepers to students’ learning and needed tools to support classroom teaching.

Product managers, designers, and engineers were able to visit classrooms and observe teachers and students using the product.

This is where newsrooms can borrow from Khan Academy. When you’re growing your newsroom’s ambitions, or responding to a workplace change, there will be lots you don’t know. Develop a plan to learn more. Make sure there are real on-the-ground experiments. Don’t worry too much about scaling at this stage — the goal is to learn. This will cost more at the beginning, but lessons and understandings established here will create the roadmap for what’s next. It will also help you see where high touch is needed and where tools or playbooks can do the heavy lifting. In past newsroom projects at the Times, like rolling out new story formats or launching training workshops, we’ve taken a three-pilot approach. By the third pilot, we’d modified it enough to start thinking about scale.

“We’ve learned to sometimes go slow to go fast,” said Kosarchyn. “Really pause and learn how to do something well, and really understand what its implications are, as opposed to just scale, scale, scale.”

Grapple with how to scale changes

As Khan Academy leaders wrapped up the initial experiments, they started to think about scaling to more school districts. They had learned a lot from the high-touch approach. But as their ambitions grew, they needed to evolve their approach, said Catherine Wang , the chief marketing officer at Khan Academy.

“How do you balance the right number of things that are automated with the custom things you might want to do with a district?” said Wang.

One lesson they took from the pilots was that the first steps of a partnership were crucial. That was when they would build a relationship with the district’s leaders, understand their needs, set expectations, and define success. To make sure this happened while expanding, the team created a playbook to standardize how they should work with each district — a “set of interactions we try to have with every partner,” Herron said.

At your news organization, once you’re ready to move beyond the high-touch piloting stage, take a moment to identify what worked well in the pilot and build from there. Maybe it’s spinning up standard templates for developing diverse source pools. Maybe it’s simplifying a workflow for a tool to make it easier for people to use on deadline. Or maybe, as it was at Khan Academy, it’s making a playbook that documents your process.

At the same time that you’re standardizing and templatizing, be prepared to refine all of it as you go. As you expand, there will be more to learn. When we’ve rolled out new tools for reporters and editors, we’ve made sure to document best practices and make them easily accessible. As tools and our guidance for them evolved, so did the documentation.

Frequently communicate the “why” internally

Khan Academy’s pivot to creating products for school districts meant the company had to change how it was working. Developers, designers and product managers needed to think about the needs of administrators, teachers, and students. And an enterprise approach meant that school districts would be paying for the specialized Khan Academy services while the online learning remained free.

With all of these changes happening, the Khan Academy leadership needed to communicate why they were moving in a new direction and how charging for Khan Academy was still aligned with their mission. They shared updates at all-hands meetings. But that didn’t mean everyone absorbed every detail or could connect it to projects they were involved in.

As changes happen across your own organization, you may fall into a similar situation. Maybe you have an exciting new initiative gaining traction — new workflows, communication norms, DEI goals, or digital formats — and need people to coalesce round it. You’ve made the announcement and sent out an all-staff email or two.

But, as Khan Academy learned, don’t assume that’s enough. In order for people to do their best work, they’ll need the context for why they’re doing it. Sal Khan , the company’s founder and CEO, suggested drilling the message down to the two or three simplest ideas, such as, why are we doing this and what does this say about everything else we’re doing?

“Communicate, communicate, communicate,” said Khan. “If you don’t communicate that over and over and over again, people will gravitate to another narrative.”

Beyond announcements and reminders at all-hands meetings, Wang said the team needed to articulate the “why” in day-to-day work, too. For example, at the beginning of a new project, they try to explain how it connects to the overall goals. That way everyone knows the purpose of the work and how it relates to the mission before launching into it.

In your newsroom, think about the ways people talk to each other and how you can make sure a change is frequently communicated. Is there a way to incorporate a new initiative into a daily news meeting? Or in planning meetings for big projects? Can editors reinforce it in conversations with reporters?

Know when it’s the right time to implement something new

When Khan Academy’s new programs were fully up and running, the organization started to connect with more districts. When they did, they were often met with excitement from leaders who were eager to quickly implement Khan Academy into their schools.

This was good news. But even though a district wanted to move forward, it didn’t always mean they should do it right away, said Wang. In some cases, the district was in the midst of other big changes, like rolling out new curriculum. Other times, the school year had already begun and asking teachers to do something different would have been disruptive.

Sometimes the best strategy was to just wait, even if someone was enthusiastic about starting soon.

“We want to make sure the district is in a place to engage with us,” said Wang. “That they’re seeing Khan Academy as a priority.”

The reality is that there’s never a perfect time for change. And if you work in a newsroom, there’s always some kind of deadline looming that requires attention from you and your colleagues. But you can try to plan for the best possible time, especially by avoiding the busiest moments. Steer clear of launching major initiatives during news events like elections and sports championships. If you’re working with a specific team, be mindful of news happening on their beats. If there’s already extra work being asked of a team, like training or year-end evaluations, consider holding off. The idea is to implement important changes when those changes can realistically be prioritized.

And if you need to wait, you may still be able to move forward in small ways. For Khan Academy, this meant proposing a small-scale pilot or starting with one grade. It’s a way to say “no” without pausing entirely.

Make internal changes to meet the moment

When Khan Academy’s formal move into classrooms began, the organization followed an “agile” product development process, meaning its teams released updates continuously throughout the year.

But Khan Academy’s leaders quickly learned that this approach didn’t match the way schools and teachers work. Schools revolve around the school calendar. If Khan Academy made major changes to the products during the school year, that would be disruptive to teachers, who wouldn’t have time to learn new systems.

Khan Academy decided to reimagine its process. Instead of releasing changes in the pure “agile” fashion, Khan Academy became more of a “seasonal” software business. Minor improvements would still be made throughout the school year. But any significant updates to products would need to be planned far in advance of back-to-school so that teachers could have time to learn how things worked before day one.

“All of a sudden, there was a time-bound aspect to the project, which is typically what you don’t have if you’re really just working in a purely agile mode,” said Kosarchyn. “That fundamentally changed the way that we needed to develop product.”

The product cycle was not the only big change that needed to happen.

“District officials said ‘Look, we like Khan Academy. But if you really want us to adopt it, we need support, training, integration.’ That was a scary proposition for us because it’s a whole other enterprise muscle,” said Khan. “It was definitely a bit of a leap.”

As you envision changes in your newsroom, consider what Khan Academy did. The organization learned from its initial experiments and then made considerable changes across the organization, revamping product development and investing in new hires. Kosarchyn called this the “final leap,” when the bottom-up learning (the tests, pilots and early iterations) joined a top-down strategic plan (the internal transformation and investments) to accelerate the change.

At a certain point along the way in your transformation, ask yourself: What’s your big leap? What major changes are needed to truly allow your efforts to endure? What internal workflows, traditions or ways “we’ve always done it” are standing in the way of a transformation?

Eric Athas is deputy editor of newsroom development and support at The New York Times. Kim Perry was director of international strategy and operations at the Times and is now manager of editorial operations at Netflix.

Cite this article Hide citations

Athas, Eric. "Need help navigating change in your newsroom? Khan Academy has some ideas.." Nieman Journalism Lab . Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard, 10 Jan. 2022. Web. 26 Aug. 2024.

Athas, E. (2022, Jan. 10). Need help navigating change in your newsroom? Khan Academy has some ideas.. Nieman Journalism Lab . Retrieved August 26, 2024, from https://www.niemanlab.org/2022/01/need-help-navigating-change-in-your-newsroom-khan-academy-has-some-ideas/

Athas, Eric. "Need help navigating change in your newsroom? Khan Academy has some ideas.." Nieman Journalism Lab . Last modified January 10, 2022. Accessed August 26, 2024. https://www.niemanlab.org/2022/01/need-help-navigating-change-in-your-newsroom-khan-academy-has-some-ideas/.

{{cite web     | url = https://www.niemanlab.org/2022/01/need-help-navigating-change-in-your-newsroom-khan-academy-has-some-ideas/     | title = Need help navigating change in your newsroom? Khan Academy has some ideas.     | last = Athas     | first = Eric     | work = [[Nieman Journalism Lab]]     | date = 10 January 2022     | accessdate = 26 August 2024     | ref = {{harvid|Athas|2022}} }}

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New case study: Teaching JS to elementary schoolers

posted on June 24, 2015

As part of our teaching guide , we have case studies that show the various ways that teachers use our curriculum across the world. I recently found out about an elementary school teaching JavaScript to their students, and was surprised because most folks think that elementary schoolers are too young to learn a syntactic language like JavaScript. However, they found their students took to it quite well — “begging to do extra homework”.

You can read all about the class in the case study , including how they bring in guest speakers over Google hangouts and how they showcase their great project work to parents. Thank you to Omar Alvarez for sharing it!

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