HigherEd Series: Sal Khan on What Higher Education Needs to Change in the AI Era

This season of Edtech Insiders is brought to you by Cooley LLP. Cooley is the go-to law firm for education and Edtech innovators, offering industry-informed counsel across the pre-K to gray spectrum. With a multidisciplinary approach and a powerful Edtech ecosystem, Cooley helps shape the future of education. You can give away the knowledge and ways to practice the knowledge and Academy is not the only player here. You have the MOOCs, you have Coursera, you have Ted, you have, there's a lot of good stuff on YouTube. It's a renaissance now in terms of if someone's just a self and AI of course now. If you just want to learn something, there's a lot of valuable ways to do it. But one thing that I think a lot about it at Khan Academy now is what is a missing link for someone to have a free world-class education or at least have access to their potential. Welcome to Edtech Insiders, the top podcast covering the education technology industry. From funding rounds to impact to AI developments across early childhood, K-12, higher ed and work, you'll find it all here at Edtech Insiders. Remember to subscribe to the pod, check out our newsletter and also our event calendar and to go deeper, check out Edtech Insiders Plus, where you can get premium content, access to our WhatsApp channel, early access to events, and back channel insights from Alex and Ben. Hope you enjoyed today's pod. Welcome to the Edtech Insiders Higher Education series, where we speak with the leaders shaping the future of colleges and universities. Throughout this series, we explore how higher education is evolving, where innovation is happening, and what the sector needs to prepare for what comes next. Thanks for joining us. We hope you enjoy the conversation. Hello, Edtech Insider listeners. We're here with a special guest who probably needs no introduction, but I'll try one. Salcon is the founder and CEO of Khan Academy and Vision Steward and board member of TED, two global nonprofits that provide free education to 200 plus million people worldwide. And today, we have Sal on the pod, because Sal recently announced the Khan TED Institute, a new higher education program in development with Ed and ETS. Salah is the author of the One World Schoolhouse and Brave New Worlds, the co-author of Teaching Students to use AI ethically and responsibly, his forthcoming book, Job Shock, examines how AI will transform the future of work and how societies can build learning systems that help people adapt, learn, and thrive. So with that introduction, welcome to the pod, Sal. I'm great to be here. Thanks for having me. So before we dive into the details, can you just tell us a little of the origin story of the Khan TED Institute? Where did this idea percolate from and where are you trying to accomplish with it? Yeah, even before AI entered all of our lives in a massive way four or five years ago, I think most observers of higher education started to say, hey, look, this is getting expensive for a lot of people, not just in terms of tuition, but also opportunity cost. You have the student loan debt crisis happening, especially in the US. Then on top of that, even the students who are able to go to college and complete college, they were finding themselves underemployed. Some of the statistics I've seen is that roughly half of college graduates have jobs that don't require college education. So there was already a lot of questions that were emerging. Are the skills that are being taught actually the ones that are going to matter? What are those signals that a college degree actually provides? Then you enter into the AI era of the last three or four years and all of those questions have just been amplified. Even if certain skills were useful that you were learning, we know that those skills are dramatically changing. What are going to be the skills that are going to be durable in an AI world? And so about two years ago, Chris Anderson, who was the previous steward of TED, and he's now the chair at TED, we were having dinner in Mountain View and we were just talking about ways that we might collaborate. And I said, look, Chris, the one area that I'm really fascinated about is higher education. Khan Academy, its mission as a non-profit is free world class education for anyone anywhere. But we've historically been focused on the academic side of things from, let's call it pre-K, with Khan Academy kids through your sophomore year in college. We do cover calculus and differential equations and chemistry and physics and all of that. But even before AI, these questions about the signals that a college degree and the skills that they provide were coming to the question. And this is becoming even more important now. And I said, look, between our organizations, we have brands that aren't just known, don't just reach a lot of people, but hopefully our view is aspirational. And so what if we were able to create something that is high scale? So it doesn't have the scarcity of seats the way a lot of selective universities would. Low cost, and we could talk more about that, but essentially affordable for anyone. This is the big delta aspirational. What we've seen in higher ed over the last 20 or 30 years is the elite universities, which are aspirational. Where if you go to them, you can get access to some of the top recruiters, get into top graduate programs. Those are expensive and hard to access. You have had a lot of good innovation on lower cost, let's call it competency-based alternatives. The examples I like to give are Western Governors University, Southern New Hampshire University, a lot of great things they've done. But they've almost been two separate worlds. The Western Governors Southern New Hampshire, it has helped a lot of people get a college education and get jobs. But it's not necessarily if someone's like, hey, I want to go work it as a management consultant at Bain, or I want to become a product manager at Google, oftentimes they say, well, I've got to go to whatever top 30 university in order to be able to have access to that. And we said, well, what if we could, if we could solve that? So that was actually part of the catalyst for how I even got involved with Ted. I was telling Chris at the time, and I didn't know that he was looking to retire from his role at Stewart and was looking to hand it off to someone else. But I said, I think Ted has so much potential, one, with the core of what it does with the conferences, both the main stage, and then all the Ted X's, and all that does with Ted.com. But I think Ted plus Khan Academy could have a real role in how we give people purpose and meaning in this AI era. So to some degree, that conversation is what looped me into taking on this role as the next steward at Ted. But then we start talking to ETS. We started getting together. All of these parties were converging. And we realized that a lot of folks also are saying, oh, we got to do AI scaling and et cetera. And most of what they focus on is, how do you use the newest version of cloud? How do you do skills? How do you vibe code? And that's part of it. But we realized those things aren't durable. The things that are going to matter much more in this AI future are going to be your communication skills, your collaboration, your resilience. And that's what we're hearing from employers too. And so we said, well, what if we could create a program and our intent is we're going to have a bachelor's program, master's program, and certificate programs where you are put into context with other people. So even though it's AI is a catalyst, a lot of this is very human-centric. I would argue more human-centric than what you would get even in a traditional university where we're going to put you in authentic work tasks. You're going to create a portfolio of things, leveraging AI tools and other tools. And you will get a read on how you are doing in a signal you can share with employers on your collaboration, your creativity, your communication, your resilience, et cetera. It's fascinating. And these are topics that we've been hitting on a lot in our special education series on higher education and the transformation that's coming. And so with that, Sal, we've invited our great friend Matthew Raskoff, Vice Provost for Digital Education at Stanford to join us to dive into this topic. I feel like we want to hit on this aspirational vision, competency-based learning, projects, and performance tasks. Is it a replacement? Is it in parallel? Before we start with that, I'm Matthew. Why don't you dive in and talk a little bit about the talent ecosystem? First of all, it's really a pleasure to be with both of you. Thanks so much, Pat, for including me and S&CELF. It's great to be on the few. So thanks for engaging in this conversation, especially so early on. I think it's 114 days into the announcement. So I appreciate your willingness to talk openly about an idea that's still evolving, so important. And I think innovating in the open is part of what distinguishes education, part of our secret weapon, I think, to help think about how to find product market fit, how to sort of the needs as effectively as possible. Yeah, I'm interested in the labor question. I mean, you raised the possibility of getting a competitive job out of this program. And then you also mentioned that it's potentially bachelors and masters and also a certificate program. So now, maybe you could walk us through, why do employers, in your view, not currently higher out of Western Governors University or Southern New Hampshire University, like what's the missing signal for them? You know, an online program that produces a big data stream and they could be mining it potentially, you know, for different sources or doing their own assessments, you know, ETS, I think, have some assessments that are available for employers. Like what's the missing signal from the noise from the perspective of employers that you think you can contribute to the record of a student coming out of this program that's unavailable from current providers of high quality online content. So to answer your question, First of all, people are hiring out of Western governors in Southern New Hampshire University, so-- - But not Bain and McKenzie. I get that. - Exactly, exactly. If you talk to any of the recruiters at Perlek-Budward aspirational firms, they'll tell you that there's just a high density at some of these selective universities. But if you're really double click on it and you say, okay, do you think that there's particular skills that you're learning at Harvard or Stanford or MIT, that that's the reason why you think you're going, somehow Harvard or Stanford or MIT or Princeton are teaching it better than Western governors or some of the university, they won't give you a clear answer. They'll say, well, no, these kids went through a really hard filter on the admission side of things. And they also know that, and this is a whole other topic, we could talk about how subjective the admissions process and sometimes random it can feel. And so they say, okay, if someone got through Stanford with a high GPA and that's another topic about GPAs have been going up and so there isn't a lot of signaling power at least just on the GPA side, you know that this is someone who probably had a high SAT score coming at a high school, probably did a bunch of interesting things, probably did get a lot out of their Stanford experience. I don't want to minimize that. Although I think a lot of that isn't necessarily some secret sauce on teaching calculus better. I think it's more of your putting you in an environment where you're going to be around a lot of other impressive young people, a lot of impressive faculty having access to amazing facilities and that just grow your horizons. But then they still don't know. Even when you look at that person with, say, a 4.0 GPA, what are their communication skills, what are their collaboration skills, resilience, et cetera. But at least you know that you have a higher density. And every time we talk to them, they're like one, even for the Stanford, the Harvard student, we wish there were better ways of getting a real signal out of what's happening there. And then they also know that there's talent, all sorts of places. But it's less dense and they don't necessarily have resources to recruit everywhere. And then they also know that it's not just many more locations at the age of 21 or 22 years old. They also know there's some amazing people who maybe went in different career tracks. And now they're 25, 30, 35, 40. But there isn't any traditional pipelines to finding them unless these people did something really, really exceptional. So our belief is if we can create something that is attractive to a broad class of students, I actually think there will be students who will come to the content institute, say, look, this is just really good, authentic experiences that I can credibly go to employers and say, look, I'm ready for whatever the future is going to throw at me. But if some of the students, and even at the elite universities, it's not like everyone gets a job at McKinsey or Goldman Sachs, it's usually the top five or 10%. But if you can be a really exceptional performer in this content institute environment, that yes, these employers will hopefully take what you've done very, very seriously. And we can't expect any of them to guarantee that they're going to hire anyone out of the program. But we are developing it in conjunction with them to make sure that they really value what the outputs of the program are. And so I do believe that this is going to create a pathway. It could be for a student who said, OK, maybe I could attend-- maybe the student got into Stanford. But for various reasons, they got a better scholarship at their local state university. They're going to go to University of Arkansas. But then say, well, now I can also do the content institute in parallel and maybe have a pipeline there. It might be your classic teal fellow type student who's jumping at the bit to start their company. And they might want to do the content institute or it might be a non-traditional. One interesting thing, since we announced, we've had over 20,000 people express interest. And the great majority of them are people. And this is actually a very big difference than you would see at Western Governors or Southern New Hampshire University. The great majority of them are people who either already have degrees, college degrees, or they are people who are in a four-year program. Oftentimes, some of the top four-year programs in the country. And what they're all consistently telling us is the people who are in their jobs are afraid of losing their jobs, we're calling them job defenders. They don't feel like they're getting the experiences in their work that are going to give them the signals or they're on. And a lot of the students at the top universities are saying, yeah, I like it here. I'm getting a great experience. I'm joining the clubs. I'm meeting great people and great friendships, et cetera. But I don't feel confident that I'm going to be employable in two or three years. - So is that the logic of the move towards the masters in applied AI, which I saw in the more recent announcement that the so much of your demand is coming from existing undergraduates, that it seems like that's the better place to start. It's coming from either existing undergraduates or people who already have undergraduate or graduate degrees. - Right. - So that's why we're probably going to start there. And then, but over time, also expand into the bachelor's. - I find it really interesting, you know, YouTube was the platform where you first launched Khan Academy. And Ted also launched on YouTube. And it was both were started as almost informal ways to boost your learning and discovery and experience. But this is an accredited formal program that you've now evolved this into. How did you think about the need to get it accredited and to actually make it degree granting or certificate granting as opposed to the informal modes which have predominated online learning for, you know, 20 years? - One thing that I've been thinking a lot, even before the last three or four years when AI put everything up in the air. But many years ago, all the time we get letters from a young people who've used Khan Academy, the exercises, the software and the videos informally. And they said, oh, if only I could get credit for this thing. Or I'm paying all of this tuition at, you know, University X, but I'm learning all the calculus from Khan Academy. Now I just have to go take the exam. So it was always on our radar a little bit. And it's especially extreme in internationally. Recently, there was a young woman who Afghanistan couldn't go to college, sorry, couldn't go to school as a young woman because of the Taliban. Khan Academy was essentially her school. And then when she's 17, she decides she wants to go to MIT. She applies. MIT is fascinated by her story, but she has no high school transcript. She has no SAT scores, she has nothing. And they said, well, if you can prove what you know, and they pointed her to schoolhouse.world, which is a sister organization to Khan Academy that I help start, where not only can you do peer-to-peer tutoring, but you can certify your knowledge by recording your face and screen while you take assessments alive. And then you can go on and tutor other people. So she was able to do that. And then MIT admitted her, and she's now a junior there. But that really showed that you can give away-- let's give away the knowledge, a ways to practice the knowledge. And Khan Academy is not the only player here. You have the MOOCs, you have Coursera, you have Ted, you have-- there's a lot of good stuff on YouTube. It's a renaissance now in terms of if someone's just a self-- an AI, of course, now. But one thing that I think a lot about it at Khan Academy now is what is the missing link for someone to have a free world class education or at least have access to their potential. And that is this notion of credit and actually being able to finish high school, get into college, and not just getting into college and completing college, but actually getting a job. Now, one thing I am telling the Content Institute team, though, is a lot of folks, when they get into higher education or they get into accreditation, which you have to do to become an accredited higher education, they focus a lot on the accreditation side. And I think they under-focus on the reality of the real world and what employers are talking about. And so even internally, we sometimes have had debates where like, well, the creditors are used to this type of thing. They're used to a professor doing X, Y, and Z. And they're used to something that can fit in an LMS in a nice and clean way. They're not used to throwing a bunch of people together on a video conference and asking them to complete a project together, and these projects aren't sitting neatly in these class containers. They're just a bunch of projects. More like work, you're not getting traditional letter grades, you're getting feedback on your communication, your collaboration, your resilience, these durable skills. And I keep telling the team, look, one, I think there is a path. And folks like Western governors and Southern New Hampshire University have helped pioneer some of that path on competency-based learning, skill-based learning. But at the end of the day, I can point to a lot of accredited universities that those students have horrible outcomes, and the employers could care less. What your degree is or what your GPA is, we have got to make this valuable for the employers. And when we first announced it, we got a little bit of criticism like, oh, this is going to turn to some kind of like vocational, like, you know, just serving corporate America. And not about, well, you know, when we talk to them, what they really care about is deep subject matter, your ability to learning velocity. So a lot of people, when you go to higher education, they're like, yeah, people don't really remember the physics, but they learn how to learn. And maybe that's true, although I always point out, no one really, you know, research university study everything, but they really haven't studied a lot of these claims as rigorously as they would as they study other things. But if we can get closer to how do you not only measure your learning velocity, and there's not going to be a perfect measure, but how do you develop that? How do you develop and showcase your communication skills across from it? many modalities of communication. How do you build your collaboration skills? Think what you could get through college with straight A's and you never got feedback that you're an asshole. That's important feedback and maybe if someone tells you that you always talked over other people or they thought you were dismissive, you could improve on that, but that's going to, so these aren't like just, you know, how do you work in the factory type of film? - If you went to Stanford, we take touchy-feely. That's one of our classes at the Stanford Graduate School Business, but I hear you, not only are you not getting the complete education package as a student, you also have this information asymmetry where you can't really show what you can do to employers in a way that's translatable or transferable. You get a static transcript. - 100% and that continues the rest of your life. I think it's ridiculous that we still lean on resumes, which are these self-reported bullet point things that no one really believes and then you go into these inconsistent interview processes that maybe you have four or five rounds and someone just asked you questions about a few gaps and what are your biggest weaknesses and what will your reference to say about you? And it determines your whole fate. Anyway, I'll get off my soapbox in a second, but I'll say one other thing, even when the interviews are being done really, really well and you've had four or five rounds and some of these organizations really do have rigorous interview processes. We've all been there where you get to the final round and they say, hey, Sal, you did a great job. We would hire if we could, but we only have one slot, so we're gonna hire this other person. And then you go back to zero. Well, really, they should give you a certificate. Google should say, you got all the way to the finals, we would have hired you. I should be able to take that and hand it over to Microsoft or Anthropic or something. They're like, wow, okay, you got that far. You must be pretty good. Let's just do one round with you for a fit. What we're telling these employers now is you have, let's call it five hours to do rigorous interviews with people. Imagine what we could do in this format at the content institute where we could do 50 hours, 500 hours, and we could do it in a more systemic way using all the psychometrics of ETS. So we can create a much clearer, much more portable signal so that hopefully you don't even have to do the five hours and it will be much more consistent. And it's not going to be as much wasted effort. And that's the other thing. So many people don't even get the interview. I just described the reason where I got the Google, I won't name which because I'm not sure of proprietary information, but one of our partner organizations, they said, we just posted a job for Product Manager. We got 5,000 applicants in three days. They're going to phone screen maybe 30 of them. So the other 4,970, don't even get a chance to show what they're able to do. So if we have something that's low-cost and accessible with authentic work tasks, they can go through this process and then show the signal that hopefully the Microsoft's Google's will appreciate. Sounds like you're an optimist about skills-based hiring. And I wonder if you have a theory about why has it not taken hold up till now? I mean, the 4,000 applicants for a single job, that's been the case for a whole while now. It's probably not going to get easier. In fact, this program might make it 5,000 or 6,000 applicants with a job maybe with better data. But I think Google announced that they were waving the bachelor's degree requirement about 10 years ago. And the data that I've seen is that no movement has happened, no increase in the non-bachelors degree hiring has really happened to people. What's your theory for what's held us up? I get the point about data. But is that really all it is? Well, I think there's two things. When you get rid of the bachelor's requirement and you're talking about a place like Google, the only way you're going to get a job at Google without a bachelor's degree is if you are just off the charts, you dropped out of Harvard, your freshman year, and then you started some amazing tech company and you sold it or you have a patent or you're just-- one of our engineers is John Ressig, who is a creator of the JQuery librarian. I remember his cover letter when he applied. It was literally, I created JQuery. He was one of the best front engineers in the world. We hired him. Only a few years later, we said, John, did you go to college? He's like, oh, yeah, I did. I was like, what was your GPA? I don't know, I don't want to divulge his GPA. But it was not good. It was not a great-- so if you're off the charts, yes, you can get that access. But the reality is, for someone without a degree, there was no way of showing that they're in any way capable. And using this 5,000 person example of 5,000 people applying for product management job in three days and only 30, 40, 50 getting a phone screen, both sides are losing. I don't think all 5,000 people should get the phone screen or should get the interview, but I feel actually pretty confident that just the probability of it is, there are more strong candidates in the pool that you don't interview than in the pool that you did interview when you could only interview 1% of the folks. And so that's a loss on both sides. That's a loss on the employer side where they could have found some exceptional talent. And that's really a loss on the individual side. And unfortunately, the people who get those phone screens, it is disproportionately going to be people with brand names on their resume. It will be brand name undergraduate programs, graduate programs, and employers-- oh, I worked at Google. I worked at Anthropic. If you have Anthropic on your resume right now, you will get every interview. And then some-- you might have gotten fired from Anthropic because you were horrible. But no one-- >> So you're serious, move the assessment off the employer onto the educational institution. Then it becomes a kind of common language, a common denominator that's more portable that you can then take to competitors, take to Google or Microsoft in your example, rather than making it part of the application process move it earlier on. You take responsibility for it, make it independent, make it part of the accreditation program. And then it's sort of a currency that you can spend if it's different. >> We'll be right back. >> This season of Ed Tech Insiders is brought to you by Starbridge. Every year, K-12 districts and higher ed institutions spend over half a trillion dollars. The most sales teams miss the signals. Starbridge tracks early signs like board minutes, budget drafts, and strategic plans, and then helps you turn them into personalized outreach fast. When the deal before it hits the RFP stage, that's how top Ed Tech teams stay ahead. And make it formative and mastery based. We've all gotten rejected at jobs. At least I have many times. Sometimes people give you a little bit of feedback, but usually they're lawyers tell them you can't go make any feedback. And so you don't know why you didn't get the job. If you're in an environment like the Content Institute where you are getting a ton of feedback. And in fact, one of the most important things, when I advise young people, including my own kids, I was like, be the person who craves feedback. And when someone gives you feedback, take it gracefully and ask for more feedback. Recognize that feedback's a gift. And know how to give feedback as well. No one teaches you these things. But if we can have an environment where you can get multiple shots at goal, at the case study type of interview from a consulting or you get to do the take home assignment, vibe coding, whatever, whatever. But if it's not up to snuff, I have someone close in my family. And actually she's applying to be a product manager and she recently had a take home assignment where she had to vibe code a solution. She spent a week and a half doing it. And they just said, oh, thank you. And you're not making the next round. She has no idea of maybe her assignment was great, but someone else just had a better one. The next person she applies to isn't going to, maybe she can showcase that to them. But if there was a way that she could have done it within the Content Institute and not just one of these, she could have done 20 of these, gotten the feedback, made them better. And then we could objectively say, hey, that's a very solid assignment or that's an exceptional one. Hey, Google, take a note. That's an exceptional assignment that this person did. That should put him at the top of the stack. - Well, I love this way of thinking too because eventually, you know, things are moving towards lifelong learning. And you're gonna be on a learning continuum all the time. And eventually you could imagine a portfolio of work like this starting in the Content Institute, but actually continuing while you're at work and submitting further work to kind of advance your competencies over time. And I think there's a realization and it's actually really great to hear that there's people who are actually job defenders seeing the value in this new organization because there's a way in which that's empowering that student to actually own their career trajectory in a way that if they're dependent on their employer for feedback or not, for promotion or for relevance or not, it's a much more scary, tenuous situation. - 100% and we are actually thinking about, yes, at some point we will give you a certificate of master's degree, a bachelor's degree, but even once you get those degrees, there's going to be some new technology a year from now. Let's see, we award you a master's degree this year. Then next year comes by, there's some new, whatever the new, agentic blah, blah, blah is that everyone cares about. And you are not in an environment where you actually get to practice those skills or maybe you can and you work for Apple or something and everything's so top secret that you can never tell anyone what you actually do. Well, now you can stay with our program. And even though we already gave you a degree, you can, to your point, keep showing these skills but building these skills too. The number of friends and family I advise and they're like these job defenders. They're just paranoid. I tell them, and all the stuff that we're trying to do at Khan Academy to use modern technologies, we're re-imagining even how we do work, et cetera. I tell the Khan Academy team this, I'm like you're lucky, or it's good to be in an organization, even though if it's uncomfortable, it's good to be in an organization that's pushing you in this way, because one, it'll make us more impactful, but it's gonna give you the skills that even if you wanted to leave, you'll be in a better position. But I, most people are not in organizations like that. They're in organizations that are kind of, you're doing the same thing and maybe they're quietly thinking about outsourcing some of the stuff to the AI, and by the time they're there, it's not you, that's going to be in the position to manage of it. Yeah, we wanna create lifelong ability to have authentic experiences that people care about that you can showcase. - I'd love to hear a little bit more about the pedagogy, 'cause I'm thinking about the competitive landscape, say, campus.edu, which is all in on synchronous schedule learning, versus say, you know, outsmart dual-in-go, fully asynchronous. And it sounds like you have a kind of hybrid theory for what humans need to do in this feedback concept, and you mentioned schoolhouse in its human-centric, tutoring model. Can you share a little bit more about the pedagogy? And it's okay if it's not a fully formed concept, but just what's the thinking, and what's the vector for your thinking? - Yeah, we think the real special sauce of the program, and there will be different flavors of it, and we've already started internally running some of these pilots, will be, we are going to put you in novel, I was just here, authentic work experiences that you're doing with other people. There will be tasks that you can choose to do on your own, and you need to do some of that, but most of what these programs are going to be at the Content Institute are going to be, you say when you're available, we're already prototyping our internal portal, I guess whatever you wanna call it, where you see, okay, these are what I need to do to get their certificate, this is what I need to do to get the masters, here are the different paths, okay, to get this credit, I need to do one of these five projects, okay, I think this one looks pretty good, I'm ready for this one, and it'll ask you your schedule, and you know, it'll say this product will take you probably on the order of 10 hours, and of that 10 hours, five hours are gonna be synchronous, tell us when you're free, and then you'll get an email or message saying, okay, you've been scheduled synchronously with these four other people from around the world on Saturday morning at 9 a.m. Pacific time, you show up Saturday morning, 9 a.m. Pacific time, and it's like, okay, here's your mission, if you choose to accept it, you know, there's a case study, but with a lot more meat on the bones, you know, just says, in the consulting world, the old consulting world, you have to, quote, crack the case like you do in business school. Now that's not acceptable, now they expect the consultant to prototype and build stuff and actually maybe implement, same thing, I don't think just cracking the case in business school is acceptable anymore. It should be like, no, you should actually build the whole solution. You shouldn't just write the business plan. You should build a prototype, go to market with it, so see if you can save someone time, if they're willing to, you know, swear by your product. So that's literally what we're gonna make folks do, and they're gonna build their portfolios, get evaluated on that, and then they're going to evaluate each other, and you know, we're gonna norm it in ways that we can hopefully take out bias, et cetera. And, but I'll say one last thing, 'cause we're also gonna use a lot of interesting things from ETS, they have some psychometrically powerful, including AI tools that can see how you interface, et cetera. But someone said, well, you know, I don't know about, I don't know about peer evaluation. I was like, look, I know there's bias, there are, there are systems where you can take out, you know, you can wait people based on how their bias tends to be, you can take out highs and lows, you can do it over many. But I say, how did you get your last job, and how did you get every promotion that you've ever had? Do some type of fairly small number of people with an impression of you, so what peers form an impression of you really does matter, and so you really need to learn how to get better at that, and how to give people feedback and take feedback. - Yeah, sounds a little bit like spark wise, if you know that model, it has the kind of AI driven turn-taking facilitator that allows humans to interact in small groups with one another, in a scheduled session that goes on each of your calendars. - It also reminds me of a lot of what we're talking about in reimagining K12 systems, moving to, you know, knowledge, skills, dispositions, as well as talking about relational intelligence as the new frontier as AI emerges. So in so many ways, this is like the ability to build and actually show your learning is a capability unlock that education itself, formal education, has it fully embraced, and it's really exciting to hear about it. If people want to learn more about the content institute, get involved, enroll as a student. Like, what's the best way for them to find out more? So check out the website, just do a search for content institute, you'll find it, and then yeah, listen to podcasts like this. - You'll get the-- - Call Sal for some private advice on education. It sounds like you're joling out a lot of it to them. - Oh yeah, I'm happy to be on it. - That was the origin of Khan Academy as I told my son, it was you and your niece, right? So solving a problem for your own family and then extrapolating it to the rest of the world sounds like a good theory. - I am seriously thinking about it, maybe this is a little bit, you know, my oldest is he's going to be a senior in high school. I am thinking about creating an advice portal. Like all the different scenarios in life, you know, advice is best when it's taken on demand. No, it's worse from that. And I'm like, maybe everyone can put their advice in one place and anyway, that's a whole other. - Yeah, when we create our AI avatars, that's where we can kind of load it with all the advice so that they can ask without fear of judgment or nodding, understanding looks. When do you think enrollment for the public will kind of go live for the content institute? - Yes, when we announced it at TED back in April, we said that we were going to do the bachelors of science in 12 to 18 months. I think we're still on track for that, minus the whatever several months that have gone by. But the certificate program, I'm hoping that early 2027, you're going to see the certificate program so only a few months away from now and then hopefully in the year master's program. On the accreditation side, we are, I'm hoping that in short order, the certificate in the master's program will already be something that is valued by employers more than even many accredited programs. But we also do want to pursue the accreditation 'cause that does also matter. So we're exploring different ways that we can do that. - Awesome, well, as you develop it, you'll hear about here on Ed Tech Insiders. Thanks so much for joining us today, Salcon. Founder of many things, including the content institute. Thanks so much for joining Ed Tech Insiders today. - Thanks for having me. - Awesome. Thanks for listening to this episode of Ed Tech Insiders. If you liked the podcast, remember to rate it and share it with others in the Ed Tech community. For those who want even more Ed Tech Insider, subscribe to the free Ed Tech Insiders newsletter on Substack. (upbeat music) - Tuck advisors was founded by entrepreneurs who built and sold their own companies. Frustrated by other M&A firms, they created the one they wished they could have hired, but couldn't find. One who understands what matters to founders and whose North Star KPI is the percentage of deals closed. 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