AMERiCA LEARNiNG MEDiA

Interview with Rolando Nuñez Baza, Head of Latin America Khan Academy and keynote speaker at Bett Latin America 2016.

(@americalearning) Before becoming Head of Latin America Khan Academy you created and directed Innova Schools, a project focused on providing better educational offerings for Peru's middle class, in which you identified that the optimal educational model for the youth of that country was the blended learning, incorporating digital technology. What solution does Khan Academy give to these types of projects, when them do not have the capacity to access to the necessary technology and/or generate and disseminate the necessary contents?

Rolando Nuñez Baza: We’ve intentionally built a product that is flexible and adaptive -- there’s no right or wrong way to use Khan Academy; can be used inside and out of the classroom. We design with three stakeholders in mind (e.g. student, teacher and parent) and then it’s up to the user to determine how to use our product.

Innova Schools is an outlier because it was designed from scratch. Everything from infrastructure to teacher training and hiring was designed with technology in mind. In other words, the entire system supports blended learning and technology was built-in from the start. Innova’s teacher training, classroom design, etc. we’re imagined and inspired by Khan Academy.

In most cases we can’t start from scratch, but that doesn’t mean Khan Academy can’t be a resource inside and out of the classroom. We’ve seen a variety of use cases in classrooms with limited infrastructure and connectivity. Teachers use our videos and platform to prepare. In the absence of computers videos are projected to the entire classroom. We’ve also seen student use Khan Academy at home to review prior to class. We’ve seen connectivity and infrastructure play a role in how Khan Academy is implement, but it doesn’t ultimately determine if it’s implemented in the first place.

As we transition to become a mobile first product, we expect to increase access to our resources and allow more users to benefit. We imagine a world where we can be the personal tutor available in your pocket to everyone, everywhere -- for free.

How important is Latin America to the current Khan Academy strategy?

Latin America is one of major priority for Khan Academy; one of our fastest growing regions anywhere. We have more than 3.3 million registered users and more than 200 thousand registered teachers using our product. Average learning time of users in Latin America are the highest in the world.

As a non-profit our work in the region is made possible by the generous support from Carlos Slim (Fundación Carlos Slim) in Mexico and Jorge Paulo Lemann (Lemann Foundation) in Brazil. Together with our partners we aim to become a primary resource for students and teachers in the region. We want to super-charge the classroom.

Over the next five years we plan to continuously innovate our product -- focusing on user experience, teacher tools and mobile. With respect to content, we want to continue to add more content that aligns to national standards. We see a future where Khan Academy has content for all subjects required by school for anyone between the ages of 5 and 24 (K-14) in Spanish and Portuguese.

At the conference that you gave in Bett Latin America 2016 you referred to the democratization of access to personalized learning for the benefit of the students. What recommendations can you make towards achieving this goal?

Giving student and teachers agency over learning is key to democratizing access to personalized learning. Whether you’re using our videos and exercises before an exam or our missions (adaptive product) to learn an entire subject, having resources available anytime, anywhere gives the learner agency. Our teacher tools allow teachers to see real-time where students are; can think about a differentiated approach to a classroom of students at different levels. By making our product and high quality academic resources available in multiple languages and across all devices we are increase access.

Recently we also partnered with Telcel and the Carlos Slim Foundation to eliminate data costs associated with the usage of our product on mobile to all Telcel subscribers. So while our focus remains to deliver world class product and content, we believe partnerships like the one with Telcel lowers other barriers to access in Latin America and other developing regions.

November 2016