Remote learning is here to stay — can we make it better?

Nilay Patel and Sophie Erickson:

Parents everywhere have had to quickly become experts in virtual learning and remote classrooms as the pandemic has shut down schools around the country — and the results haven’t been universally positive.

But there are some things that remote learning does better than classrooms: kids can learn at their own pace and rewatch lessons, they can interact with more of their peers, and they learn to set goals and achieve them. The challenge is balancing what online learning does well with what it can’t do — what we need classrooms to do.

For this week’s episode of Decoder with Nilay Patel, I talked to Sal Khan, the founder and CEO of Khan Academy, a nonprofit online learning platform for students in kindergarten through high school. Khan Academy is an organization that can only exist because of technology. Sal started tutoring his niece in math over video using off-the-shelf cameras and software, and Khan Academy has since grown into an organization with nearly 20 million users per month in 46 languages and more than 190 countries.