I’ve heard Sal exclaim a couple times that everything we’re doing at the Khan Academy is obvious. Everyone involved agrees. Instead of struggling to invent something brand new, it feels like we’re coloring in an outline that should’ve never been empty in the first place.

If you sat around the table with a bunch of hacker geek types and said “teachers’ software should show them a chart of the problems each student worked on in the past,” you’d get a bunch of “yeah, no s***” stares. To anybody who’s been on the receiving end of the most talented software teams’ production pipelines, useful charts and graphs and data summaries galore are old hat.

Nothing to get all excited about.

This student’s 2-minute glimpse of Sal’s video had an immediate effect.

But every time we show a new, useful chart to teachers, they are floored. Not because we’ve invented some cool new way to generate charts, but because nobody has been summarizing their most important data for them. Having access to a historical log of every problem a student has worked on next to data about how long each problem took and whether or not they watched an instructional video beforehand is game changing for them.

The monkey in the back is for when the rubber ducks can’t talk me through my problems.
Jason is last resort.

This type of feature would be standard fare in any collaboration app, analytics software, or video game. We’re not pushing the limits of what technology can do, but it feels like we’re filling in an empty husk that the leading edge of software left behind.