The One World Schoolhouse: Education Reimagined

by Salman Khan

It was partly for this reason—and not because of some preexisting theory—that I decided that I would never be pictured in the lessons. I didn’t at the time own a suitable video camera, and I didn’t want to buy one. It seemed like a slippery slope. If I had a camera, I would have to worry about the lighting. If I had good lighting, I would have to give thought to what I was wearing and whether I had spinach in my teeth. The danger was that the whole process would become more like making movies than tutoring students. Tutoring is intimate. You talk with someone, not at someone. I wanted students to feel like they were sitting next to me at the kitchen table, elbow to elbow, working out problems together. I didn’t want to appear as a talking head at a blackboard, lecturing from across the room. So it was determined that students would never see me but only hear my voice, while the visuals would be nothing except my scrawls (and occasional historic images) on the black electronic chalkboard. Students would see the same thing I was seeing.