Solving education is not just to solving education

it's kind of solving everything.

You know if you care about AIDS in Africa

if you care about poverty in the inner city

if you care about the environment

whatever you care about, you care about education.

It is the ultimate gateway problem.

I absolutely believe that we need a revolution in education

and the good news is that it

very much appears to be happening.

(pensive music)

The history of the human race

is really a history of education.

Great moments in education have

dominated the great moments in history.

Out of the industrial revolution we took what we learned

about factories and processes and efficiencies

and we turned education to a giant assembly line system.

You'd never build a system like the one we have today

if you're building it from scratch.

It's a crazy system.

It's intuitive that not everybody has the

exact same learning style and works equally well

for each kid, for each thing that they learn.

Education is very, very slow to innovate

but when it does two things happen.

There's a kind of Cambrian explosion

of access increased access

and also of improved quality simultaneously.

I believe that we are on the verge of the next great jump

and that's going to be online education.

If we can suddenly mine all of the data

that you've always been producing when you study

we can personalize education to you.

We work with partners like publishers and schools

and we take their content and we make it adapative.

You get your own personal textbook.

It's literally unique.

It's created for you every single day

and within a couple weeks I know

how strong you are at every single concept in the course

and I know how exactly how you learn it best.

If you learn math best in the morning

between 8:13 and 9:00 a.m. I know that.

If you learn science best in

24 minute bite sizes, I know that.

It's really personalized,

I mean there is some belief that

the education is not just one-on-one

but you do collaborate if learning.

So kids learn from one another.

You type a question into our system.

Our system can go find everybody

whose online right this second who absolutely

knows the answer to that question.

And then we ask that question to 15 people

just pops up in their screen

and you get like the wisdom of crowds

harnessed with this adaptive A.I.s

We can't teach the higher level critical thinking skills.

We can't build the imaginations.

That's what the teachers do.

Online education is not going to

supplant traditional education.

It's going to be a supplement to it.

Now if you have a great teacher in the room with you

obviously that's better.

Many people around the world don't.

We want to expand education access

as far and wide as we can and that very much

includes in the developing world.

Most of the price of a textbook is just

wasted on paper and printing and shipping

so I believe we're on the verge of solving the

access problem of the developing world.

We're gonna power about a million students

starting this fall in the United States

but very soon thereafter we expect to start

spreading all over the world.

We want to make sure education

in the next decade or two becomes available

to everybody anywhere in the planet.

It could well be that the person who cures breast cancer

is growing up in some Cambodian fishing village

and will never be discovered.

The world's best lecture notes on Hamlet

might be sitting in some desktop in Dublin somewhere

and shown to 30 kids a year.

Well we can actually unlock that

trapped value for the first time.

(upbeat string orchestra music)