Neeru Khosla, Co-founder and CEO, CK-12 Foundation

Can you please provide us with an overview of CK-12, its founding history, and the main milestones and achievements in recent years?

I was a molecular biologist and had four children later in life. We try to find the best school for my kids, the best education. I stopped doing research because of the risk of radioactivity in pregnancies. Then, I started getting into the school I found for my kids, the Nueva School, and headed their education committee. I found it very fascinating to think about how learning happens. What do you have to do to get students to learn? What do teachers have to do? It’s been one of the best things that I’ve witnessed. 

Then, I started asking myself, “Why can we not give a similar education to every kid everywhere in the world?” An education that has meaning to them, where they’re interested, and where they want to do something. So, that nagging thought took me to Stanford, where I got another degree, a master’s in education, to find out what the issues were.

That made me realize that scaling was a big problem in education and how to make it meaningful for every student because it was standardized. These thoughts led to the idea of figuring out how we might give them a meaningful education and maybe start to get help.

What would you say are the core initiatives and strategies that contributed to CK-12’s success?

When we started, there wasn’t much online content. Of course, there was Wikipedia and some open source at that time, but the reality was that most of those were for higher-school kids. So, we started focusing on K12 math and science. We started by making the content available online and wanted it to be open for everyone to use. So, we said, “Let’s create that high-quality content we call the FlexBooks.” The FlexBooks are nothing but content, which has a lot of abilities that can be customized for every child. We kept adding online digital abilities to that Flex, which meant we could do multi-modality videos. We could do interactives; we could do adaptive practice. 

Those are what was really needed to move from just a PDF to a much more meaningful offering. The whole idea was not just to create an online Wikipedia for K-12, but also to create a place where kids will want to learn and where they will be able to get feedback on how they’re doing. That led to what we now call our AI tutor, Flexi. 

Flexi can tell each student how they’re doing and what they need to do. We could now make predictions for teachers, help them, and be a teacher’s assistant. A student’s tutor and teacher’s assistant – those two offerings are not just free, but they were also very high quality. The education system in the US and most places have requirements and standards, and we had to make that content fit those standards or requirements. So, we had to make sure that each piece of content could be used in different ways in different states, countries, and languages. The digital presence and its adaptability and customizability were really what attracted teachers. We had over 300,000 FlexBooks created by states, by schools, by teachers, and they used our core content on their own so that they could start building on top of that.

At the heart of our system was the adapted practice. We did not want to burden the kids who were already behind and already feeling like they were failures. We didn’t want them to be not wanting to try. We were trying to encourage you so that anytime you had any issues, we could help you through that and give you the right content at your level. So, if you are behind, we could make it simpler. If you were advanced, we could give you much more challenging content, and all of it was in context. Why do we need to learn these concepts? That brings us to real-world examples. Why do we worry about velocity or acceleration? What does that mean to get a rocket to go up in the sky? You would need to have it go up with a certain velocity and then be able to kind of the gravity barrier so you can go out into the moon or wherever you want to go.

You have mentioned the FlexiBooks and the Flexi AI tutor. What would you say are your competitive strengths in this educational market?

Well, I think one of our competitive advantages is that you can customize this content to each student if the teacher or the school wants it so that each child can get it at their own level. It isn’t like a textbook, which is for every student. You get the same textbook, and you and I probably got the same textbook, but you did really well, and I didn’t because I probably didn’t understand the language or the difficulty of the language or difficulty of the

of the problem. 

One of the things that teachers tend to do is if someone’s having an issue with, say, a physics issue problem. Many teachers, not all, will try and give the same problem to the students. Very often, it’s not the physics that’s the problem. Very often, math or language might be the problem, and that’s very hard to grasp with the number of students a teacher has. So, we can help with that.

We also have been building a lot of knowledge and concept maps that say, “What should you learn next? Very often, we can trace back and say what they didn’t learn, partly maybe because they didn’t read the content system, follow them in scrolling down the page to read the content. Some students will stop reading, and then they’ll get those questions wrong. They lose effort and stop reading. So we can help the teacher. 

On that regard, what would you like to highlight as the general feedback that you receive from teachers? 

There are so many. There was one teacher, and these kids wanted to take a chemistry level class next semester. So, she told them they were not ready there yet. They hadn’t taken the prerequisites. She says, “Okay, over the summer, if you do CK-12, then you can kind of take the next school class that you want to take. And those who took the class learned the material over the summer. They were ready for the higher class, and they all did really well.

I remember when I went to college here, I was not allowed to do… I had to take a particular class in college because students coming from India didn’t have a lot of these classes. This professor decided I didn’t know anything about that course, so he forced me to take it. I did really well, and I kept telling him, “Look, I know this stuff”, but he wouldn’t believe me. So, we can change a lot of these things. We can go at the student’s pace, whether they’re fast or slow. Those are important things for us to really advance and keep the kids engaged.

There is a component of creativity in which fast kids can learn faster, and they don’t have to be waiting for others. And if they might have more difficulties, they don’t need to get discouraged. They can also go at their own pace. And sometimes, well, I remember, I think it’s a commonly known fact that Einstein learned to speak when he was 4 years old. So, you never know.

Yes, and the other thing is, it’s not just the advanced kids, but it’s also the kids who are behind, right? They don’t learn. They don’t want to show that they’re incompetent because that’s what they feel like if they’re not doing well. We can quietly keep advancing them, and most of the time, when the students are so far behind, the system expects them to learn within the same year that they’re in a grade that they were behind, and at the same time, learn what they have to learn in that particular year. But with our system, they can keep going at their own pace and catch up.

What does the future hold, and what are your next plans and things to be released?

One of the things we are creating is this tutor, which is already getting about 2 million questions a month. We can tell a lot from the things that these kids are asking. So, one would think they’re asking about homework or to write my essay for me, or trying to cheat. But a majority of these questions they are asking are very high-level curiosity questions. What does the sun burn in the atmosphere, out in the skies, or in outer space where there’s no oxygen? They forget. They are misunderstanding burning and nuclear reactions.

Those are the kinds of questions you can easily answer with that tutor. The missing part so far was the conversation piece, and that has really helped us to create a very domain-specific tutor. How can we really engage students to want to learn more? That, to me, is very exciting.

We can change the world in terms of how we do education. We can change this. Years ago, I tried to work with the State of Virginia to see if we could teach physics, not as grade 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, but really just a continuum. So, as you started learning physics, you just kept making progress, and that progress kept you going. It didn’t stop when grade first finished, and you went to the grade second and third, and fourth. I wanted to do that. Unfortunately, the governor of Virginia left that post, and we didn’t get to finish that project. But that’s what I want to do: change it. So, that instead of having 13 years of waiting for these young kids to figure out what they should do, go to college, do vocational. Those should be choices, and they can happen faster.

What is the final message that you would like to have for this feature?

I think standardized education was necessary, but we have to break out of it. We have to be able to teach each student the basics of learning, reading, writing, arithmetic, math, and science, but it has to also mean something to them. At the end of the day, you hear so much criticism that students are not going to college, or they don’t want to go to college, or they don’t get into college. And so, what purpose will they have? We have to be able to give them some skill sets that they can offer and feel good about. It doesn’t matter if they want to be an artist, or they want to be a builder, or they want to be a poet, or they want to be a scientist. They all need to have some level of training so they can use their minds in a way.

Maybe Flexi AI tutor can be a career coach as well.

Absolutely. In fact, we do that. Flexi can help you with your career and tell you what subjects you should be taking and what concepts you should be learning. It’s already in our website. A lot of people have just packaged ChatGPT or Gemini, or all these different LLMs on top, thinking that you know they will do all the work. But the reality is, for young kids, you do need to kind of keep domain specificity in mind – how they learn, what, how learning happens or doesn’t happen. Those are still problems that will not go away because of AI.

Is there anything, Neeru, I haven’t asked you about that you would like to mention?

We prioritize what’s missing, which is to make online learning as close to classroom learning. So, it’s not just coming in and being able to read something or watch something. And there’s got to be a purpose. I’m a big proponent of real-world examples. I really want people to be able to apply what they’ve learned to create something to help humanity. Moreover, education should not cost as much as it does. Everyone should have access at their particular level.