EP 16 - Dr. Kristen DiCerbo - Khan Academy’s Chief Learning Officer and the creation of Khanmigo

In this episode, John and Jason talk with Dr. Kristen DiCerbo about how Khamigo was born, how it works, and how it might help transform and humanize online learning. 

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Resources:

• Kristen DiCerbo
• Check out the Khanmigo page
• Khan Academy / Canvas Instructure Press Release where they announce their partnership
  • Video from Instructurecon
• More information about the ICAP Framework

Transcript

We use a combination of computer-generated transcriptions and human editing. Please check with the recorded file before quoting anything. Please check with us if you have any questions!




Pre-Banter 


[00:00:00] Jason Johnston: Was Khanmigo able to join us on the call today? 


[00:00:04] Kristen DiCerbo: Khanmigo right now does not have text to speech, so we'll not be on the podcast. 


[00:00:09] Jason Johnston: All right, probably too busy. There's a lot of people to support out there. And they're a bit of a rock star. So they're probably at the White House or something  


[00:00:17] Kristen DiCerbo: Most likely, yeah exactly. Some world leaders. Yes. 


[00:00:20] Jason Johnston: Leaders guiding policy across G20 or something like that. 


[00:00:25] Kristen DiCerbo: yeah, exactly. 


Start 


[00:00:26] John Nash: I'm John Nash here with Jason Johnston. 


[00:00:29] Jason Johnston: Hey John. Hey everyone. And this is Online Learning in the Second Half, the Online Learning Podcast. 

[00:00:34] John Nash: Yeah. We're doing this podcast to let you in on a conversation we've been having for the last two and a half years about online education. Look, online learning has had its chance to be great and some of it is, but a lot of it still isn't. And so how are we going to get to the next stage?  


[00:00:50] Jason Johnston: That's great question. How about we do a podcast and talk about it? 


[00:00:54] John Nash: Perfect, what do you want to talk about today? 


[00:00:58] Jason Johnston: Well, I'm very excited about our guest today. We're going to be talking with Dr. Kristin DeCerbo, the Chief Learning Officer at Khan Academy. Welcome Dr. How are you? 


[00:01:11] Kristen DiCerbo: Good, good. And please call me Kristen. It's great to be here today. 


[00:01:14] Jason Johnston: Well, it is great to have you here. And we just wanted to start off by just getting to know you just a little bit. Tell us a little bit about your current role at Khan Academy. 


[00:01:25] Kristen DiCerbo: Yeah, so a chief learning officer can mean lots of different things and lots of different organizations. So, At Khan Academy, I lead our content team, our product management team, our design team, and our community support team. So most of what you see, on the Khan Academy site is built and created by a lot of the folks that are on my team. 


And I do not lead the engineers, they're a whole 


[00:01:51] Jason Johnston: Okay. That's good. 


[00:01:52] Kristen DiCerbo: group, not them. But I come from an educational psychology background. So my PhD is in educational psychology, and so I don't have the traditional kind of product background that some educational technology folks who lead those kinds of teams do. 


And instead, I bring a lot of, you know, experience and insight about how people learn. And we try to build that into then the articles, the exercises, the videos, and all of the experiences students have on the site.  


[00:02:24] Jason Johnston: And so, you mentioned about your education, you've got a PhD in educational psychology. Is that what you said? 


[00:02:30] Kristen DiCerbo: Yes. I actually thought when I went to grad school that I was going to be a school psychologist. And so did a research practitioner program where I was doing. All of the work and training to be a school psychologist and doing all of the work on how you diagnose learning difficulties and all of that and did a whole bunch of research and kind of fell in love with that side of things too. 


But then did end up being a school psychologist in a school in Arizona where I live. One of the