4 Tips For Creating A Sal Khan-Style Instruction Video...From Sal Khan

Since he set out to democratize education, Sal Khan has amassed a library of more than 4,000 short educational videos on Khan Academy, which gets 5.4 million unique visitors a month. The videos have been viewed 240 million times and are incorporated into classrooms around the world, as described in Khan's book The One World Schoolhouse.

In this 10-minute video he uses his trademark "chalk and talk" style to show you how to create a Khan-style video about anything you want. The video was created for professors at Harvard, MIT, and elsewhere who are using the EdX platform to create massive open online versions of their courses, designed to be accessible for free to tens of thousands of students. (It's a little-known fact that Khan was a favorite student of Anant Agarwhal, the CEO of EdX, at MIT).

"I will make my best attempt at this very meta-level task," Khan says in the video. His ideas turn out to be good for advertisers, public speakers, or almost anyone seeking to get a message across.

• Keep things conversational. Emotionless is bad. Don't talk over your audience's head, or talk down to them either. "Not even a 6-year-old likes to be talked to like a 6-year-old."
• Use visuals and colors--but not too fancy. Khan favors hand-drawn diagrams.
• Prepare carefully, then speak from your heart. Khan will sometimes write a script and throw it away. He'll spend an hour walk figuring out how best to visualize a concept, then represent it in a quick sketch.
• Keep it short. 10 minutes tops. Chunk down a larger concept into smaller pieces, to keep your audience hooked.

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For more tips on public speaking, check out my video on how to give a TED Talk:

[Image: Flickr user Steve Jurvetson]