Khan for Educators: Creating assignments

Hi, I'm Megan from Khan Academy, and in this video, we'll learn how to find and assign exercises, videos, and articles on Khan Academy for your classes or students.

In order to create an assignment, we recommend teachers start by finding and assigning content right from the Assignments tab on the Teacher Dashboard. From the Teacher Dashboard, select one of your classes, and then click on Assignments on the left side navigation to expand all of the options under Assignments. Then click assign.

Now, select your preferred course from the drop-down menu, and you will see the full content for the course divided into units. Units are organized into lessons, which in turn contain videos, articles, and exercises. Courses that are already aligned with the Common Core and AP show the standards tag to each unit, lesson, video, article, and exercise.

By clicking a piece of content, you can view the exercise, watch the video, or read the article before assigning it to students. In addition, hovering the cursor over a code shows the text of that Common Core standard. When you find what you need, check the boxes for individual pieces of content or the entire lesson, and then click assign.

While it may seem appealing to assign an entire unit to a class, we don't recommend this. When you assign a unit to a class, each item appears as a separate assignment to students, which means you could be giving students 20, 30, or even 60 assignments.

Whenever you assign a piece of content, you need to choose the class or classes, students, due date, and time of the assignments. You can assign to a specific class, a few classes, or all of your classes at once. You can still assign for one student, a group of students, or all of your students.

There is also an option for teachers to select the content they wish to assign but save the assignment for some time in the future. You can click assign to send the assignment to students immediately or click save and assign later to save the assignments for a later time.

In addition, for exercises, you can decide whether students will receive the same question in the same order or a set of questions selected at random from that exercise's item bank. One note: you can always view the complete item bank for an exercise by clicking the exercise name.

Teachers share that viewing the item bank before creating an assignment helps them ensure they are providing the right questions and helps them flag any concerns before assigning the content to students. In the case of classroom practice, the most common option is to ask students to work on the same set of questions. This allows you to quickly identify common mistakes, which highlights areas for re-teaching or allows you to quickly identify common areas of success to provide opportunities for celebration.

If you are using assignments for independent practice or homework, many teachers prefer students to work on different questions. In these situations, students are given a consistent number, variety, and rigor of questions, but because the questions are not identical, students are encouraged to work independently.

Another way to make assignments is through the Skills Report. The Skills Report shows the level of skill mastery for every skill for every student, which makes it a valuable tool for assigning content that meets the needs of each student. Select the unit to expand the report and view all of the skills within the unit.

By hovering over the purple bar to the right of the skill name, you can get a quick view of the number of students at each skill level. By clicking on the skill name, you can expand the view of the skill to see which students in the class are currently at each skill level.

You can then use the Assign This Skill button on the right-hand side to assign the skill to an individual student, group of students, or all students. The same pop-up that appears in the Assignment tab will appear here. You can preview the types of questions that are included in this exercise by hovering over the blue View Exercise link. Clicking on the link will take you to the student view of the same exercise.

Many teachers suggest using this report to assign skills to students at the not started or attempted levels to encourage them to increase their practice time on that skill. Another way to make assignments on Khan Academy is through the toolbar. When you browse any content on Khan Academy from the student perspective, as long as you are logged into your teacher account, the toolbar will appear at the top of the page.

You can use the toolbar to make assignments using the same information you would from the Assignments tab or Skills Report. One other thing, you can also find the content you need by using the search bar. You can search by subject, concept, or even by standard, Common Core State Standards for K-12 math, or AP standards for our AP courses. You can then filter the results by videos, articles, exercises, and more.

When you find the content you want, click on the item and use the toolbar to complete the assignment options. If you ever need to edit or delete an assignment, use the Manage tab under Assignments.

Now that you have an idea of how to create assignments, a question we hear a lot is: what does this look like for students? Students will find assignments on their learner homepage, the page they see as soon as they log in, under the Assignments tab for each class. Students will see all of their active assignments, past assignments, and the due dates for completing each assignment.

Assignments are organized by due date, with the soonest due date at the top. As students complete their assignments and work on each question, they receive instant feedback on how they are doing, and both you and the student receive data on their performance almost instantaneously. Students are enabled to make several attempts to complete the assignments, and we encourage students to learn from their own mistakes.

If you assign different questions for each student, they will receive a new set of questions selected at random on each attempt. Just as a reminder, students can also view and complete assignments for any class in the Khan Academy mobile app.

We know this is a lot of information to take in, and we hope this helps you as teachers to create assignments for your students on Khan Academy. Some concepts work particularly well for classroom practice; choose concepts that are more difficult or that can generate good discussions and debates.

Start slowly by creating just a few assignments to do in a class. Most teachers recommend three to five assignments per week. Gradually, you will build up a routine of using Khan Academy that best meets the pace of your students. We hope this video helps you get started creating assignments for your students on Khan Academy.