7 Tips for Effective Remote Learning with Khan Academy

Hello all! Welcome to Seven Tips for Effective Remote Learning with Khan Academy. My name is Megan Patani and I head up U.S. Teacher Education here at Khan Academy. I'm joined today by my colleague Jeremy, who leads our Teacher Success Team.

So just a little heads up, today we're going to be covering tips and best practices for remote teaching and learning. Again, Jeremy and I are really here to help support teachers and students as they navigate this remote learning experience. Jeremy and I are both former educators, and we've tried to do our best to put ourselves in your shoes going through this very chaotic time. We're going to try our best to provide clear and actionable steps using Khan Academy wherever possible.

Just a heads up, today we will not be covering account setup or how to get started. If you want to learn more about how to get started with Khan Academy, I recommend using the link below in order to access our Quick Start Guide. If you want a full copy of the slides and all the links attached, in the Handouts tab of GoToWebinar, you'll find a full copy of the slides from today's presentation.

So why use Khan Academy for remote learning? Khan Academy is built to serve learners anywhere, at any time. You can assign specific skills to practice, or you can have students practice and get instant feedback. You're able to keep track of student progress, even when you're not together, which right now we know is more important than ever. Khan Academy is built to serve learners anywhere, at any time.

You don't necessarily need a computer; everything students can access on the web can be accessed on a smartphone. So if you have students with limited access, they'll still be able to reach valuable content. And our content is available in over 40 languages and all for free. Khan Academy is a non-profit with a goal to support high—excuse me—high-quality education for anyone, anywhere.

So let's start here, and while this may feel a little bit obvious, I think sometimes when teachers and students jump into remote learning, those valuable communication skills that you rely on every day seem to fall apart.

So think about when you go into your classroom. When you walk into your classroom in the morning, you never think, "I'm not going to talk to my students all day." Of course, you're going to communicate with them. And, for some of your students, you are the most important relationship that they have every day. Now, more than ever, your students are in need of consistent communication.

So if you and your students can connect live, absolutely do it, even if it's a learning curve for you and for them. There are some really great tools out there, like Hangouts Meet, which allow teachers to give live video lessons and record them for students to watch later. There are a bunch of other tools that are now offering their video streaming services for free. So feel free to take a look and have the opportunity to connect with your students live. I absolutely support taking that dive.

Let your students know you're thinking about them. So if you can't connect live, or even if you have time beyond that, which I know is a stretch right now, send them a note via email or an app like Class Dojo. Find a way to communicate with your students; let them know that you're missing them.

I think students right now are really hungry for that opportunity for social connection, and getting a note from you as a teacher—someone who's so meaningful in their lives—telling them that you miss them and how excited you'll be to see them again really has a deeper meaning.

And please, please, please provide feedback. A lot of students have been given a bunch of work to do while they're at home, but if they're just given the work with no feedback, how do they know that that work has meaning? How do they know that they're doing things correctly? So, please, if you've given your students work to do while they're remote, make sure that you're giving them qualitative feedback as well.

Here's a couple of examples we're seeing from our teacher community. So the top, we have a teacher who says she was channeling her inner Sal Khan, and she used video chat to whiteboard live with students. Down below, we have one of our ambassadors who combines Flipgrid and Khan Academy and creates videos for his students to know that he's thinking about them and they can message each other back.

Then let's talk about communication between students and between you and their families. While that communication between you and your students is so essential, students are also missing each other. So using something like Google Docs or Slides, allowing students to collaborate or communicate in real-time around shared problems and ideas is a great opportunity.

We see a lot of teachers maybe taking a sample problem. They'll look at Khan Academy and see a problem that a lot of students have answered incorrectly. They might throw it on a Google Slide, and then each student can add a subsequent slide showing their work on how they would solve the problem. Students can leave comments saying, "Oh, that's what I missed," or "Great job." That way, your students are still able to collaborate in a way similar to what they would do in class.

Also, don't forget about parents and families. Many of you, I'm sure, are now becoming both a full-time stay-at-home parent and a full-time work-from-home teacher. So think about some of those other families who are in your shoes. We're all working remotely on this journey together. If possible, try to reach out to one family per week just to share something their student might be doing well or something you know about their student that's really exciting.

And don't hesitate to let parents and guardians know how much you appreciate them for supporting their child through this process of remote learning. This is a really hard jump for parents, and to get a little high-five from the teacher saying, "You know what? You're really doing a great job putting that effort in," can make a huge, huge difference.

And don't forget each other! I'm so excited to see so many people on here today because we really are stronger together. Don't forget to reach out to your other teachers—teachers you work with daily that you're used to communicating with—members of maybe your peer learning community, and just your teacher friends. They're going through this transition as well, so don't hesitate to share best practices or just check in on each other.

And if you're looking for a way to communicate with them, use some of the same tools you're already using with your students.

Number Two: Choose the best tools and stay with them. Choose the tools that are best for you and your students. There's a lot of noise right now around digital tools, and there are all sorts of things you can use for remote learning. But you know your classroom best, so start with things that you've already been using. If you've been using Khan Academy all year, great! Please keep using us.

If you are looking for new tools, pick what fits you and your students. I don't know your classroom better than you do, and neither does anyone else. So find what fits your students and use that, making sure you're not switching it every day or every week. Because students, we want them to focus on what they're learning. We want them to learn new skills in math or English language arts or foreign languages; we don't want them worrying about stress over new tools. So, if you find what's right, stick with it.

Number Three: Keep a schedule. We know this is much easier said than done, but sticking to consistent times for working and connecting with students is really important. And as we're trying to keep schedules for students, we also want to try and keep schedules for ourselves. It helps give a rhythm to the day and to our organization. So find times for you to lesson plan, connect with students, and find times for you to take a break.

And if you're looking for examples—because this is a really big adventure for a lot of us—we've got you covered. Sal Khan has put together key schedules for all different age groups. You'll see on your screen right now an example for our elementary school students, an example for our middle school students, and an example for our high school students.

What should you be thinking about? What might your students need? And you'll see this is not just sitting in front of their computer for eight hours. Things like getting outside and playing, finding time to read and reflect—all of those things are there for them. Definitely, teachers are great at adapting resources, so if this is a great base for you, take it and make it your own.

Number Four: Support independent learning. I know a lot of us are always trying to find ways for our students to gain independence and really take ownership and agency of their learning. So with remote opportunities, we can encourage our students to really take hold of that and to master new skills. So using Khan Academy's mastery system, students can set mastery goals to work below on or above grade levels, and students can move at their own pace.

They're always welcome to go back and review content or move ahead. They can even work on subjects outside of what they would normally do inside your classroom. Some teachers might encourage students to move a course below or course ahead in the same content area. I even know one math teacher who wants students to master their grade level in math, encouraging them to find something that they're passionate about and really dive into mastering skills in that area.

So encourage your students to take a little ownership of their learning now and move ahead or review concepts that make them feel really confident in their learning. And if you're looking for more guidance on how to tactically do this, the link at the bottom of this slide will take you to a how-to article on setting up course mastery goals for your students.

This here is a quick animation. So for those of you that are familiar with the Khan Academy platform, if you go to your teacher dashboard and into your class course mastery on the left-hand side, as you see in the image, doing click placement and create goal—again, I highly recommend if you'd like to do this with your students, you access the article, and it'll take you step-by-step through the process.

Number Five: Motivate your students. Now, I know a lot of you are thinking this is hard enough to do in person. How am I supposed to do this when I don't even get to see my students every day? Well, we know motivation is hard, and it's even harder now. One thing we recommend is setting clear goals. Maybe you had goals before, but use this as a great opportunity to revisit them. Or maybe as a class, you want to set goals for while you're remote.

What is something that we as a class can achieve? Include your students in the process. Students really love being part of their own learning. So often, do we get the question, "Why am I learning this?" Include your students in the conversation.

Either make them individual goals or have an entire class focus on what they want to achieve during this time period, and then communicate that back with the students and families. Again, think back to our earlier conversation around communication. Involve families; tell them what your students are working towards.

If you want more information, again, these links are all included in the slides in the Handout tab of GoToWebinar and will be included in a follow-up email. I recommend using that link to learn a little bit more about mastery goals and why we recommend using them with students.

And don't forget to recognize milestones. Right in the classroom, if students perform well, if they do well on an individual assignment or they're showing growth or perseverance, we recognize that. We really make our students feel celebrated. Well, it's a little bit trickier, we know, to do it at a distance.

So why don't you try recommending a, you know, virtual certificate of achievement or a celebratory video? Things like Flipgrid allow you to do quick, free videos for students. If you're looking for certificates related to Khan Academy, we've got you covered. That link will take you to a handful of Khan Academy certificates you can share digitally with your students, and they come in a variety of languages, so they should reach a fair number of your students.

This one's a pretty big one, and I think this is one that adults just as much as kids are struggling with: recognize the emotional impact that everything that's going around right now. Remote learning is about more than just curriculum. I think we've seen a lot in the media over the past couple of weeks about how students are going to keep learning and keep hitting goals and those things. It's more than just curriculum.

You, as a teacher, know that being a teacher is not just about reaching a standard. So, make sure that as we're going through and worrying about all the things students have to learn, we take a moment to pause and think about the emotional impact this is having on our students and our communities.

Some teachers recommend switching out an assignment and instead replacing it with an opportunity for students to write and reflect on what's going on. Maybe you have a question for discussion or maybe just open reflection.

And again, thinking back on some of the things we talked about earlier, using a tool like Google Docs, and students can share that and leave supportive comments to each other. You're giving students an opportunity to reflect on the emotional toll that this experience is having on them and allowing them an opportunity to communicate with each other and be supportive even when they can't be with each other in person.

Express gratitude. I think this is a thing we can all work on. I know I certainly can—with our students and our communities in general. But taking a moment to, you know, send a brief email or again a message in something like Class Dojo to encourage teachers and students to share their appreciation.

Students who are still completing all of their assignments or maybe reaching out to you for something more, or students who are asking for help—obviously, it's going to take them an extra bit of effort for them to ask for help right now. Recognize and appreciate the effort your students are putting in, and I bet you'll see a lot of that returned back.

At a school I worked at, we used to have an option where we would send five messages to students once a week or five messages to students' families once a week, and it was just a way to recognize students and let their families know that we appreciate them and things our students are doing. Not just your high achievers; across the board, recognize students that are doing something, even if it's not academic-based.

You really want to recognize that, and then you'll get a lot of really supportive things back, I promise you. And how much families and students appreciate all the time and effort you're putting in right now and throughout the year.

Also, remote learning and that emotional piece is not just about the students; it's about you too. I think we've seen a lot about the effect it's having on students, but don't forget this is really hard, and this is a lot to take in at once. So be honest with yourself and be honest with your students. Share with your students and let them know it's okay to struggle with a new tool or a new concept.

I can tell you the team here at Khan Academy has been trying to learn new tools all week so that we can reach all of you. When we opened up about how we're struggling to learn these tools, it was great to hear everybody else say, "You know what? Me too." So it's okay to open up with your students and say, "This is a lot to take in; this is a lot to learn," and it's okay to struggle.

We're going to get through it together. If you're looking for additional resources on things like that, please feel free to check out our content on growth mindset—it's a great starting point to talk about productive struggle and things like that with students.

Last but certainly not least—and I think this ties in right with recognizing the emotional piece—is cut yourself and your students a break. Be realistic; you are not going to cover everything you would in class, and you know what? That's okay.

To take a step back and realize that you are putting in the effort to keep your students mentally engaged is a huge achievement in and of itself. So if you need to choose a couple of key standards or concepts to focus on, think about what are the most essential for students to understand. Most of our teachers are recommending two or three a week for students to work on.

And you know what? If one week you only get to one, that's okay. Again, cut yourself some slack. None of this is easy, and as you transition and as you and your students get more comfortable, you'll find that you can get more done.

So again, if you're thinking about those two or three concepts per week, if you want to use assignments on Khan Academy, most teachers have told us that three to five assignments per week covers the right amount of content for about two to three standards or concepts, reaching about 30 to 45 minutes per week on Khan Academy. We found that that benchmark is really, really important for students to see growth.

If you're looking for more on assignments, again, please utilize these slides after the presentation, and that link will take you to a video on how to create assignments using Khan Academy.

Now, I want to make sure we have time to open it up to questions. If you want to have anything more specific or you're having trouble with any of the technical pieces, please reach out to our Help Center. Again, a link here; feel free to share these slides with other educators. If you want to share feedback, please let us know as well.

We are trying to gather as much information from educators and teachers like yourselves about what they're doing that's working well and what has been a really great learning for them that they wish they could share with other teachers.

So I'm going to pause here and reach out to Jeremy, who’s going to share a couple of our questions that are coming in.

“All right, so first of all, thank you so much, Megan, for leading this. Here, Bill actually says—”

And if you look here, you'll see total learning minutes, skills leveled up, and skills without progress. This shows the total learning minutes for each of my students, so I can get a quick glance at how long my students have spent on the site.

In terms of their skills, how many they've leveled up and how many they have not made progress on, which means they've either leveled down or they've stayed at the same level. If I click on an individual student here, I'll be able to see my exercise minutes and my total learning minutes. So these are the two numbers I referenced—77 is the total learning minutes I've spent on the site on any content, whereas the 28 minutes are the minutes I’ve spent engaged with questions.

For all of your students, you'll be able to see that, and for each activity on this individual student report, you'll be able to see exactly how many minutes they've spent on each of these items. As you can see, this is a demo account, so there's not a lot here, but you'd be able to see how much time they've spent on each item.

“Cool. Thank you so much, Claire, for that great question, and thanks, Megan, for showing exactly where to find it. Um, let's step back from the technology for a second. Another question says, what are some of the norms that we can set up for virtual learning? We all have rules and guidelines in our physical classrooms. How do we bring that same sense of culture and expectations to the virtual environment?”

Yeah, I think it's a really great question and a really important one. I think what happens sometimes is that a lot of teachers, as they move digital, forget that those same concepts apply. Things like class management and class culture are still really valuable and, in some cases, even more valuable now.

For example, if you decide to go live with your students—like a fair number of teachers we know are set up—the first time you're doing it, or if you haven't had an opportunity to, start Monday by taking what you would think of as your norms and expectations and display them to your students. Go through them, and if you're not sure what your norms feel right for your classroom, make it an opportunity for an interactive activity with your students.

Again, you could do it in a discussion format. If you're using something like Hangouts Meet, students can put suggestions in the chat on the right-hand side. If you're using something where students can post comments or post votes, allow them to choose what should be our norm. Should our norms be that anyone can add to the chat at once? Should our norms be that we need to raise a hand icon if we want to contribute to the class discussion? Should our norms be that we only meet live twice a week?

I think involving your students in what should be those norms now that you've gone digital to help set those expectations should be an opportunity for you. If you feel really comfortable and know what the norms should be for your classroom already, make sure you're communicating those well and following through on them.

They're really easy to get off task. For example, when I would work remote with students, one of the things I would say is a norm is I would close off all my social tabs while I was in class. If I was teaching my class remotely, then that was where my focus was.

Making sure that my cell phone was on silent and that my, you know, Twitter feed was muted and things like that is a norm. Make sure you're modeling that behavior for your students; you're not on your Hangout or your video distracted by something else—which I know that example can be easier said than done.

But again, setting those norms, communicating them clearly, and modeling them tends to be really helpful. If you're able to do that, then your students will be encouraged to do the same.

“Cool! And speaking of modeling, Megan, I think hopefully what we're seeing through this webinar today is what's possible for your own students. Whether you use a tool like GoToWebinar, Zoom, Google Meetings, or whatever your district provides, you always have the ability to have questions, chats, even live polls—kind of like Kahoot! baked into your webinar. So definitely lots of ways to keep students engaged even in a tough learning environment.”

Yeah, I would double down on that too, Jeremy. As you think about this, again, as someone mentioned, the hope was to share some tools that go beyond the scope of Khan Academy and that we really can give some ideas as you take this remote learning adventure.

And don't be afraid to mix and match your tools together. When I was teaching, some of my students really enjoyed combining a video tool, so they would be on live camera with each other with Kahoot! so that way they were doing review questions and they were doing it in a social way, but they were all in their own homes at night. So don't be afraid to try something.

And again, take these tips as guidance and fit them right. Teachers are great at adapting things to their own classrooms, so don't be afraid to take tools you're already using and adapting some of the tips that we share to fit you best.

“Cool! So another sort of psychological question here, and this is coming in from Maddie. Maddie says, how do I actually encourage my students to complete Khan Academy assignments given they don't have that in-person contact and that ability to motivate them day-to-day?”

Yeah, great question! A couple of things are built into the platform. Let me show you, just in case you— for those who might be a little less familiar with the Khan Academy experience on every course for Khan Academy that's mastery enabled, you'll see that each of these offers kind of a gamification piece, where students are earning mastery points for achieving progress on skills, lessons, and units.

As students work through content—and I'm going to jump into a unit here—students will see their levels go up, and their skills move to mastered, and they'll see these little icons start to fill out. As they do this, they earn mastery points and badges, and they can upgrade their avatars on their own profile page.

So there are some gamification pieces built into Khan Academy. Now, we know that works for some students and definitely not for all. Again, to the question of, "I'm not there in person; I can't put my chart on my wall; I can't throw a pizza party for my students." What else can I do?

Again, we recommend trying to build on some of those same concepts that work well in person for your students. Try adapting them with some of the tools you're using and making them remote. So if your students are really encouraged by things like certificates or homework passes and things like that—again, we have a portfolio of certificates we can share.

But don't let that limit you! Feel free to, you know, recognize students with certificates, and if you can share them digitally via email or a message app through something like Class Dojo, that works really well. Or even if you got to the point where you could mail them to students and they can recognize that and show their class either by sharing maybe through your Google Classroom, "Hey, I got this great certificate from my teacher," or, you know, if you—some teachers prefer things like video messages, like using Flipgrid to show, "Hey, this is what my students have done this week; I'm really proud of them."

Even some simple things are really inspiring, like putting your pet or your own children getting really excited about something they've done or doing a silly dance.

We have a teacher that we work really closely with, and he celebrates his students by doing really, you know, things that sound really terrible as an adult, like walking on Legos or putting pie in his face—recording yourself doing some of these really funny things that you can still do while in your own home and sharing them to students.

If you reach this goal, I will do this thing! Put it on a video and share it with you, showing that you're staying committed to learning just as much as your students are.

“Cool! I want to share this comment from Linda, which was that I know I thought I was the only one who was feeling overwhelmed. I'm so glad to know that I'm not alone.”

So Linda and everyone else out there: know that we are totally in the same boat. Megan and I are both former teachers, current parents, with their own kids at home, so we absolutely feel what you're going through and want to do anything we can to support you during this tough time.

That being said, I do want to call out, because there are a lot of questions coming in on this on the question line—that this is all being recorded. It'll be available in your email automatically in about three hours after the recording is processed, and you will get that—no questions asked. You can also grab all the slides that Megan has already shared right now in the handout section, and if you can't find that, don't worry! It'll also be included in the email coming in three hours.

So one way or another, you'll get access to all this, and yes, you can absolutely share it with anyone.

“Okay, Mina wants to ask—when you were talking about sort of the time on Khan Academy per week, were you recommending 30 to 45 minutes per week? What was the recommendation again?”

Yeah, so when we talk about— a lot of times we've been focused more on in-class practice, but even thinking about that again, we don't want students to feel overwhelmed by, you know, sitting in front of a screen for eight hours a day or things like that. It shouldn't be just Khan Academy. We encourage you to have some diversity in what students are learning, and especially if you're an upper school teacher, you're probably subject-specific, and you don't want your students just doing that one thing all day.

What we see is that 30 to 45 active minutes on Khan Academy per week shows really great efficacy. What you can look for as a teacher in terms of tracking is that on that report I shared, and I'll just go back on my screen to show you, so if you go back, go to your teacher dashboard and look at your activity overview, and you want to see in this Total Learning Minutes column, you want to see somewhere between 30 and 45 minutes; and then in this Skills Leveled Up column, you want to see two or more.

We find that that's a really good benchmark for seeing if students are making meaningful progress.

“Great! Okay, and to go along with that, Bridger asks this question: For an English or math teacher, could you give a brief summation of what a week might look like, including assignments? So basically walk me through how that flow would look—what I'm doing, what the students are doing, so it feels really real and doable for me.”

Sure! Now, I do want to say again, you know your classroom and your students best, so please adapt and don't take this as a hard-and-fast rule, but take it as general advice that you can adapt to your own teaching and your students' learning styles.

So if you're looking for, you know, let's say a math teacher, right? Khan Academy has great math content from pre-K through early college. If you're looking at something like that, we recommend some time again—you still want to be teaching your students. So if you can, make sure you're getting live or recorded videos of you talking through some of those concepts at least a couple of times a week.

How long that takes you now, as in saying how much time your students have access to the internet and those tools might vary a little bit, but we'd say at least two or three times per week trying to get that to them. When you're looking at what would I give my students— again, I recommend looking at our resources to walk through some of these skills on Khan Academy a little bit more slowly.

But if you're looking to make an assignment—in this case, if I wanted to assign third-grade content to my class, if I were looking for what I wanted to do for the week, I might make three to five exercise-based assignments, plus if I felt like there was any sort of learning content that might be helpful.

If I were looking at one-digit multiplication, I can open up this unit and open up each lesson. If you look on the right-hand side for our teachers, these are the common core standards to the right-hand side. So if you're looking for specific standards, you can find them right here in the assignments feature or you can search by those as well.

So to get back to your question, I would probably make three to five assignments for the week for students, and I would have them do one day—like I would pick one day probably at the end of the week, and I would also communicate with my students that I'm not going to be looking at how well you performed until this day.

So you're giving students the opportunity to go back and try again and really persevere through things they might be struggling with or, you know, they might need additional time to learn those skills. So to circle all the way back, I would say recommend making sure there's some sort of teaching or communication component two or three times a week, and then giving students three to five assignments, hoping that they'll reach that 30 to 45-minute per week threshold and move up to skills or more.

“Awesome! A lot of questions are coming in about sort of how do you use Khan Academy for differentiation, and in particular, how do you serve special education students, particularly during this really tough time? Any recommendations there, Megan? Really tough questions, but I'm really glad to hear them.”

When it comes to differentiation, we strongly encourage teachers to enable our mastery system and to set mastery goals with students. And here's why: If you go into Course Mastery again from this teacher dashboard and you go to placement, you can see the goals that are assigned to each of your students. What you're able to do is assign a course mastery goal to all of your students, just a subgroup of your students, or maybe just one of your students.

In the example you see on your screen, I've assigned Algebra 1 to my whole class, and I've assigned Pre-Algebra to four of my students. The reason I assigned Algebra 1 to everyone—that's my class-level goal—and this shows up on the student dashboard for all of them. Every time they log in, it's one really big goal. But how they get to that goal varies by every student.

Instead of having to make an individual assignment for every skill they need to learn, you've given them the opportunity to reach mastery on all of those skills, but they can do it at their own pace. They're able to watch videos and read articles on concepts. They can go back and review skills that they may have had a gap in, or they can move ahead if they really understand, you know, graphing equations well, and they can move quickly through that.

That way, you're getting all students towards this grade-level huge goal while giving them the opportunity to work at their personalized pace and getting the supports they need.

And then, if you have students who might need a little bit more support—maybe they're working below grade level—you can always assign an additional goal and say, "You know what? I'd really love for you to get to 50 on Pre-Algebra because I think you really need some extra support in these skills."

Students can have the opportunity again to go back and revisit content that might feel, you know, below grade level per se. But they can do it at their own pace, and they can see themselves growing and achieving mastery in skills that they might not have had before. As I mentioned earlier, some teachers for students that are progressing at a faster pace will encourage them to, you know, work on the next course or work on something else—Khan Academy has content across, you know, math, science, computer programming, arts and humanities, and many others.

So that sometimes when the students have that, you know, additional time, allow them to learn even beyond that. When it comes to our special education students, I would say we have—I'll say we have an opportunity to learn more about some best practices with special education students. But I can reference a teacher I've worked closely with before who has used Khan Academy for multiple years in math for a classroom entirely of special education students.

While those students, in terms of age, might fall into what you think of as middle school students, they're working on a first or second-grade level. So what she's able to do is that for each of her students, she creates a separate mastery goal for each student based on where she knows they are.

Then, each student is able to work on the skills that feel appropriate for them, but the whole class is working on mastery. All of the students feel really included, and they're working towards great big goals, but they're all still working on the skills that feel appropriate for them.

So in that similar way, when we talked about kind of a standard classroom, I would offer the opportunity to think about how you might be able to alter that for special education students. If—as you go through this process—you learn things about that, please reach out to us and let us know how it goes because we are always eager for teacher feedback to improve our recommendations around any area that's awesome.

Then, sort of a bookend question of that that's coming from Melody and many other educators is, "Okay, I've assigned these course mastery goals. How do I measure progress? What reports do I look at? What do I focus on on the page? How do I know how my students are doing?"

Yeah, what a great question! I know that there's a lot to take in here, and I do encourage you—all these are really great Khan Academy questions too—integrate some of what we're sharing with what you're already doing. Again, you are here because you really care about your students and really teaching well in this new remote situation.

So please take these pieces and integrate them with things that you know that you're already doing well. So if I wanted to specifically track progress on their mastery goal, if you look on the left-hand side where I'm at Placement, if I instead choose Progress, I can see here this is how my whole class is doing in third grade.

If I've set the mastery goal here as third grade, I can see how much progress all of my students have made, and I can see a class median. So we've made about eight percent progress, and if I hover over any of these bars, it'll show me which students quickly fall into each of these areas. If I look here, Jocelyn and Wimbo fall into this first box we’re looking at, you know, 10 to 20, whereas if I jump up here, I can see Melissa is at, you know, 44.

That gives you a quick snapshot of all of your class and how they're doing towards that greater goal. If you scroll down below, you'll see each of the units within that overall course, and it will give you a class median on how they're doing on each of those units.

In this case, if I clicked into one-digit multiplication, I now get a similar screen to what I saw for course mastery, but I get it at the unit level. Here I can see how much progress my students have made in this particular unit—we've made a little bit more progress here, you can see—and the same hover opportunity exists.

Then, if I really want to get detailed, if I scroll below this chart, I'll see this section called Skill Mastery. It shows me exactly where my students fall on every specific skill. By clicking the carrot on the left-hand side, it shows me my students and how they're performing on that particular skill.

So my first book would be not started, meaning students haven't done anything yet. Attempted means they've tried but they've gotten fewer than 70 of those questions correct. Familiar means they've reached at least 70, proficient means they've got at least 100 on an exercise, which is single skill practice.

To get to mastered, they have to show that they have success in both the single skill practice of the exercise and the mixed skill practice of either the unit test or the course challenge. So they have to be able to demonstrate that skill in isolation and combined with other skills.

What's neat about this part of the progress report is that if you see students that have not started this skill or might need more practice, if you click the assign button on the left-hand side, a pop-up box will appear, and without you having to search for it, you can assign that skill to either all your class, a handful of students, or a single student and encourage them to work on that skill to master it.

“Very cool! So, hopefully that gives you a sense of how you can keep tabs on your students even when you're all spread apart. But now we've done—we've dove pretty deep into the innards of Khan Academy. Let's zoom back a little bit.”

Sheila and a couple of others are asking, “Hey, is there an answer sheet for Khan Academy? How do I actually evaluate how things are doing? Can you just maybe show off a sample practice exercise, Megan, just to show the kind of experience the students get?”

“Really wonderful question, Sheila. First of all, there's no grading required for the teacher or if you're a parent on the line with us right now. Everything is graded for you, so no one's going to quiz you on your Algebra 1 skills if it's been a bit.

But if you're looking for more detail, if you go to make an assignment—so let's go back into my class, and if I go to Assignments and under that I click Assign. If I look at any of these exercises from the teacher perspective, if I click on the title of the exercise, what I see is an item bank, and it will show me all the questions students can receive if I assign this exercise.

When you assign it, you have two options. You can assign all the same questions to students, and all students will receive the same exact questions or random questions, which means students will receive random questions out of the item bank. However, I will give the caveat that if students, if you choose random, if there's different types of questions—so in this case, you can see there's a number line question and there's this box question—all students will receive the same number of questions of the same type, so they won't be totally different.

It's more that the variables are changed. In this case, students would receive seven of these 21 questions. We encourage teachers to take a look at the item bank before they assign them to see, is this the right skill I'm looking for? Does this feel like the right level of rigor for my students? Are there any pitfall questions I should tell my students to look out for?

Here's where you could find—it's not quite an answer key, but it is a good item bank of what your students would see. From the student view, if you click here, you'd see this is what it looks like from the student perspective. Here's the question, and then below, they can get supports to watch a video or use a hint.

Once you make those assignments to students, you can look at their scores right below that assign. You can look at scores, and what you'll be able to see is how they've performed on each assignment you've made. If it is a video or an article you've assigned to the student, they'll receive a checkmark for completing that.

For an article, they just open the article and scroll down; for a video, they have to watch at least 90% of the video, and they can't watch it faster than double speed. If they try and watch it at triple or quadruple speed, they won't get credit for it.

For anything that has questions—a quiz, an exercise, a unit test—they'll get a numeric value for that, and it will be color-coded for you. So if they are below 70, it will come up in red; if it's between 70 and 99, it will come up in this yellow color; and then if it's 100, they'll get a nice green.

And by clicking on any of those individual scores, you can view the report for that student. So you can really view it at a class level or jump in and view it at a student level.

Here you can see the questions the student was given, and then what their answer was. If the student—you've selected randomly—the questions are ordered by the ones they missed most. The neat thing is that you can also change this on the top right. Right now, I'm looking at a single student. Right now, I'm looking at Michael.

But if I wanted, I could select them all, and what I can do here is that I can look at either their first or last attempt. Because I selected random, I can see the questions in order by most missed. If I see here question five, students had the greatest challenge with this question.

I can use this question for a reteach and maybe it's an opportunity to do that quick video that I either record and share out or do it live on a whiteboard with them and work through the problem.

“And speaking of recorded videos, Paul has a very juicy inside Khan Academy question for us, which is: Do you know what kind of software Sal Khan uses to make those videos? And if a teacher wants to make their own Khan-style videos, how could they do that?”

“I do not know the software style uses. That's a great question! I have been here a few years, and no one has asked me that, so bravo on asking me a question I haven't been asked yet. I will definitely find that out. However, what I can share with you is some of the tools that I use to make videos for teachers.”

A couple of things that are free: You can do some recording with Hangout meets. Loom is a free tool you can use that allows you to record your screen and your face at the same time, and I really like that. Again, that's just something that I've used, and some of our colleagues have used, and it's great for doing things like I just demonstrated—so walking through this, and it also can have a video of your face in the corner, so your students can see you, you know, what you're doing on your screen so maybe you're modeling a behavior for them, and then they still get to see your face because they probably miss you.

“That's so cool! I'll just add that from having sat in Sal's office a couple of weeks ago before we were all sent home, I know he uses a Wacom tablet, so check those out and add them to your next Amazon delivery of hand sanitizer and toilet paper.”

“Okay, so great question, Paul. Another sort of interesting technical question has come from Frank and a number of others. It's okay, I love Khan, but I'm also using Google Classroom or Schoology or Canvas, my LMS. Is there some way to at least get the Khan links into my LMS system?”

“Yeah, that's a request we get a lot, and it's something that we, as a team, think is really important as you know to think about as we move forward. Currently, we do not fully integrate with any of the learning management systems, so what we do allow is that you can import your class roster through Google Classroom. So there's no need for you to create a class from scratch; you can simply pull in your roster from Google Classroom, and students can use Google single sign-on.

However, sharing the assignments directly— we have not established that link with any LMSs yet. However, I do know our friends at Class Dojo have shared that if you're using Class Dojo, and you make an assignment, you can put the direct link to the assignment in there and share that really easily with students.

It's a really important concept that you bring up, and it's really important especially now; but we do not link assignments directly with any learning management systems at this time.”

“Cool! And I will just mention that like even though you would lose some of the power of the assignments we just talked about, if you're ever just in rush—like, 'I've got to get something to my students fast; the clock is ticking!'—every single piece of content on Khan Academy has a unique URL, that little sort of web address at the top, and of course, you could always copy and paste a video link or an exercise link if you just wanted to stick it right into your LMS. But of course, there is an advantage to using Khan Academy natively to have all that evaluation.”

“Okay! So a couple of challenges that teachers are facing right now—a big one that we've heard a lot today is: Help! You know, my students don't all have internet access at home or devices at home. Are there any workarounds? Are there any ways to get them access to all this goodness that you're talking about?”

“Yeah, I think that that has become more apparent to everyone. Being in the current situation, the way we think about internet and device accessibility has really become, you know, more apparent than I think the priority has been in the past.

While Khan Academy is really dependent on students being able to have some form of internet access to get those personalized results—to help them differentiate and get what they need to either review or move forward—there are a couple of things we can recommend.

One is that if students have access even to just a smartphone, what we found is that a lot of families might not have a laptop or they might not have a tablet, but someone in the home has a smartphone. Khan Academy has an app, and all of the features that are available to students on the website are available through the app, and the app is available in 18 different languages.

So even if students want their parents—who might not have grown up in the U.S. education system—to support them, they can work with them. So that's one piece we can recommend.

A second one is there is some information on our Help Center site that I recommend is that—what if there's an article? I'm sure I can pull it up right now, actually—on how do I use Khan Academy without an internet connection? Here it'll show you how to use some of the apps, and you can download the video!

If students only maybe have a limited amount of internet connection, they can download the videos from the app and watch them at a later time. There's also a collaboration with an organization we work with called Calibri, and they allow devices to download content, including Khan Academy, to download exercises, videos, articles ahead of time and then watch them or engage with them at a later point in time.

Again, that would involve a device still and internet access at some point, but it wouldn't involve a consistent flow of internet connectivity.”

“Cool! And then, sort of piggybacking on that linguistic challenge that you were talking about, Angeline asks, 'You know, as an ESL teacher in elementary school, a lot of my students just don't speak English. How can I leverage Khan Academy given that most of the stuff that we've seen so far is in English?'”

“Yeah, absolutely! What a phenomenal question! We work with school districts all over the U.S., and our team is international. So, we are thinking about how do we serve anyone anywhere and really deliver a world-class education, and that is not just in English.

We are available in 40-plus languages, and let me show you quickly how students can change their language setting. We see this in school districts inside the U.S. really frequently, and we want families and communities to be able to support their learners.

Even if they're encouraged to learn in English in the classroom, they can change their language at home so their parents and community can support their learning process and then switch it back to English in your classroom. So if you click on the name, and this would be the same process for a student as it would be for a teacher, they click on their name in the top right, and they go to Settings, and one of the top things at the Settings page here is it says Primary Language.

If you click the dropdown, you'll see that we have over 40 languages for learners to choose from. I'm going to stay in English. Then make sure—here's the important part—you click Save Changes, and it says Information Updated in green. That's how you know the language has switched.

If I were to switch it, it would change the core language on the site. Most of our content, especially if you're looking for Spanish speakers, almost all of our content that's in English is available in Spanish and then large percentages for all of those other languages.

Very cool! And so just to end, maybe one really universal question that folks are thinking about right now is whether you're a teacher and you're trying to serve the families all around your community who are now spread out, or you're also a parent and you’re trying to serve your own students at home.

Any recommendations, Megan, for how to really support your students—whether they're your kids or your students in your classroom—without overstepping, without sort of being too overbearing and saying, 'Hey, you’ve got to do this work,' even when the world is in a little bit of a chaotic state?”

“Yeah, I'm going to go back to what I mentioned earlier: just be open about it, right? This is hard for all of us, and I think it was really good in the example I said earlier where the Khan Academy team was like, 'Listen, we're really trying to help. These tools are new for us too, and we're trying.'

People are like, 'Yeah, I'm tiring too,' and owning that shared experience that this is hard. I think being able to be open with your students and say, 'You know what? I want you to achieve this, and here's why,' and giving them that really good reason—I think it's okay if you struggle.

It's okay if it's frustrating—accepting that this is an opportunity for us all to grow together, and don't hesitate, as I said, you know, to reach out if you've got great ideas or we as an organization can do more to support you because we really do think we are stronger together.”

“Cool! Well, I know we're almost at time. I know we have barely scratched the surface of all the questions that have come in, so thank you so much for asking such great ones.”

“Yes! Would you mind closing up by showing folks where they can go on the Help Center to ask questions directly to our amazing support team?”

“Sure! That sounds great, Jeremy. So if you navigate to our Help Center, which is khanacademy.zendesk.com, the link is on the last slide in the slide deck that’s shared from this webinar.

Here, you can search for any sort of content you might have questions on, and you'll be able to see information around frequently asked questions, community responses. If you have a technical problem or something that’s not quite right, if you click Report a Problem, you’ll be taken to this request form, and our support team is really phenomenal. Even in this high request time, they've still been answering requests in under a couple of hours.

So please, if you have any questions or if things aren't working quite right for you, please reach out to us. We always want to hear from you.”

“Cool! So any final words of wisdom, Megan, as folks head into the weekend after this very, very long week?”

“You know what? Give yourself a pat on the back. It's been a long, hard week for everyone! Be proud of the fact that you've gotten through it and learned something. And you know what? Next week, you can— you’ve learned something this week, and look forward to learning something new next week!”

“Cool! So as we say at Khan Academy, we're always learning, we're always discovering new things, and we always end every session by saying, 'Onwards!' So we wish you a wonderful weekend, and onwards to all you.”