Khan for Educators: Student experience
Hi, I'm Megan from Khan Academy, and in this video, we're going to walk you through the learner or student experience at Khan Academy. We believe that everyone is a learner; from the teacher perspective, all of your students are learners, and you can be as well.
To better understand the student experience on Khan Academy, log into your Khan Academy account. Then select the navigation button indicated by your name on the top right of the screen. Once you see the drop-down menu, select Learner Home.
You can now see the learner home page on your screen. You can think of this as the student's homepage, as this is what students see immediately when they log into Khan Academy. Also, a quick tip: if the student clicks on the Khan Academy logo, no matter what page they are on (assuming they are logged in), they will always be taken back to this home page.
If you've never visited this page before, you will need to select at least one course from a pop-up box screen before you will see a screen similar to this one. On the left-hand side, any classes that the student is in and where the teacher has given them some sort of assignment or goal is listed. As you can see, the course mastery goals and assignments recommended by the teacher are accessible with a single click.
Within the Assignments tab, learners can easily see upcoming assignments and work directly on the assignments from there. Within the Course Mastery tab, learners can see the mastery goals you have given them and their progress towards those goals. By going to the Progress tab, they can see their activity log. This same report is also available to you as a teacher when you click into a student on your roster.
We surface the report to both student and teacher to facilitate accountability and teacher-student conferencing on progress. By clicking on Teachers, students can see all of their current teachers and also join a new class by entering a class code. On this page, students will find a summary of their recent activity, energy points, and badges earned.
When students click on their mastery goal, they are taken to the course page, where they can work through the course at their own pace. Courses are considered complete when a student reaches course mastery of 90 or more, and they always have the option to go back and view past goals. What you see here on the course page are the different units that make up the course, as well as the student's progress towards mastering each unit.
Below the unit name are the lessons within the unit. By clicking into a lesson or unit, I am taken to the unit page. Students have the option here to either dive straight into practice, which is listed on the right-hand side, or first check out the learning material, which are the articles and videos on the left-hand side.
There are a couple of different types of practice content in Khan Academy's mastery system: exercises, which are opportunities for students to learn single skills in isolation; or assessments, where students get mixed skill review. The different types of assessments address different quantities of content. Quizzes are mixed review of skills in a lesson; unit tests are mixed review of skills within an entire unit; course challenges are mixed review of skills from the entire course.
As students work through the content, Khan Academy assesses their skill level, giving them a designation of attempted, familiar, proficient, or mastered. These levels are surfaced in the teacher progress reports, but students can also quickly understand their level by looking at the tower visual next to each skill: one brick for familiar, two for proficient, and the crown is unlocked at mastered.
When students work on skills in isolation through exercises, the maximum level they can get to is proficient. They would need to answer all questions in isolated skill practice correctly to get to that level. The only way to get to mastered is by proving students can ace questions related to that skill in a mixed skill context, so they need to complete the assessments for that final level up.
If students have tried the skill and get 70 to 99% correct, we call them familiar. If they got less than 70% correct, then they are attempted. At the top of a course page, students may also see mastery challenges. Mastery challenges are a way for students to review and practice previously learned skills in a course. They first get unlocked after the student has gotten to the familiar state on three or more skills and continue to get unlocked once every 12 hours afterwards.
They also provide another way, beyond unit tests and course challenges, for students to level up or down in already familiar skills. Mastery challenges highlight opportunities for students to engage in personalized spaced repetition of the skills students have already started practicing. Research shows that spiraling skills over time and across lessons is a key component to minimizing student learning loss and improving knowledge retention.
Students can see assignments from teachers from their learner home page. From the learner home page, students can select assignments from the left-hand panel. Under each class, students will see current assignments in the order of what is due soonish at the top of the list. Each assignment will show the title of the activity, the class name, the due date and time, and the status of the assignment.
If the assignment is a video or article, it will show as completed or not completed. If the assignment contains questions, it will show the student's best score. By clicking on the assignment name or the status (which will show as a start button for new assignments), the student will be taken directly to the assignment. If students want to revisit past assignments, they can click the tab for past assignments on the top of the page.
When students are actively engaged with questions through Khan Academy's exercises and assessments, students receive real-time feedback and support. If a student is stuck, they are encouraged to watch a video to help acquire the skill needed to solve the problem or take a hint, which walks through the exact problem step by step. Please note: if the student chooses to take a hint, that question will be marked incorrect, as the final step in the hint is the answer to the problem.
Once a student submits an answer, they are instantly informed if they are correct or incorrect through an encouraging message to move on to the next question or reattempt the question to reach the correct answer. We hope this video provides a better understanding of the student experience on Khan Academy.