Get a Tour of the Student Experience on Khan Academy

Hi everyone, this is Jeremy Shifling of Khan Academy. I'm joined by our amazing leader of professional learning, Megan Patani. Megan has a real treat in store for you today because she's going to walk you through not the educator experience that you're used to on the site, but the student experience, so you can see exactly what your students are seeing and deliver them an awesome experience with all the remote learning challenges we all have at this moment.

So that being said, Megan is going to start to share with you what it looks like through the lens of a student using Khan Academy. And then, in true webinar fashion, if you have any questions whatsoever, you can ask those at any time using the questions feature, and we'll take those both throughout and then also at the end. So that being said, thank you so much for joining us today. I'll turn it over to Megan.

Thanks so much, Jeremy. So, we're going to jump right in, and just a quick note of what we will and will not cover today. We will cover the student experience, and I know a lot of teachers and parents have many questions about this. We're going to walk through the student experience on Khan Academy to help you as parents or teachers better understand what your students and/or children are learning. However, we will not cover today the teacher and parent experiences.

We have some resources about the parent and teacher experience, and if you'd like to take a look at those, definitely reach out to our Keep Learning site at keeplearning@khanacademy.org, and there you'll have more information about parent and teacher experiences.

So that being said, I'm going to jump right into our live product. Here's how we're going to start: once students log into Khan Academy, if they have an existing account, either a personal account or one they have through their school or district, they log in here. If they need to create an account, they can do that pretty easily; they can use that same Google login they might have for school or, if they are under 13, you as a parent can help walk them through that process.

Once they're logged in, they're going to land here. This is what we call our learner home. You might be asking yourself, "Well, who is a learner?" Well, at Khan Academy, we view everyone as a learner, especially our students. This is where they're going to find everything else they need to access on Khan Academy. One trick we always like to share with our students and teachers is that anywhere you are on the Khan Academy site, by clicking that Khan Academy logo at the top, they'll return right back to this learner home.

On this page, you'll see a whole bunch of things, and we're going to start at the top and then work through the rest. On the left-hand side here, you'll see this little avatar, which students can update. You'll see their name and their username, and an option here to add their bio. By clicking on this, students can edit this information.

One thing I always like to call out to parents and teachers is that this basic information—the username, the avatar, and the bio information that students share—is publicly available. So, just to be a little bit cautious about what they put there. When they land on the learner home, they'll see if their teacher has assigned them course mastery or assignments. They'll see those broken down by class on the left-hand side.

You can see on my student account here that in my period one Algebra 1 class, I have a course mastery goal that you see here, and then I also have assignments from my teacher. So anything they need from an individual class will be there on the left-hand side. If they have courses that they'd like to study on their own, under this next category of information, where it says "My Stuff," students will see courses.

These are courses that the student has selected themselves to study, and when students sign up for an account, they'll have the opportunity to pick which courses they’d like to study on their own. We recommend things that they might be studying in school or things that just interest them, and they can always edit those courses by clicking the blue button at the top. Below this, I also want to call out this SAT button.

For students that might be in the high school age, they have the opportunity to link their College Board account with their Khan Academy account, and so they can import existing PSAT or SAT scores and get personalized recommendations across math, reading, writing, and essays. If students want to do that or if they haven't taken it yet, we also offer diagnostics if they add SAT.

Again, when they set up their account, they have a button that offers them to add SAT as a course. They'll be added to this SAT tab, and they can practice recommended exercises fit to their personalized results. If you scroll down a little bit further in the My Account area, one other thing I'd like to point out here is this button for teachers.

If students click on "Teachers," this is where they're able to see any teachers they're currently connected to. They can remove those teachers, and if they need to join a class, one of the easiest ways for students to join a class is to enter the class code. This is where your students would go if they need to input a class code to join your class. They would enter the class code in the space here and click "Join the class."

Once they do that, your name will appear on the right-hand side as a teacher. So if you're ever concerned that the student is not connected to your class properly, have them go to this tab and check to make sure that you are, in fact, connected as a teacher. One last thing on this student learner home is this profile.

This shows students what they've done on Khan Academy. It shows things like how many days they have completed work on Khan Academy, if they've worked on any computer programming projects—they find them here, how many energy points they've earned, and how many badges they've earned. So all of these kinds of gamification pieces and tracking pieces can be found here.

Now, I'm going to go back to this course mastery on my learner home, and this here is a course mastery goal that's given by my teacher. So if you've assigned a course mastery goal to your students, this is what they see when they log in. They'll see, in this case, that we've assigned an Algebra 1 goal to this student. It shows the course name, when the goal is due, and how much progress they've made on the overall course. By clicking on this, it takes me directly to the course page, so I've now gone from the learner home to the Algebra 1 course.

Now, some students will navigate to courses on their own by clicking this "Courses" button in the top left. This shows you all the courses that are available across Khan Academy. However, if you've assigned a course mastery goal, we do recommend that students log in, land on their learner home, and then click on that bar to take them directly to the course of study recommended for them.

From this page, you'll be able to see all the units, lessons, and even a course challenge that assesses skills across the entire course. For this particular course, on the left-hand side, you'll see student progress. This is the overall progress in the course, and then each of these bars align to a unit. You'll see that the student in this case has made quite a bit of progress in Algebra Foundations—about 93% of that unit is completed—whereas the one right below it, Solving Equations and Inequalities, is 64% mastered.

From here, by clicking on a unit or a lesson, students will jump into the lesson or unit in which they want to work. In this case, they'll be able to see each of the lessons within the unit and the skills that are contained within that unit. By hovering over any of these individual skills, they'll see a sample of what that skill looks like.

We know that evaluating expressions with one variable doesn't always make a lot of sense to students, but if they can see a sample problem, then they have a better understanding of what they're asked to be working on. Along with this, you'll see that each of these little figures has bars filled in. These are indicators of the mastery level of that skill.

The Khan Academy mastery system has various skill levels for students, and each skill can be placed at a different level. If they have not attempted the skill yet, they'll be placed at no level, and all the bars will be grayed out. If they've attempted the skill but earned less than 70 while practicing that skill, they'll be marked as attempted, but again, none of the bars are filled in.

If they earn more than 70% correct when practicing a skill in isolation on an exercise or correctly answer a question related to that skill on a quiz or test, they'll get moved up to familiar. If they get 100% of the questions correct when practicing the skill in isolation on an exercise, they'll be moved up to familiar, and you'll see two of these bars filled in.

In order to get to mastered, they need to show that they are competent in that skill in two different scenarios. They either need to complete the exercise and get 100%, and then demonstrate understanding of that skill in a test or a course challenge, so that it shows that they are proficient in that skill in both isolation and in mixed review, or they have to answer that question correctly twice on two separate unit tests or twice on the course challenge.

If students are confused at any time, just like I just did, they can click on this question mark and look at the skill summary. This appears in every unit on Khan Academy to understand what they need to do in order to move up or down levels.

Now, on this unit page, you'll see each of these lessons. In general, you'll see that on the left-hand side are opportunities for students to learn or acquire new skills, while on the right-hand side are practice opportunities for students to demonstrate their understanding of that skill.

On the left-hand side, students will find videos and articles related to the skill they're asked to practice. On the right, as you move down the unit page, you'll see a quiz; a quiz assesses all the skills in the preceding lesson. At the bottom of the unit, you'll see a unit test, which assesses all the skills across the unit.

As you can see in this unit, I've completed much of the content, but you'll see that here, where it says "recommended based on quiz 2," I have a little star, and this is recommending that I review this concept and then try this skill again. Students will receive individualized recommendations as they make progress through the content.

While all of your students or your children may be working on the course independently, as they make progress on certain skills, while maybe attempting and struggling on others, the program will recommend to them specific activities in which to engage to make more progress.

Alright, so let's take a look here. If I were to jump into one of these exercises—so if I were to look at this particular exercise on evaluating expressions with one variable, I'll open up into this exercise window that says "Ready to practice." In this case, I see seven questions, and it should take me about seven to eleven minutes. Then I click "Let's go!"

I will now receive seven questions that are all on the same topic, and once the student inputs an answer, you'll see that they get immediate feedback. In this case, I've input the incorrect answer, and it encourages me to try again, get help, or skip for now. This gives me an opportunity to show you two ways students can get help while they're working independently. Beneath every question is a question here that says "Stop."

In this case, by clicking on the blue link that says "Watch a video" or "Get a hint," the student receives videos that are specifically related to the skill they are attempting, or if they're really stuck, they click "Get a hint," and it will walk them through this particular problem step by step, with the final hint being the correct answer to the question.

One thing to note is that if students watch the videos and then come back and attempt the question, they can still receive full credit. If they use the hint, the question will get marked incorrect because the final step in the hints is the actual answer to the question. Again, here I go with some instant feedback to keep up my persistence.

If I go back to the main page for this course, you'll see at the top here I have a banner that says "Mastery Challenge." Along with the regular assessments built into the course, every student will receive mastery challenges after they've become familiar with at least three skills. This mastery challenge will highlight three skills the student has already practiced, and these are skills specific to that student's performance.

When they do this, they're able to level up or move to mastered in that skill if they are successful. What's important about this is that mastery challenges are personalized spaced repetition of skills. We know that spiraling skills helps reduce learning loss and improve knowledge retention, and so we strongly encourage students to engage in mastery challenges once they become available. Mastery challenges will refresh for students every 12 hours.

Now, I'm going to jump back to our learner home for a minute. This is great if I'm working on course mastery, but we know many students are using assignments as well. Again, for that same class, below course mastery, I see assignments. By clicking on assignments, I can see all the current assignments my teacher has given.

In this case, I have a couple of videos, indicated by these triangles, and a couple of exercises. For each assignment, I can see the name, the class for which it's due, the due date and time, and the current status. If I haven't attempted this activity yet, it'll appear as a start button. If I have, it'll show me this current best score, and in this case, because I haven't reached 100, it's encouraging me to try again.

If the assignment is a video or an article, instead of showing me the "Try again" button, it'll show me either "Completed" or "Incomplete." So if I haven't started yet, I could click "Start" to watch this video, and once I've finished, it’ll show as completed. These are all my current assignments, and they're ordered for students with the most proximal or soonest due date.

In this case, you can see this assignment is due on Monday, whereas this isn't due till Wednesday. So students know by clicking at the top that they're doing the assignment that is due next. If they ever want to go back to look at past assignments, they can click the tab for past on the top and see all of their past assignments.

Again, here you'll see completed videos, exercises, and in this case, something I haven't completed that is now late. If I go back to active, these are my current assignments again, and here's the name. By clicking on the name of the assignment or the start button, I'm taken directly to that activity.

So instead of having to navigate through the entire course, it takes me directly to the assignment that my teacher has given me and jumps into that exercise. Just like with course mastery, it's the same exercises, so I'll jump into the activity and receive the same personalized support and instant feedback.

The last thing I want to go over before we open this up to questions is that from this student or learner home, on the left-hand side under my account is a tab for progress, and this is very similar to what parents and teachers can see. By clicking on progress, I can see my progress as a student, and I can alter the time window, what type of content I'm looking at, and which type of activities.

From here, I can see my time spent, and it's broken into two sections here. My 14 minutes indicate the amount of time I’ve spent on exercises. This is the amount of time students have spent actively engaged with questions, and 45 minutes of total learning time, which means this is the total amount of time I’ve spent learning on Khan Academy.

This doesn't include things like the time students spend changing their avatars or navigating around the site; this is time they spend engaged with any sort of assessment, exercise, videos, articles—anything that is active learning. Then below this, each of the activities this student has engaged with shows me what the activity was, when I engaged with it, my current mastery level, whether that was up or down in terms of mastery levels, the total number of questions I answered correctly out of the total number of problems in that exercise or quiz, and then the time spent on that particular activity.

In some cases, you'll even see a little bar that says "multiple skill changes." In that case, it means that multiple skills were assessed, and the student had changes in levels across multiple skills. In that situation, by students clicking on that, they'll be able to see the same type of levels and changes across all the skills that they used in that exercise.

Now, we've gone through a lot fairly quickly, and when in doubt, if anything seems unfamiliar to students or they're ever concerned, they can always go to the help center. By clicking on the navigation button again, students can jump back to their learner home, alter their settings, or in this case, get help.

The last thing we want to call out is that if students are ever in need of help, by clicking on their own name and selecting help, they'll be directly taken to the Khan Academy help center. Here they can look at frequently asked questions or report a problem. If they're having trouble with their account or finding things, they can always receive help from our help center here.

Now, I'm going to stop here, and we're going to open it up to questions.

Alright, so first of all, Megan, thank you so much. This is an awesome tour de force of the student experience, so thanks for laying it out so clearly. We've got a ton of questions; I'm going to try to sort of go to the ones that I'm seeing over and over again to really make sure that we hit home.

This is a question from Yana, but it was certainly asked by a number of other teachers as well, which is: Khan has so much rich content, but a lot of it is in the text format that can be tough for students who are struggling with reading ability. Is there any way for students to engage with this and have those questions read aloud as opposed to being forced to read them themselves?

Yeah, I think that's a question we do receive a lot, especially from our teachers or younger students or teachers who are teaching English language learners. We do not offer an in-product text to speech option, and I know we hear a lot of that. A couple of recommendations, though, for those students that may be having trouble—those that may have additional needs and things like that—we are enabled for screen readers.

So, if the case is for students with particular needs, that have learning challenges where they might need that screen reader, we are adapted for that. I will highlight for our younger learners our Khan Academy Kids app, which is designed for learners two through seven. It recently released a teacher tool set where teachers can assign things, and that does have a text to speech option.

If you have younger learners, I encourage you to take a look at that. We do hear that, and it's great feedback that we'd love to have.

Cool. That's perfect because we had a number of early elementary and preschool teachers who are saying, "Hey, Khan Kids seems great, but it's not really teacher friendly." And now it is! This is brand new information that we just linked to in the chat section.

Yeah, brand new! The features just became live in the app store in the last 48 hours, and so teachers can now go into Khan Academy Kids. It's really exciting, and they can see what students are doing—they can connect what they're doing at home and in school and make assignments within the app. So, definitely check that out, and please give us feedback because we're learning and growing on that.

Cool! And even if you have your own kids running around at home in that age range, feel free to use the teacher tools to make sure that they're getting assigned the right content.

Yes, absolutely. Megan and I are both in that same boat, so we're definitely...

Question from Jan: This is the question I've been getting, not just in the webinar, but in my email over the last several weeks: My students are saying, "Hey, I've been watching these videos," but then the teacher is not seeing them getting checked off in that teacher dashboard on the back end. What could be causing that disconnect between what the student says is happening and what the teacher is seeing?

A couple of things. So, number one, students only get credit for watching a video if they watch at least 90% of the video and they watch it no faster than two times regular speed. So if students are putting it on fast forward or, you know, students are only watching half the video, they're not going to get credit for that. They have to actually watch the video.

The other thing is if students just put the video on and forget about it, Khan Academy won't give them credit if it times out. So if they just left it on and forgot about it or left it on and then went to do something in the other room—which not that our students would ever do that, but we do see that happen—so they have to make sure that they are engaged with that and not just ignoring it.

So that's one set of things that can happen. The other piece that we strongly encourage is that a lot of students have both a personal and a school account, and it is most likely the school account that's the one attached to the teacher. So I would go back and verify with your student that they are logged into the account that's attached to your class.

They can check in on that learner home whether or not it's their personal or if it's their school account just by looking at the left-hand column and seeing if their classes are there or checking that teachers tab. I would double check that they are logged into the class and I will double check that they are watching the video actively.

That's all really cool. Great advice!

And then, going back to the very beginning, maybe this is the last question we have time for: We've been talking a lot in the last several weeks about how do you motivate and engage students. It's hard enough even when they're in your classroom, and now when you're teaching them from afar, it's even more difficult.

So Casey and Brie asked respectively, "What were those energy points that you referenced at the beginning, and how do students earn badges?"

You bet! Really great question. So Khan Academy has some really great gamification features built into it. When students engage with any activity—even if they're getting questions incorrect—they earn energy points because we really want to recognize that effort and that persistence.

So the more successful, the more repetitive they become with those good behaviors, the more energy points they earn. Those energy points allow them to do things like upgrade that avatar that we saw on the top left of the learner home. And the badges come from certain behaviors—earning certain amounts of energy points, answering 10 or 15 questions on the same topic correctly in a row, or watching 15 minutes of video on a singular topic, showing that they're trying to really understand concepts or completing challenges.

So if they complete certain challenges within the product, those badges and energy points are deeply connected and are meant to engage and gamify a little bit to keep students motivated while they're learning.

Very cool! And then, finally, I know we have to go in a second, but for those who want to have their questions answered even beyond the context of this webinar, what other resources are out there so they can get the support they need when they need it?

A couple of things to recommend from a teacher perspective: We have a great set of teacher resources right on our Khan Academy site, and so when you log in as a teacher, you'll see three tabs on the top, and one of them is resources. So check that out for sure. We have a Keep Learning microsite specifically designed to support remote teaching and learning right now, and so I would check that out.

There's all sorts of great stuff for students, for parents, and for teachers—everything from daily schedules to motivation tips. So I would start with those two. And then if you have other questions or concerns, definitely contact our help center. They are really incredible, and even during this really high demand time for Khan Academy, they're usually good about getting back to you all in a matter of hours because it's really important that we know that our users—even especially in a time of high need—we're here for you and whatever questions you may have.

Cool, well, I've included those links so everyone can feel free to click into those. That being said, you will get a recording of this webinar, so if you want to go back and look at any particular part of what Megan shared, you can do that at your own pace, and you can also share that with fellow educators and even parents if you want to help them sort of get up to speed with this experience.

Anything else you'd recommend there, Megan?

One other thing, I went through this, I know, pretty quickly in a live demo, so I've included a handout with this webinar as well, which is just a set of slides that walk through the screens we went through today, with a little bit of text. So if you'd like a little bit more time to digest everything we went through, that's available there for you as well.

Cool! Well, on behalf of Megan and the whole Khan Academy team, we want to thank you all for making time out of your busy afternoon to join us, and we wish you well in this really difficult endeavor that we're all tackling right now. Any final words of wisdom, Megan?

Just remember that anything you're doing right now is really incredible, and that we are all doing the best we can, and we are here to support you! Stay safe.

Great! We wish you tremendous success. Bye, all!