Tour of the Khan Academy student experience

Hi, I'm Kim from Khan Academy and I'm here with Megan, who leads us teacher education.

Hi Megan!

Hi Kim!

In this video, we are going to walk you through the Khan Academy learner or student experience. So Megan, who is considered a learner on Khan Academy?

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.

That's great! So where should teachers start if they want to better understand the student experience on Khan Academy?

To begin, you want to 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 homepage 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.

On the left-hand side, any classes 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 it. By going down to the Progress tab, students can see their activity log. This exact same report is also available to you as a teacher when you click into a student on your roster. We surfaced the report to both facilitate accountability and to stimulate student-teacher conferencing on progress.

By scrolling down and clicking on Teachers, students can see all of their current teachers and also join a new class by entering a class code. One more thing on this page: students will also find a summary of their recent activity, energy points, and badges earned.

That seems like a really useful place for students to check current mastery, progress, assignments, and overall learning. Can you walk us through what students experience when they select their mastery goals?

Of course, Kim. 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. What you see here on the course page are the different units that make up the course, as well as the students' progress towards mastering each unit. Below each unit name are the lessons within each unit.

By clicking into a lesson or unit, I am taken to the unit page. From here, students have the option to either dive straight into practice, which they can find 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 types of practice activities 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 reviews of skills in a lesson, unit tests are mixed reviews of skills within an entire unit, and course challenges are a mixed review of skills from the entire course.

And how does Khan Academy assess students' proficiency in the skills they're learning?

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, the maximum level they can get to is proficient. They would need to answer all the 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 earn less than 70%, they are attempted.

I saw a banner for mastery challenges on the course page. What are mastery challenges?

Great question, Kim! 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 familiar on at least three skills and continue to get unlocked 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.

You mentioned that students can see assignments from teachers. How do students know which assignments to complete?

From the learner home page, students can select assignments from the left-hand panel. Under each class, students will see active or current assignments and the order of what is due soon at the top of each list. Each assignment will show the title of the assignment, the class name, the due date, 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.

This is so helpful, Megan! Thanks so much! We hope this video provides a better understanding of the student experience on Khan Academy.