Getting Started with Khan Academy for Remote Learning

Hey everyone! This is Jeremy Schieffling with Khan Academy. Super excited to be joining you this evening for our session on getting started with remote learning. Just to sort of set the tone for the evening, we know that there's some challenging times out there, and we're all struggling to figure out, as parents and educators, what can we do to serve our students and our children the best way possible.

With that in mind, I just want to give you a sense of who's going to be sharing their stories with you tonight and then what you can do next. Joined on the line is Megan Pitani, who is Khan Academy's lead educator training teachers all around the country. As you can see, she was an amazing high school biology teacher and high school track and field coach. You also have myself, a former kindergarten teacher, mostly known for teacher ties and making smoothies for his kids.

That being said, I want to give you a chance to introduce yourselves. So, I want to start with a couple of quick questions. These are pretty important because I'm going to use these to inform the live demonstration we do in the next few minutes. So go ahead and answer this question: What grade level do you teach? All the way from elementary to high or even beyond? I'd be curious to find out. Again, we'll use that to really personalize the kind of experiences you see on the screen in a few minutes.

Okay, we're going to close this poll in a few minutes. Three, two, one. We'll share those results, and it looks like we've got a big chunk of high school teachers here, as well as some from elementary and middle. So that's fantastic! Thanks for joining.

I'm going to ask you one other question as well, which is, regardless of school level, what subject do you teach? Everything from math to ELA? Love to know more! Thanks so much for participating. Go ahead and close this poll, share the results, and sure enough, it looks like we've got a plurality of math teachers, but also some folks from across the disciplines. So thanks again for joining!

Okay, so that being said, I want to address a couple of ground rules for this webinar. For those who are curious, you will absolutely get a recording of this afterwards that you can share with anyone you like: fellow educators, administrators, even parents. And then absolutely please use the questions feature at any point. Megan's going to respond to your questions right now as you type them in, and then we're going to take some questions live as well. So please let us know what's on your mind, and we'll respond in real time.

Okay, that being said, the three big questions that we're going to address this evening are as follows:

1. Why do you even want to use Khan Academy for remote learning in the first place? We'll dive a little bit into the underpinnings of our site.
2. How can you use Khan Academy to make remote learning as effective as possible? You know you've got this big challenge in front of you; we want to give you all the tools and resources to be as successful as you can.
3. Finally, what else is on your mind? How can we help as you sort of face this next step in preparing your students for success?

So that being said, I want to start with this beginning question: Why use Khan Academy for remote learning? The reason I've chosen these images on the screen, which take you back to the very early days of Khan Academy as Sal Khan himself was building it out a decade ago, is that even though we often associate Khan Academy with the classroom today, at its very beginning, everything on Khan Academy was remote. Sal was sitting in his closet, as you can see, creating the videos, creating the content that became the first lessons on Khan Academy.

The result is, because that's always been part of our DNA, even as we've moved into the classroom, you can be sure of two things:

1. Khan Academy is for learners who are learning anytime. You don't have to be working at the same time as students. They can respond to the specific skills you want them to practice, they get instant feedback as soon as they do, and you always keep tabs on how your students are doing.
2. No matter where you are, no matter where your learners are, Khan Academy can bring you together. Computers don't... students don't even need a computer. They can now access Khan Academy on smartphones using our app or the mobile website. In addition, our content is available in over 40 languages, and as a non-profit, it's all free for you, all free for your students.

So that's why Khan Academy is sort of uniquely built for this moment because this is the moment that we came from.

Okay, so now the most important question: How can you use Khan Academy to drive great remote learning for your students? To make this really come alive, I'm going to use some of those recommendations that you just gave. I'm going to put them to use live on the screen for your benefit.

So I'm going to go into split screen mode here, and what you see on the right-hand side is actually the live Khan Academy site, the same way you see it if you log in at khanacademy.org. The question that students often ask teachers is: How do I even get started? How do I get my students enrolled? So if you want to do that, all you have to do is come over here, and a lot of folks said, "Hey, I'm a high school math teacher," so maybe you're teaching algebra, and so you have your classroom.

If you want to add new students, you have three different options that I've categorized into fastest, oldest, and youngest. To explain what that means, I'm going to come over here to the admin section and then down to students. Under students, you're going to see this link to add new students. When you do that, you get the exact same option that you see there on the slide. Do you want to use Google Classroom? Do you want students to join with the class link? Or do you want to actually enroll your students yourself?

The reason I say Google Classroom is the fastest is that if you already have a Google Classroom account, all you have to do is connect that and then import your students right away, and you're all set, and they're there in Khan Academy. So that is definitely the fastest way to get started.

But if you don't have Google Classroom, and you do have older students, maybe middle school or high school, you can absolutely have them join themselves really quickly. All you have to do is click that button "students join the class link," and you get a custom code that you can put on your whiteboard, on a screen, on an email where they can just join and be logged into your classroom right away.

If you actually download the handout that I've included here in the GoToWebinar panel, you can actually get a special handout or slide to give to your students with that information. What it has at the very end is your unique class code, which identifies your class from every other one on Khan Academy. And then finally, for your very youngest students, for the elementary teachers out there, you can actually create your students' accounts on your own very quickly. All you have to do is type in their names, and then voilà, Khan Academy does two things for you: number one is it generates unique usernames, and number two is it generates a unique password.

Then if you create those accounts, you can actually download all that information and then print it off for your students, give handouts for your students, have them take it home, and they're ready to go. So those are the three options to get started, from fastest all the way to oldest and youngest students.

That being said, as a former teacher myself, I can't resist the opportunity to give you a little pop quiz. So quick question for everyone out there: Where can you find your class code? Is it located under course mastery, under assignments, or under settings? Which of those three areas on your classroom dashboard are going to take you to your class code?

Thank you for everyone for weighing in very quickly here. This is awesome! We've got almost 400 folks around the country sharing their feedback. We'll go ahead and close this poll and share the results. And so you're absolutely right: settings is where you want to go. Just to recap that, if you come back here to your classroom page, you're skipping past course mastery, past assignments, and you come to the admin section, and you can find your class code in your students' area right over here or in your settings field right over here. That's always where you're going to find your class code.

Okay, so next section: Once your students are enrolled, how do you get them prepared? What we're going to recommend is if you have the ability to work with your students now before school closure events, you're going to have the best chance to really get students comfortable with the platform and familiar with the routines associated with it.

So we highly recommend that you start by assigning just a simple skill to practice so they understand the basic mechanics of Khan Academy, and they feel confident and in charge when they use it at home. That being said, we really recommend that you add yourself to your own class so you can try it too because, as important as your students practice, we've seen time and again the most successful educators with Khan Academy are the ones who feel confident about themselves and who include themselves in the experience.

So, taking this class code, for instance, if you want to add yourself to your class just to see what students are receiving, the emails that are generated, what an assignment looks like, all you have to do is come here to your name in the top right-hand corner, go to your learner home— not your teacher dashboard— and then on this learner page, which is all about you as a student, not as a teacher, you're going to come down to this very bottom section called teachers.

All you have to do is plug in your class code and you can join your very own class. Now you'll see everything the same way that students do, so you can know before you make an assignment everything is the way that you want it, and that's how you join your class.

Now, the other thing is a little bit less technical, and that is not only should students be familiar with Khan Academy, but they should feel ready for success in general. I think there are a couple things you can do today to really make sure they're set up for success tomorrow.

Number one, do students have their login information handy? If you download the handout that I've attached here, I have a simple worksheet that you can print off and hand out to your students where they can write down that information, including the login address, so they have that or can even share that with their parents. That's the first step.

Of course, for your older students who may have their own smartphones or devices, let them know that they can access Khan Academy not just through a computer but also through the Khan Academy app on iOS or Android. If you have younger students, maybe they don't even have a computer at home and you're worried about equity issues, let them know that they can also access Khan Academy on their parents' smart device, even if they go to the mobile website or if they want to download the app.

So another option to make sure all of your students are served, all of your students have access. Finally, Megan really reiterated this to me before this conversation tonight, which is you want to have a lifeline to your students.

When Megan was teaching in Connecticut during the time of Hurricane Sandy, she made sure that she had a clear line of communication to her kids using an LMS or an app like Class Dojo or Remind or even just email. So make sure that you have that step in advance; students know where to receive information from you, and then also know that Khan Academy will assist you by sending notifications to your students. So if they have the app or if they have access to email, they'll be notified that they have an assignment or course mastery goal, and that'll keep them moving toward the right goal.

Okay, that being said, I want to ask a little pop quiz to see if everyone sort of caught that important pro tip about adding yourself to your class. If you want to add yourself to your own class on Khan Academy, do you do that by going to your student roster, by going to your learner dashboard, or by going to the students tab of your home page? Just to check for understanding here, old teacher habits die hard.

Thanks for everyone for voting across the country so quickly. I'll go ahead and close the poll and share the results. Voila! You nailed it again! You leave the sort of cozy confines of your teacher dashboard and come over to learner home. There, under the teachers section, you can add your class code and join your own class—it's exactly what your students see.

Okay, nicely done! Just two final sections, and we're going to open it up for some live Q&A. So once you have your students enrolled, once you have them set up for success, how do you get the communication going? How do you get assignments flowing?

Well, to set up assignments, which are sort of the basic functionality of Khan Academy, all you have to do is come back to your teacher dashboard, come into your class. So again, sort of putting ourselves in the shoes of high school math teachers everywhere—maybe you're teaching algebra, maybe you're teaching pre-calc, and you come over here to the assignments tab specifically, you click assign, and then you have your entire curriculum laid out for you.

So maybe you chose a couple of different courses: pre-algebra, algebra one, maybe even a little bit of early math. In this case, let's go to algebra one and say, "Hey! Right now we're in the quadratic section of the year." So let’s dig in there and say I specifically want my students to watch a polynomial’s video and do an exercise on polynomials—sort of an introductory level.

If you want to check those out yourself, all you have to do is click on them by clicking on the exercise. You can instantly see the total database of questions that students will be faced with, and once you check that out and it feels good to you, you can close that tab and click the assign button.

The nice thing about assignments is just like an assignment in class, you choose the due date, the due time, and you choose the specific students. You can have all students work on the same thing, or if you're ready to do a little differentiation, focus on the students who really need a little bit of remedial work and folks who are ready to move ahead; you can choose that as well.

And then lastly, as you see here on the screen, there is this pro tap, which is if you really want to make sure that everyone has a different experience, you can do that. But there is an advantage to giving the same questions to all students, which you're about to see on the next slide. Either way, you make your choice and click the assign button. Now that assignment goes out to the students, they're notified, and they're off to the races.

So that’s getting an assignment started. But how do you review progress? How do you sort of close that feedback loop with how the students are doing? If you come over to the scores tab, right beneath the sign, you can now see the results that are coming in from all these assignments on a student level, which is nice to know that your students are actually getting your assignments, completing them, understand how they're performing.

But you can actually dig into the assignment itself and figure out how they did, question by question, across your student body. The reason I shared that pro tip of having a shared set of questions is that, let’s say you're in a situation where you're able to do a video conference with your students for 30 minutes a day, and you can share your screen using something like Zoom or Google Hangouts.

Well, what you can do is you can actually go through those questions and point out, "Aha, there's clearly a misunderstanding here! We're seeing a pattern where a lot of students are missing the same thing. Let me actually correct that misunderstanding at the root." You can actually draw right on the screen if you want to, and it even gives students hints to give them a sense of how they can sort of scaffold all the way up to the right answer.

That way, even if you're not directly connected with students, you could have that same level of feedback, that same level of guidance that characterizes the best teachers anywhere. So that’s how you get assignments going.

Now one pop quiz for you here is: Do you have to assign the same exercise to all students? Think about this question for a second. Is it mandatory to give the same assignment to every single student? Where can you differentiate? Can you spread it around?

I know this is an easy one; we just talked about it, just wanted to confirm this because this is very important, which is that Khan Academy is really focused on letting teachers differentiate and serve every learner where they are. So even though you may be tempted to just sort of assign one assignment to every single student, if you know that a student needs something different, feel free to use the assignments tool to pick and choose the students the same way you would in your own classroom.

Okay, so that is the assignment piece. Finally, this idea of mastery goals. Of course, it brings up the question: What exactly is a mastery goal? Let me explain a mastery goal this way. We've just talked about assignments, which can often be very short-term: do this problem set tomorrow, watch this video by tonight, and that's great; that gets you through the day, especially when you're starting with your remote learning cadence.

But if you know that you're going to be out of school for two weeks, three weeks, or more, and you want to set a longer-term objective, a mastery goal is about setting their horizon about where you want students to head, even if you're not going to be able to be with them for a month or more at a time.

So that's the first thing a mastery goal does. The second thing is it lets you set a really high bar. As you just saw with assignments, much of the focus is on get it done and get a score, similar to worksheets. But if you want to say, "Hey, it's not just about getting through the assignment; it's about mastering the core underlying skill," that's where mastery goals come in.

They let you say, "Hey! I don't want you moving forward and just sort of going through the motions in these next two or three weeks. I want you to always push yourself to really understand and master this new skill." That's what a mastery goal can help with.

In terms of why you want to use them for remote learning, number one, we all know that one of the biggest sort of issues with remote learning is that students can feel disempowered. "Here I am behind the screen; I'm not able to connect with my teacher as directly; maybe I'm just going through the motions," whereas a mastery goal lets a student work as fast or as slowly as they need to to ultimately master those key skills. They're the drivers of their destiny; they have that level of empowerment.

Number two, when students do come back to school, you don't want to have wide gaps because students were going really quickly through your online assignments. Instead, you want to make sure you fill in those foundational gaps, and mastery goals really drive students towards that level of understanding before they move on.

So how do you assign mastery goals in your classroom? To come back to our teacher dashboard here, we're going to go from assignments to the course mastery tab, and we're going to click placement. What you can do here is you can create a goal for as few or as many students as you want, and these goals are typically set at the course level.

You might say, "You know, by the end of this year, I want every one of my students to have mastered all the key skills of algebra one," and I can assign that to all of them or part of them, and I can set an appropriate due date. That’s the way you get started.

But then the magic of Khan Academy's course mastery goals comes through actually experiencing what students see. So again, if you ever want to see what it looks like on the student side, you come back to your name menu at the very top right-hand corner, you go to learner home, and then you come over here to course mastery. You can see exactly what the goal looks like on the student side, and you can see what it looks like as they click in and go through mastering their skills.

When you talk about empowerment, so much of it is about understanding what you've accomplished, and this really gives students a clear sense of what have I mastered, what do I still have left to work on. Finally, as you want to check that progress yourself as a teacher, you come back to your teacher dashboard, which you can always do just by clicking the Khan Academy logo at the very top of the screen.

You come into your desired class, and then instead of clicking the placement tab, you click the progress tab. Here you can really dig into course mastery at an entire course level as well as at a unit level. So for example, if you assigned a course mastery goal, but you want to understand how students are doing with variables, you can find out that, "Aha! We have some students who have really mastered them, which is awesome. But we have some students, like Tori and Casey, maybe need a little bit of extra practice," and you can actually click the assign button and assign that practice just to the right student to give them a helping hand even from afar to make sure they have everything they need to be successful and are constantly pushing towards that high bar of mastery.

So that’s how you check progress; that's how you keep your students moving forward. That being said, I want to finish up with one final pop quiz. So, many folks out there will know Tim Vandenberg, who's one of our Khan Academy ambassadors and is a sixth-grade math teacher in Hesperia, California. He did a really awesome webinar for us last week where he talked about the progress that his students made using course mastery exclusively, not even using assignments.

So for anyone who is on that session, I'm curious if you recall the incredible progress his students made in terms of the California math assessment, the high-stakes test that all the students had to take at the end of fifth grade. We'll collect these results, we'll close the poll, and we'll share them with the audience.

And sure enough, you're absolutely right! Tim had this astounding leap! If you remember that graph, which is kind of burned into my retinas, his students started sixth grade 60 points below grade level, and they ended up 34 points above—way more progress than the state made or the district made or the county made on average, and he attributed it all to the fact that focusing on mastery and filling those gaps kept his students really making sure they had all the foundations they needed to be successful.

So even in this difficult time, I recommend checking it out just to see what's possible as you try remote learning. So that said, let me close up with two final next steps, and then we're going to open up some live questions.

First of all, if you haven't already, go to the handout section and get my total cheat sheet to this entire process: enrolling your students, getting them ready for success, making your first assignment, and setting your first course mastery goals. You can feel free to download that, share that with educators down the hall, share that with your administrators.

Then number two, if you have any questions whatsoever, please feel free to put them into the questions box, and Megan and I will answer those now. So let's go ahead and start with some good questions that have been coming in, and thank you everyone who's been asking these!

So, let's start with this important question from Karen Leonard, and I'm going to bring this up to Megan because Megan is our expert teacher trainer, and she'll be able to respond directly to this question.

Karen wants to know, "Are there standards connected to each activity, Megan, and if so, are they national or state standards?"

It's a great question! So for all of our math content and for our ELA content, which we do have a small section of ELA content in beta for those that might be looking for that, it is all Common Core aligned. From the teacher perspective, if you go to make an assignment the same way Jeremy is showing you on your screen, all of the Common Core standards will appear there for you.

The alternative is that if you're looking for content maybe to align to your existing curriculum, in our search feature, you can search by topic, but you can also search by standard. Some other things that might be helpful if you're a science teacher: we do have some NGSS aligned content, and if you're an AP teacher, all of our AP courses are aligned to the AP standards, and you can search by those as well.

If you're a high school teacher interested in SAT preparation, we do have official SAT practice, and inside our SAT practice, our content can be identified by state-specific standards. So only in the SAT paragraph can you identify by state-specific standards. Otherwise, it is national standards, mostly Common Core.

Cool! Great question, Karen! Thanks for the great answer, Megan.

Okay, so next question here. Melissa Lopez wants to know, "Would you recommend, Megan, that teachers share an account to work with students?"

So let's say that you have, you know, maybe students in common with another teacher. Should you have a single account, a separate account? What's the best way to set that up?

So if students that are across multiple teachers, I believe is what the question is getting at, is that your students can have as many teachers as they'd like. If they're making—if you're using progress tracking as opposed to our individual assignments, we're using progress tracking. Any teacher who has that student on their roster can see their progress. So if, for example, you are a third-grade teacher and you're using it for math, but you might also have support instructors in your classroom or additional paras who are in your classroom, they can have an account as well.

They can track student progress for students, and so that way teachers, even though you can't share an account, you're able to have access to student progress.

Cool. Okay, this is a really important question from Camden King. This goes way beyond technology. Any tips, Megan, on how to actually get the kiddos to do the work? Maybe using incentives beyond grades?

Yeah! So what a great question, for sure! There's a couple of things depending on the age group demographics of your students. We find different success with this. So Khan Academy also awards students energy points while they're completing assignments or doing work, and those energy points allow them to upgrade avatars and earn badges and some sort of some of those internal gamification pieces we find to be really motivating for students.

On top of that, we find that teachers like to track overall progress and provide incentives around that. Some of them can be as simple as we have printable certificates on the site that show you, "Oh, you mastered five skills!" or "You've really gone ahead!" or some teachers create their own: "You completed all of first grade—that's amazing!" and just recognized on that. Whereas other teachers, you know, start to say, "If you make X amount of progress, we'll award the class with some sort of prizes," which might be a little bit challenging as we think about remote learning.

But I know that some teachers will, you know, send again digital recognition either in a certificate or, you know, some teachers really go all the way to Amazon gift cards. I'm not encouraging that; it's just something we've seen in real classrooms. But ways to recognize student progress!

Cool! I've seen a couple of questions here about K-2 or even preschool. I do want to call out Khan Academy for Kids, which is our sister program that's all focused on ages two to six and helping them really sort of build the foundations for number sense and for reading and language arts.

If you're interested in that, that's a free app that you can download on iOS or Android. So definitely check out the Khan Kids app as you can see right here.

Sort of going along with that question, Megan, Tina Loughman asks, "Does Khan Academy have any reading lessons, or is this really just for math?"

It's not just for math, which I do think that's a common misconception, is that we did start with math, but Khan Academy offers math, science and engineering, computer science, arts, humanities, economics. We're partnered with College Board, as I mentioned, and we have free official SAT practice along with a fair amount of AP content, including things such as AP Computer Science Principles, AP US History, AP Biology is just getting a revamp. So there's plenty of content beyond math.

Our ELA content is just in its early development, so if you are an English Language Arts teacher and you're looking for some content, we do have some, and we would love to get your feedback on that as well as we think about developing that further.

And if you have early learners, as Jeremy mentioned, we do have the Khan Academy Kids app, which is focused on both early literacy and early numeracy along with social-emotional learning. So if you have kiddos that are in that two to seven age range, we just published all of first-grade content last week—very exciting for us! So if you're looking for that type of content, I highly encourage you to look at the Khan Academy Kids app, which has a much more robust language and reading component.

Awesome! Our Mourinho asks a really interesting question, which is: Obviously, for a lot of students, even if they don't have internet access themselves, they might have it through a parent's smartphone or through the library. But if there's just no internet access available, what would we recommend in that case, Megan?

Yeah! It's a really tricky one, and we do deal with this with some of the, you know, students. We do work with school districts all over the U.S., which obviously, you know, every school, every district has their own accessibility concerns.

One thing I will say is that everything, as Jeremy so kindly printed out, everything that's available to students on the website is available to them through the app. So even if they only have access to a smartphone, they can access the full content library, all of their assignments from you, all of that is still available.

We find that a lot of students might at least have access to a smartphone for even a small part of their week, and so that is one thing we do see leveraged quite a bit. If they have no access at all, there is an option that if you look at our help center, "How do I help students who have no internet access?" we do have a partnership with an organization called Learning Equality, and they have an option where a student can download content and access it offline.

However, they would still need a device in order to do that to get the content. We don't offer printouts of all our exercises, but as Jeremy's showing you on the screen, if you look in our help center and you find there again Calibri, which is a part of Learning Equality, they do offer an ability to download Khan Academy and other content— they're not exclusively for us—and so that students can access that offline. We do see that used quite a bit, mostly outside the U.S., but inside the U.S. in a few locations as well.

Fantastic! And let's just close with one final question, which is, "You mentioned those certificates. How would a teacher go about getting access to those, Megan, as well as any other teacher resources that we're developing?"

Great, great question! So once you log into Khan Academy and you're dropped into your teacher dashboard, there's a place for you—and Jeremy, I believe, is going to navigate us right there—called Resources. That tab that Jeremy's hovering over, and there you can see getting started with teacher training. We have some teacher training options there, including a welcome guide and some videos that show how teachers have been using Khan Academy.

There's also some additional resources when you go into that, and you'll find resources for parents. There's some out-of-school program suggestions. I know I used to work with Boys and Girls Club of America quite a bit, and they would use it in some of their after-school programs. All of those types of things, like certificates and printables, you can find them there. If you're having trouble finding them, always feel free to go to our help center, and even if you do something as simple as put certificates into the search bar of our help center, just like that, you'll be able to see them, and they do come in multiple languages, and those are printable for your students.

So great! Okay, so let’s end it there. Megan, thank you so much for sharing your expertise with our audience, and thank you to our audience for taking the time out of your afternoon or evening to be with us. I know there's so much going on right now; we appreciate you investing in the session.

That being said, do us one final favor: please take the poll that pops up at the very end of this webinar, and let us know, A, how can we make future iterations of the session even better? And then B, what kinds of sessions would you like to see going next? Obviously, this is a relatively high-level session about getting started. If you want us to dive deep into math or ELA or motivation or keeping students engaged in a remote learning environment, please just let us know. We'll be sure to build it out for our next session.

So on behalf of Megan and myself, thank you so much for making time to join us today. We wish you tremendous success as you get your students set up for remote learning. If there's anything at all we can do to be of service, please just let us know. Thank you again so much!

Thank you very much!