Khan Academy learning plans for school closures

The goal of this video is to introduce you to the idea of learning plans on Khan Academy, and I'm going to focus on a plan for sixth grade math. But what I'm talking about is as applicable to fourth grade math as it is to sixth grade math, as it is to something like calculus or statistics.

Now, the core of any learning plan is the course you're actually working on. So, if I were to click on sixth grade math year, I would go right over here to the sixth grade course on Khan Academy. In order to make sense of the learning plan, you really first need to make sense of how a course is structured on Khan Academy.

Every course is subdivided into units. You can see the units listed on the left here: ratios, rates and percentages, arithmetic operations, so on and so forth. You also see them listed on the right here, and on the right, they are broken down into the various lessons. Now, you have two things going on: you have a certain number of mastery points for the entire course, and then you have a certain number of mastery points for that unit.

As we'll see in the learning plan, we're going to talk about how you can pace yourself through these units and what are some target mastery point goals you could have for the units in a given week. So, if we go back to the plan itself, there's some text that explains how to do it, but what it essentially says is, here is the plan, and we give several plans—one that can occur over 20 weeks and then another that can occur over 12 weeks.

We say week by week what unit should you be working on, and then how many mastery points should you target getting at least. There's space for you to write down or type in at the end of the week how many mastery points did you get, which you might want to share with your parents or your teacher. If you just keep doing that over, in this case, those 20 weeks, then by the end of that, you will have a good understanding of sixth grade math.

Now, at the end, we have something called the course challenge, and we also talk about earlier in this plan that you might want to start by taking these course challenges. So, what are we talking about? Well, if you go to a course, if you go to the bottom, you see course challenge here. If I click there, it's going to scroll down right over there, and it says start course challenge. When I start there, it's going to give me 30 questions that'll take me 30 to 45 minutes that are sampling items from throughout the course.

Given that many of you have already completed a good chunk of the school year, this is a great place to start because it can give you accelerated credit for things you already know, and it can help you understand the things that you don't know. The things that you do know, you're going to start getting leveled up in.

To understand what it means to get leveled up, we can go into this first unit that I've already started working on, and you could see skill by skill it has a sense of whether you are familiar, proficient, or mastered, depending on how many of these stacked blocks you actually get. So, if you already know a lot of a given grade level or a lot of a given course, I recommend taking the course challenge. If you get 70 or better, take it again and again. That'll really accelerate your mastery points and give you credit for a lot of skills.

Then, you can focus on the ones that you don't know, and then the ones that you don't know, you can then go to those particular units and take the unit tests in them. Just to get a sense of what the unit tests look like, let's go to this first unit again. If you click here in the bottom left on unit test, it'll scroll down to the bottom of the page, and you can say start unit test. A unit test you can kind of view it as a course challenge that's just focused on that unit.

So, once again, if you feel like you already know a particular unit, you could take the unit test over and over again. You're going to get different questions, and that's a faster way to get leveled up mastery. Now, going back to sixth grade, you might have noticed this thing called a mastery challenge. A mastery challenge allows your skills to get leveled up, and these are skills that you might have gotten familiar with recently, or they're making sure that you've reviewed skills that you've seen in the past.

So, going back to the plan, start with a course challenge and then the appropriate unit tests, and as much as possible, try to keep pace with these points right over here. Now, if for some reason you fall behind, not a big deal. If for some reason you feel like jumping around, that is okay too. This is all about helping you, the student, be in the driver's seat of your own learning.

Now, for those of you who are feeling a little bit less confident, we're also providing for each grade level ways to build your foundations. So this is what we're calling the super ultra strong foundation learning plan for, in this case, students completing sixth grade. There we say, hey, in parallel to trying to finish sixth grade, try to do the same thing with our arithmetic course.

If you are a sixth grader taking the arithmetic course, a lot of it is going to be review. So once again, take those course challenges as many times as you like. If you're getting 70 or over, you're likely to really be able to accelerate what you do know, and then you'll know where your gaps are, and you can focus on those units.

Now, in each of the plans for either the grade level or for the foundational work, we have both 20-week plans that I just showed you, and we have a 12-week plan. The 12-week plan focuses a little bit more on the essentials of the course, while the 20-week plan is a bit more comprehensive. So, think about which one works best for you, and think about whether you need just the grade level course or, in parallel, to do the foundational work as well.

But either way, all of us here at Khan Academy are confident that if you stay focused and you keep up with these plans, then over the course of the school closures and the summer, you're going to build a really strong foundation in your mathematics, and you'll be off to a great start next school year.