Our team selected online learning and Khan Academy (KA) as our modality, and Intro to HTML and CSS as the specific resource.
Before experiencing KA I understood it to be a website that offered free tutorial videos in math and possibly other subjects. Upon further research I found that KA offers a lot more than this: it breaks down your learning into fine-grained competencies that it teaches users through video, text, and web-based simulations. KA then tests users by having them complete small projects or answer questions. KA uses mastery learning heavily, requiring students to reach a high level of proficiency in a topic or competency before learning subsequent content.
Mastery learning makes a lot of sense to me, especially in areas such as math and computer science where KA focused earlier on. It’s difficult to learn a math or computer science concept when it requires another concept that you didn’t understand when it was taught to you, but you moved on anyways because you passed the test. KA ensures that learners have the foundation they need to move on to the next topic.
KA also uses a lot of gamification. Gamification can be described as using game-design elements in non-game contexts. Gamification often focuses on components that attempt to motivate learners. KA has almost covered the gamut of gamification techniques: achievements, avatars, badges, collections, content unlocking, levels, points, voting on projects, contests, and probably more that I’m missing. I wonder how effective this extensive gamification is at motivating learning and keeping users on the site? Does the effectiveness vary by age of the user or other factor?
Jason, it was refreshing to read your post; I had forgotten how succinct and eloquent your writing style is. Thank you for explaining more about what Khan Academy is about. Like you, I had the perception that KA was focused on math and science. I also thought it was heavily skewed toward K-12 learners. Did you get the sense KA is relevant for adult learners? Katie’s research indicated educational videos are best used for understanding, not mastery, and I like that KA seems to echo those findings with its approach (ie., having learners complete projects to demonstrate mastery ). Do you know if KA allows learners to “challenge” courses? From a learner’s perspective, I can imagine it would be frustrating to take entry-level courses if you already have an intermediate level of knowledge and are looking to jump straight into more advanced courses.
Hi Amber,
Thanks for your message. And here I am admiring your loverly writing style!
KA has math content starting from the beginning, but most of the KA content starts around a high school level, and very little of it goes beyond what I would consider first year university. The majority of content will be relevant to adult learners, but the content is mostly focused on STEM.
KA is wide open for anyone to explore without needing to login. KA does not use what I would consider courses. It’s organized a bit differently depending on the topic, but drilling down it’s usually something like topic, lesson, and then exercise. Learners can navigate directly to a lesson or exercise they find interesting or would like to work on.
Hi Jason,
I echo Amber’s sentiments as this is my first introduction the Khan Academy and feel like I have a solid understanding based on your clear description.
I think it’s interesting to consider mastery when learning as I believe my research, my experience, and my current work-related projects have left that to the wayside. I’ve been so narrow-minded in my research around constructivism and teaching millennials that it’s easy to presume that the best way to learn is to provide information and let the learner fabricate their own learning in whichever way is most relevant to their lives. On the flipside, is that the way we should be teaching a heart surgeon how to fix an artery, or somebody learning to create code to protect our banking information? This is a good reminder that there is a time and place for mastery even though my experience with video-based learning has been so focused on the “open to interpretation” information and less “matter of fact” content. To build on Amber’s questions, based on your experience, would you use Khan Academy as a platform to learn tactical skill sets for your current role or is the content too junior? Have you enjoyed it in general?
Hi Katie,
KA focuses on STEM, and I think that mastery learning is much more important in STEM then it is in most other areas such as the arts, humanities, business, social sciences, etc.. I believe I could complete MALAT in reverse order (last course first) and be successful, but the same wouldn’t be true for any STEM program. How does one do long division if they don’t know how to add or subtract? A lot of content in STEM requires specific prior knowledge to be able to learn it.
KA doesn’t have anything that looks like it would be relevant to what I do in my current role that I don’t already know, but there’s plenty of content on KA that I find interesting. Also, KA looks like it would be very efficient as a refresher in a subject. For example, if I wanted to take the Machine Learning course at Coursera but felt my linear algebra was rusty, I could use KA to efficiently review what I’ve forgotten in linear algebra.
I’ve enjoyed my time in KA. One of the more memorable moments was creating a programming project on the site and sharing it with others who took my project and built upon it to create something even better.
Thanks for the comment!
Hi all,
There’s lots of good food for thought in these comments; thanks all for sharing them. Here are a few brief thoughts, and comments are of course more than welcome. As argued above, mastery learning is best suited for knowledge domains and levels where logical sequencing of content (and the structure of the knowledge domain) is clearly evident. Katie notes, “there is a time and place for mastery,” also implying that there are times and places for different approaches to learning design as well. Using the heart surgeon example above, we could surmise that mastery learning might work well for the basics of the functions of the heart, or getting to know the fundamentals of physiology, or even of electricity. However, as the learner starts to advance more deeply into the knowledge domain, the need to integrate knowledge and skills across parts of multiple areas both within and outside the domain becomes increasingly complex and difficult. When the learner arrives at this point, the need for a new array of learning approaches comes into play. For instance, for many decades now it’s been found that simulation-based learning (a form of experiential learning, without the real-world downsides) is critical in successfully managing a complex emergency whether in the operating room or airplane cockpit. The learner needs to develop pattern recognition and situation awareness, and to generate an evolving set of possible actions and potential outcomes, doing all this with limited information, an unforgiving time-frame, and dire potential consequences. Much of this needs to be addressed by a combination of teaching/learning methods. For instance, constructivist learning approaches are helpful in such areas as teamwork and communication leading to coordinated action by all members of a surgical team or cockpit crew during a crisis, as well as in debriefing incidents to learn from mistakes and improve future practice. An apprenticeship (or community of practice) pedagogy initiates learners into the culture and practices of the work setting. Cognitive tools (procedures, checklists, methods of analysis and critical thinking) provide support for decision making. And so forth. A key role of the educator is to know when and how to use and combine different approaches depending on these multidimensional settings and challenges.
But wait, there’s more. I’m very interested in Jason’s comment about sharing a programming project in KA in a way that enabled others to build upon it. Is there a tool in KA that enables this kind of making/collaboration (beyond discussion forums)? If so this seems to represent a different approach (more constructivist, project based, collaborative) than the usual found on one-to-many curated video streaming sites. Also: Is there any information about ownership and licensing? If it’s essentially closed or proprietary (I’m guessing it is), how would that compare with using a site such as GitHub? It would be very interesting to learn more about this. Has anyone else come across the type of thing Jason described?
Hi Irwin,
Thanks for your insightful comments. I understand that the MA in Disaster and Emergency Management program at RRU makes significant use of emergency simulations and that this works well for them.
The following will talk about programming projects in KA and briefly describe how they work. Programming projects in KA allow users to program in JavaScript, see the results in real-time, and automatically detect and show errors in real-time. Projects created in KA are publicly visible to everyone without the need to login to the site. Without logging in, anyone can see what projects users are working on, manipulate a temporary copy of the project while seeing the results in real-time, and view the original project’s comments. When logged into the site, users can click the ‘Spin-off’ button on a user’s project page to clone the project, creating a copy for themselves in their own projects section. Spin-offs identify which projects they were cloned from. Logged in users can also discuss the projects and ask and answer questions on the project pages. For example, if someone spins off one of my projects and gets stuck adding a new feature, they might ask me a question about it, resulting in me receiving a notification the next time I log in. I can also easily browse all the projects people have created that were spun off of my projects, possibly giving them positive feedback or asking them questions.
The features discussed above were implemented in KA 6 years ago. More information on the launch of their computer programming support and the methodology for this initiative may be found here: https://johnresig.com/blog/introducing-khan-cs/
Users agree that their project code is automatically licensed under the following MIT open source license: https://opensource.org/licenses/mit-license.php
As you can see, KA is much more than a curated video library.
Jason, thanks for this additional information. The KA programming project is definitely more sophisticated than a simple curated video library. The developers seem know their subject and their learners from a teaching and learning perspective. The MIT license is good for their purpose, and the developers are encouraging an open approach to how learners may engage with the site and its various functions. Of course it helps that coding and computer languages, and other quantified sciences in general, are amenable to these methods. For instance, scripting and coding syntax and structures can be automatically tested by another program, or visually through results on screen (e.g. HTML, JavaScript). This allows for direct feedback and/or visualization. The KA project demonstrates several of the domain-specific approaches that are often unique to disciplines, based on the structure of the knowledge/skill domain and the techniques and tools available to operate in it. A common technique in math education, for example, is the use of worked problems, in which the learner can see how the problem is solved through the various steps, and/or work back from the solution to the method. In a chemistry experiment this may be impossible, as chemical reactions generally don’t work backwards from end to beginning. One of the important skills of the educational developer or instructional designer is to coax or elicit this type of knowledge, which is often held tacitly, from teaching faculty. Typically a good first place to start is to ask where students generally run into difficulty, and what techniques instructors (and students) use to get around the problem. This skill goes much deeper than simply applying a constructivist or other approach to designing a learning experience.
Again, thanks for the information; it’s appreciated.