Khan Academy

Thank you, teachers!

Wed, 08 May 2013 20:12:00 -0400

I recently passed by a sign that said “I teach. What’s your superpower?”, and was reminded of the teachers that have been superheroes in my life. There were a few precious teachers who encouraged a shy little girl to love learning, changing the course of her life forever.

In honor of Teacher Appreciation Week, we take a moment to say a big THANK YOU to superhero teachers, including the 30,000 teachers across the world that are using Khan Academy in their classrooms, and changing the lives of students.

We salute you as you endeavor to provide more personalized, mastery-based and interactive learning experiences for your students. Thank you for putting in the long hours, for giving it your heart and soul, and for being a role model and an inspiration to students to be lifelong learners and explorers.

New coach and classroom resources are now available!

Fri, 12 Apr 2013 20:12:00 -0400

Check out our updated Coach Resources featuring classroom case studies, tips on getting started, and approaches to developing a personalized, mastery-based, and interactive classroom.

Get more out of Khan Academy in your classroom!

New to using Khan Academy in your classroom?

If you’re just getting started, check out the Quick Start guide which provides the basics on using Khan Academy in the classroom.

Join the conversation

Connect with other teachers who are using Khan Academy in our community discussion online to find out more. Below each video and article in the Coach Resources section, you can engage with other coaches and the Khan Academy community about how to use Khan Academy.

MCAT Video Competition

Tue, 02 Apr 2013 18:06:56 -0400

Over the past 6 months we’ve added a significant amount of content, including over 150 medical and health videos, but we want to do more. We are now collaborating with the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the Association of American Medical Colleges (those are the folks that put together the MCAT® exam) to find new medical content creators. (See the press announcement here).

Together with RWJF and the AAMC, we will sponsor a competition to encourage medical students and residents to create educational tutorials (i.e. collections of videos, questions, and articles) about concepts that will be tested by the new version of the MCAT exam, which will be administered in 2015. Announced last year, the revised MCAT exam will include concepts from psychology and sociology that provide the foundation for learning about the human and social components of health. It also will include biochemistry concepts for the first time, along with the biology, chemistry, and physics content included as part of the current test.

If you’re interested in making free medical content for the world and being trained as one of Khan Academy’s new medical content creators, apply here:

https://www.khanacademy.org/about/med-competition

The competition will run through June 14, 2013, and we’re going to invite the top video makers to join us for a one-week boot camp (July 14-21) to refine their tutorial-making skills. Winners may then be invited to become Khan Academy Fellows to work with Khan Academy on developing the next generation of pre-health and medical education content! Everyone will benefit: competition winners get to make great tutorials, we get to offer more content, and the Khan Academy community gets to learn about a whole set of new topics related to the new MCAT exam that will debut in 2015. It’s a win-win-win!

Sign up your class!

Mon, 01 Apr 2013 22:47:00 -0400

Teachers, you are now able to create accounts for students of any age!

For students under 13, you will need to get parent permission for them to use the site. You can download our sample permission slip to send home with your students.

To add your students, visit Coach > Manage Students and click the green “Add new students” button.

This opens the form for inviting students by their email addresses:

If your students do not have email addresses (or you don’t have them handy), choose “create Khan Academy accounts for them.”

Next, you’ll create a username and password for your first student and enter their birthdate. If they are under 13, you need to include their parent’s email address:

You’ll receive a confirmation and then you can create your next student’s account.

As soon as you’ve created the account, your student can start using it — so you can create accounts for your whole class one afternoon or evening and have them log in the next day!

Credit goes to team lead Matt Faus, intern Dylan Vassallo, Kitt Hirasaki, Maureen Suhendra, Matt Wahl, Shantanu Sinha, Ben Kamens, and our fantastic legal advisor Aman Shah!

School Implementations: Spring into action: Testing season

Wed, 27 Mar 2013 20:11:49 -0400

School Implementations: Spring into action: Testing season:

ka-implementations:

With springtime comes testing time. We recently spoke with a handful of teachers about using Khan Academy to prepare for their upcoming standardized test (the California Standards Test - CST) and thought it’d be nice to share…

Free! Art History!

Tue, 26 Mar 2013 20:04:00 -0400

When we started Smarthistory 7 years ago, we thought of it as a replacement for the textbook - mostly for our own students. But along the way, we learned a lot about how we might use the web to think about teaching art history. We opened our classrooms, and opened Smarthistory to art historians, hoping in the process that together we could create a free, open resource for the teaching and learning of our discipline.

We learned we could teach…

1) more experientially (why not make videos from audios recorded INSIDE the Arena Chapel or the Contarelli Chapel?)

2) more personally than the impersonal voice of the textbook

3) using lots more images than were ever available to us in the slide library (Flickr!) and tourist videos too (why not show students what’s it like to climb to the top of the Brunelleschi’s dome?)

Today, Smarthistory.khanacademy.org has 250 essays and 500 videos (and all our videos and a few text pages are also on khanacademy.org).

And this afternoon we were honored to read a blog post by our Contributing Editor for American Art, Dr. Bryan Zygmont, on how rewarding it has been to contribute to Smarthistory at Khan Academy (Bryan has contributed fabulous posts on Frederic Edwin Church, Leutze’s Washington Crossing the Delaware, and Benjamin West’s Death of General Wolf. Bryan’s post is titled “In Praise of Smarthistory.”

So we want to take this opportunity to thank Bryan, and our other generous contributing editors, Dr. Nancy Ross, Dr. Rebecca Easby, Dr. Amy Calvert, Dr. Elizabeth Macaulay-Lewis. Email us if you’re an art historian interested in contributing.

From Bryan’s post:

SmartHistory.khanacademy.org is a peer-reviewed online art historial textbook. That is free.

Free. For you, me, and for our students. Free, indeed, for the world. It’s like an art history Wikipedia, with one notable difference: those who write for it have something we like to call ethos. It’s written by art historians. But not just art historians. It’s written by art historians who have a sincere desire in teaching and pedagogy. It’s a wonderfully useful site. It currently contains almost 500 high-quality videos and nearly 250 essays. And by the time you read this, it’s likely to have grown (I’m just too lazy to update these number weekly!).

What does this mean for the teacher of, say, Survey of Western Art II (Renaissance to Modern Art)? It means, quite simply, that you can have your students read the 500 words that may appear in Gardner’s Art Through the Ages on Giotto’s Arena Chapel. Or, you can send them to SmartHistory and have them watch a video (or four!) on the same work of art.

Want some proof: Check out Part I of the video here. There is absolutely no way that the images or text of any book can match the detail and enthusiasm present in this video. And it’s one video of four that are available for the Arena Chapel. Quite simply, as this resource grows I believe it will fundamentally change the ways in which I teach art history. And change it for the better.

It may seem hyperbolic to read such lines, but the are true: I am honored beyond measure just to be involved with this project in the small ways in which I am. It sincerely signifies the best part of my job of being a professor of art history.

(Thanks Bryan!)

Teachers can now create accounts for their under-13 students

Fri, 15 Mar 2013 19:56:00 -0400

Teachers now have the power to create Khan Academy accounts for their students who are under 13!

We’re working to make it as simple as possible for teachers to get their classes started with Khan Academy, and this is just a first step.

Before creating the accounts, make sure you have permission from your students’ parents. You can download our sample permission slip to send home with your students.

Then, to add your students, visit Coach > Manage Students and click the green “Add new students” button.

This opens the form for inviting students by their email addresses (if they’re over 13):

If your students are under 13 and do not have email addresses through Google Apps for Education, choose “create Khan Academy accounts for them.”

Here, you’ll create a username and password for your first student and enter their birthdate and their parent’s email address:

You’ll receive a confirmation and then you can create your next student’s account.

As soon as you’ve created the account, your student can start using it — so you can create accounts for your whole class one afternoon or evening and have them log in the next day!

Soon, we will be opening up this feature so that you can also manually create accounts for your students who are over 13.

Credit goes to team lead Matt Faus, intern Dylan Vassallo, Kitt Hirasaki, Maureen Suhendra, Matt Wahl, Shantanu Sinha, Ben Kamens, and our fantastic legal advisor Aman Shah!

khanacademy.org gets a makeover, bug fixes, and UX improvements

Tue, 12 Mar 2013 22:02:37 -0400

Khan Academy has come a long way from when I first joined waaaaay back in 2010. The company and product have both matured. The content and experience that we offer the world has grown and changed dramatically, but this is the slow steady change of iterative improvement. And even though we’ve added over 1,000 videos and hundreds of interactive exercises to the site, that change isn’t always obvious.

It’s going to be hard to miss the changes we’re releasing today.

Current:

New:

Today, we’re launching the first piece of what will eventually be a major redesign of Khan Academy. This first step is part visual refresh, part re-focusing of the interface that folks use every day, and part foundation for future changes. This change should help to clarify exactly how our content is organized and what order we recommend proceeding through tutorials while fixing a host of other small bugs (like progress indicators not showing up or not being properly aligned). It also includes user experience improvements like the menu improvement that Ben Kamens blogged about.

For the curious, we’re planning a more in-depth look at the ideas and process behind these changes to be written by our amazing design intern, Tabitha Yong. Keep an eye out here for an announcement when that’s ready.

We’ve been testing these changes with a subset of our students and teachers around the world for the last month or so, and lots of folks have reached out to us, excited about the changes. But change isn’t automatically good and it’s definitely not always easy to deal with. We know folks will have questions and concerns. I invite you to leave your comments and questions here, or get in touch with the team via Twitter, and DEFINITELY file bug reports for things that are getting in your way. Your feedback is critical to helping us understand how to improve. Please don’t be discouraged if we can’t respond to you individually! We are reading/listening.

Love,

Team Athena (Ben Komalo, Marcia, Marcos, Jason, Tabitha)

ka-implementations: Check out a cool new tool that’s great for...

Fri, 01 Mar 2013 14:27:18 -0500

ka-implementations:

Check out a cool new tool that’s great for teachers!

Stephanie Chang, one of our software developers, created this exercise browser to help teachers easily see the different types of problems we have in each exercise. Watch the video above to see how to use the tool, or check it out yourself at www.khanacademy.org/r/exercise-browser.

Watch out—the exercise browser is a bit buggy right now and works best in Chrome and Safari. But don’t worry, it will only get better with time.

New feature: Change your email address

Fri, 18 Jan 2013 03:09:00 -0500

If you’ve ever wanted to change the email address on your Khan Academy account, now you can!

Just head over to your account settings page to add a new email address to log in with. If you want to remove the old one, you can do that too after linking your new email address.

if you have child accounts set up for your children, they can graduate to using a regular account after turning 13 years old by using the same method.

Khan Academy "Tutorials"

Fri, 11 Jan 2013 15:55:00 -0500

Thanks to a huge team effort, we are reorganizing the site’s content into “tutorials” — short collections of videos and exercises that focus on a single concept, such as “Subtraction with borrowing,” “Perimeter and area of rectangles,” “Shorting stock,” or “Impressionism.”

We’ve been working towards this ever since last spring, and we hope you find the new tutorials a great way to learn and practice.

Congratulations to Marcia Lee, Tom Yedwab, Stephanie Chang, Marcos Ojeda, Desmond Brand, Jason Rosoff, Ben Eater, Matt Wahl, Elizabeth Slavitt, and Sal Khan!

"It’s that some kids DO want to learn, but can’t."

Wed, 09 Jan 2013 19:23:00 -0500

Guest post by Andrew Einhorn, founder and CEO of the not-for-profit Numeric.org in South Africa

——-

A little over 15 months ago, we started an experiment. We wanted to know if Khan Academy was viable in township (slum) areas in South Africa and if so, what type of impact it might have on numeracy. Numeracy in South Africa is astonishingly weak, with just 2% of Grade 9s scoring over 50% on the annual national assessments in 2012.

And so we set out to see if Khan Academy might be used as a catalyst for change. But before I expound on the results of this experiment, I ought perhaps give a little more background on the environments we’re working in.

Townships in South Africa are not unlike the favelas of Brazil or the slums bordering Delhi and Calcutta in India. They are urban areas that were, until the end of Apartheid in 1994, reserved for non-whites, but have now become residential hubs for the urbanizing masses. They are typically built on the periphery of cities and tend to be characterized by high population density, poverty and unemployment. Picture a ramshackle of makeshift houses constructed out of corrugated iron, wood scraps and cardboard, jigsawed together into a gigantic maze 5 miles wide and 10 miles across. At the risk of generalising grossly, that’s more or less the picture I want you to have in mind as you read this article.

Now, townships in South Africa get a bad rap. They are viewed as ‘dangerous’ places and it is considered unwise to visit them unless you know someone there, or visit them as part of a ‘township tour’. Yet while crime rates in these areas are often high, the reputation does not do justice to the vibrant and persevering people who inhabit them. In particular, townships are YOUNG! On any given day, around two o’clock in the afternoon, the streets flood with uniformed, backpack-toting children on their way home from school. And despite having barely two pennies to rub together, they are meticulously dressed – shiny black shoes, starched white collars - and have aspirations to match. Most of the children in South Africa live in some form of township, which means that children growing up in these environments constitute the better part of the future of our country.

And yet it is supremely difficult to convince our best teachers to go and work in these areas. They are offered good jobs in well-resourced schools most often located in the wealthy suburbs of the cities. Principals at these schools compete fiercely for their skills. And this is as it should be. But it also entrenches the educational bias whereby a child’s access to quality education is directly proportional to the wealth of their family (see chart below).

* University exemption rate refers to the percentage of learners who attain the academic marks in their final year of school that are necessary to gain access to South African universities.

So Numeric’s experiment was to see whether we could use Khan Academy, in conjunction with a slightly less skilled (and often unqualified) math coach, to create the high impact and stimulating learning environments enjoyed by kids living in wealthier suburbs.

The opportunity provided by Khan Academy premised on the following: Videos do not argue about where they are played; they are unaffected by crime and environment. Appropriately licensed, they do not cost anything. They do not grow weary, skip class, or grow jaded. Instead, they convey their message enthusiastically, faithfully, clearly - time and time again. A child may watch just as many videos as he/she has appetite for, and need never feel limited by the dragging on of a boring class or an inept teacher. For many children in South Africa, a Khan Academy video will be their first exposure to what we might term ‘world class instruction’. When complemented by the exercises on the Knowledge Map, Khan Academy becomes a powerful tool for turning the tide on numeracy in South Africa.

So what were the results of the experiment? Well, it’s probably too early to draw any major conclusions, but we do have a few figures we’d like to share. We currently run 7 Khan Academy classes across 3 different hubs in the Eastern and Western Cape provinces of South Africa. The first pilot group of 20 Grade 9s has just completed its first twelve months of Khan Academy and their numbers are as follows:

* Total Khan Academy hours delivered: 2220

* Total Problems Solved: 27,988

* Total Problems per learner: 1399

* Total Khan Modules Complete: 1232

* Average Modules per learner: 62

Bearing in mind this is an afterschool programme, these are 27,988 math problems that would not otherwise have been attempted. The 62 modules completed by the average learner constitute 62 gaps that those learners have filled. But it’s more about just the numbers; it’s about creating excitement and enthusiasm around learning. This is hard to convey in words, but perhaps a picture will suffice.

As we always say to our coaches, the tragedy in South Africa is not so much that kids don’t want to learn. It’s that some kids DO want to learn, but can’t. Khan Academy provides us one way to give these kids a world-class education without having to magically replenish our nation’s supply of teachers. And who knows, perhaps one day these kids will become the inspirational and talented teachers we have waited for for so long!

—-

Andrew Einhorn is the founder and current CEO of Numeric.org. His TEDx talk on Numeric.org and Khan Academy is available here.

Introducing Khan Academy Lite

Fri, 14 Dec 2012 18:18:00 -0500

Jamie Alexandre, one of our interns from last summer, has launched a fantastic project: Khan Academy Lite. His goal is to bring Khan Academy to the 65% of the world that doesn’t have internet access.

Visit the site at:

http://kalite.adhocsync.com/

Read more about Jamie’s mission to make universal education universal:

http://jamiealexandre.com/blog/2012/12/12/ka-lite-offline-khan-academy/

Illinois pension obligations

Thu, 29 Nov 2012 12:07:54 -0500

After meeting with Illinois Governor Pat Quinn and discussing the state’s pension obligations, Sal has created two videos about the issue.

The first looks at how pensions differ from 401(k)s and IRAs. The second looks at how unfunded pensions will create future budget challenges for almost every state, especially Illinois.

For more about the Illinois pension squeeze, visit http://www.facebook.com/ThisisMyIllinois and http://thisismyillinois.com/.

Pension obligations
Illinois pension obligations

First programming challenge champs

Wed, 28 Nov 2012 19:03:00 -0500

Sal picked three submissions to our first programming challenge and made companion videos for them.

Congratulations to our challenge champs: Peter Collingridge, tetef, and Justin Helps!

Thanks to everyone who spun off a program for the challenge!

Peter Collingridge
View Peter’s simulation at http://www.khanacademy.org/cs/challenge-unbiased-estimate-of-population-variance/1169428428

tetef
View tetef’s simulation at http://www.khanacademy.org/cs/will-it-converge-towards-1/1167579097

Justin Helps
View Justin’s simulation at http://www.khanacademy.org/cs/unbiased-variance-visualization/1167453164

CS challenge: Accretion disk

Tue, 27 Nov 2012 13:54:00 -0500

Sal has a new programming challenge — create a simulation that demonstrates how when gravity pulls together a cloud of particles, the matter accretes into a rotating disk like our solar system or galaxy.

Vist the challenge here to spin off a copy of the base program and start working!

http://www.khanacademy.org/cs/challenge-modeling-accretion-disks/1176457365

Door number one, door number two, or door number three?

Mon, 26 Nov 2012 17:33:00 -0500

Khan Academy volunteer Peter Collingridge has created a computer science simulation that demonstrates what happens when you play “Let’s Make a Deal” with Monty Hall and have to choose what’s behind door number one, two, or three.

Watch the simulation here:

Monty Hall Simulation

Peter’s simulation illustrates Sal’s lesson that it makes sense to change your initial pick after Monty reveals to you that one of doors you didn’t pick has a goat behind it instead of a car.

Monty Hall Problem

History of the Alphabet

Mon, 26 Nov 2012 16:17:00 -0500

Instructor Brit Cruise dives into the History of the Alphabet, the fourth video in his series on Information Theory.

If you understand the alphabet, you’re ready for information theory! The full series starts here.

History of the Alphabet

First Computer Science Challenge

Wed, 21 Nov 2012 20:30:00 -0500

Sal has created the first Computer Science programming challenge. The challenge is to create a fun, visual CS program that demonstrates a principle from statistics that Sal describes here:

Unbiased Estimate of Population Variance Challenge

Check out the challenge and start your entry!

Cathedral of Notre Dame de Chartres

Tue, 20 Nov 2012 18:36:40 -0500

Co-Deans of Art and History, Dr. Beth Harris and Dr. Steven Zucker, have added parts 2 and 3 of their visit to the Cathedral of Notre Dame de Chartres. For more information, visit http://smarthistory.org/Gothic.html

Cathedral of Notre Dame de Chartres
This video focuses on the cathedral’s pre-Gothic history, its sacred relic, and the westwerk’s royal portal and jamb figures.
Cathedral of Notre Dame de Chartres (part 2)
This video focuses on the cathedral’s interior, its stained glass, nave, aisles, elevation, and choir.
Cathedral of Notre Dame de Chartres (part 3)
This video focuses on the symbolism of light, the cathedral’s flying buttresses, transept, the iconography of the north rose window, and the north porch and its sculptural program.