The biggest change that Khan Academy has ever made in its history is the introduction of the new Learning Dashboard, which is basically a new learning flow, made with the purpose of engaging people more.
We have previously published a review of Khan Academy, discussing about its basics, functions and features, and this article will focus on KA’s remarkable new update of the learning dashboard.
With a lot of content on KA, many users didn’t know where to start, or what level was appropriate for them. On the learning dashboard, KA recommends new content for you to learn, just like a personal tutor would. The dashboard is tuned to help you learn Math, and other subjects are expected to be available soon. Log in and enter your dashboard, to select a mission. You’ll find missions such as The World of Math, Algebra and those aligned to grade levels. The squares that are present besides the mission, form a progress bar, each representing a skill or a type of Math problem, and for those familiar with the KA’s knowledge map, it can be viewed as a condensed knowledge map for a particular mission. Every time you finish a task on your mission, the progress bar updates. As you master the skills, the individual cells will darken. You should try to get all of the cells to turn deep blue by sharpening your skills.
You start by taking the mission pretest that helps address the issue of where you should start on KA and what exercises are most appropriate for you. The test is adaptive, if you answer the questions right, it gets harder and onto advanced topics and if you answer incorrectly, it will give you simpler or more basic topics.
After taking the test, some of the tiles of your progress bar will change colors, which means that you’ve started on your journey to master the skills. Grey implies that you haven’t practiced the concepts yet, while blue means that you know the concept at a reasonable level and the deeper the darkness of the blue, the better your knowledge of the concept. Clicking on the tiles will directly take you to the exercise for that concept. Based on how you did the pretest, you can immediately figure out what you know well enough or where you need practice. According to your progress bar, you’ll be recommended with what’s the next best thing is for you. A next set of tasks will be unlocked, that will suggest you new things to practice, and each one you will finish will give you point rewards. The exercises are accompanied by hints and a video which you can watch to get a clarification of the concept that the question is based on.
If you have a coach or if you’re someone’s coach, then the coach can make their own recommendations. There are a lot of coach tools that help the coach keep track of what the student is working on, based on which the coach can recommend particular exercises to be focused on or to be prioritized. Once you spend some time on the system, your progress bar will get more and more filled up with blue tiles of varying shades indicating skill level. To level your skills up, by working on the skills you’ve already practiced, you need to take the mastery challenge, on completing which you get a report that shows what you achieved by completing the challenge.
The challenges are fun and rewarding, as you can keep track of progress right on the dashboard. Points, badges, and skill levels are all visible and updated in real time.
The learning flow makes sure that you know where to start, that you’re starting on things that are at your level, and not only are you learning new things, but you have the opportunity to review those things and make sure when to use those things when you face with a whole mix of problems. Go ahead, try this new feature out and fill out the knowledge map by mastering skills and fulfill your mission in Math and future other missions.
