Comment by dangoor | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dangoor | Hacker News Reader

Khan Academy (where I work) is definitely trying to help people achieve mastery[1][2], and we have people who create studies to test our efficacy and help inform future course development. We care about proving the efficacy of our approaches and constantly improving.

We've been putting in a lot of effort over the past few years specifically to help teachers help their students achieve mastery in their subjects. One piece of that has been standards alignment for our content. I don't know about the UK, but I do know that our content has been aligned with the US Common Core[3].

Since Khan is a non-profit, we're often best known for offering all of our content for free so that anyone can learn (and our mission _is_ a "free, world-class education for anyone, anywhere"), but we know that a lot of learning happens alongside teachers in classrooms and are providing tools to help with that.

[1]: https://support.khanacademy.org/hc/en-us/articles/3600307534...

[2]: https://www.khanacademy.org/khan-for-educators/k4e-us-demo/x...

[3]: https://www.khanacademy.org/commoncore

If you will, could you speak more to

> we have people who create studies to test our efficacy and help inform future course development. We care about proving the efficacy of our approaches and constantly improving."

I'm curious how that works, what the results are. For instance, is the endpoint metric how many more students pass standardized testing? If so, how does that leak into the definition of 'mastery'?

Honestly, this is not my area of expertise (I'm a software person), so I'm going to avoid speculating too much.

Standardized testing is indeed one way that we can demonstrate efficacy:

https://www.khanacademy.org/about/impact

That page also includes studies that talk about course pass rates.

I don't know if our efficacy work necessarily changes "mastery" definitions, but I can imagine (but have no direct involvement with) these studies and smaller-scale studies are used by our pedagogy and course creators to improve how we approach the material.

Again, though, not my area of expertise :)

That's fair, thanks for answering, cheers :)

Khan Academy is no longer motivating for kids.

It used to work great. It was mainly math. Each lesson was marked out in a big 2D map, with arrows connecting lessons. Kids would earn meteorites, stars, comets, and other sky object badges.

I've seen this in action with multiple kids. The interest just died, almost 100%.

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