Where is the grid??

Hello Chris! My name is Lisa Krueger and I am a Khan Academy Ambassador teaching in Chicago. I completely agree with you and sent the Khan Academy developers a message let them know how often I used the grid view and exactly what I used it for as opposed to the other reports available through Khan Academy. I am going to add it to the 'wish-list' for the Khan Academy developers to let them know that users want it back. Please up vote this thread to show how useful the grid view was to you. Thank you for posting. 

Hi Chris! I was part of the pilot review of new feature roll out and I emailed Khan Academy directly regarding the Grid feature. As well as adding it to the 'wish-list' the Ambassadors are compiling for the Khan developers and I will embed this thread into the my recommendation on 'wish-list'. Sorry for the confusion! Hoping feature will be returned soon or a similar feature added. Thank you for posting and keep sending us your feedback!

Thanks for the clarification, Doug. In my view, replacing the grid view with the "assignment progress" of the new dashboard is contrary to the original mastery learning intent of Khan Academy.

Where the focus was once on competence and mastery (ie. "what can you do?"), the focus now seems to have shifted to following the steps (ie. "what have you done?"). It's now much easier to revert to the traditional teaching model of making all students in a class do the same things regardless of preparedness and progress rather than tailoring the learning to suit each student.

The Skill Progress view is also the closest that I found. It's better than nothing although annoying with the multiple listings of each skill. It's pretty good for identifying skills that are poorly understood across a class but no good at all for easily identifying students who are struggling with many skills (or have done little work at all). The old grid view did both very quickly.

Ah well, looks like I might need to write some Excel code to create my own table from the raw data exported from the skill progress view.

I used the grid almost every single day!  I miss it badly. I think the only reason there hasn't been more response on this thread is that most teachers have no idea it's gone, because they haven't returned to school yet.

How do I miss the grid? Let me count the ways.

1. Relative Progress. I assign a lot of Khan Academy via Google Classroom. Kids often lose track of what they've finished or not. I project and frequently refresh the grid on a classroom screen while they are working independently in class, so they can glance up and see what they're missing. Kids who are slacking can also see that most kids are way ahead, and they need to get their game going. Kids love to compete.

2. Grading. A fast glance at the grid tells me immediately who's finished and who's not. There's no other way that even comes close to showing results that readily. Grading will be so much more time-consuming without the grid. I dread the thought.

3. Celebration. I sometimes do a grid screenshot at the beginning of class and compare it to the grid at the end of class, so kids can see (as a whole) how much more blue there is. It gives them a visual sense of accomplishment.

PLEASE BRING BACK THE GRID! PRETTY PLEASE!

The grid view has been removed; Khan Academy found that it was being used far less than the other views and decided to focus on the others instead.  Your best bet for getting information about the progress of a class is the Skill Progress view. Particularly if you click on the "Struggling" box, this narrows in on who's struggling where, instantly:


They removed the Grid view shortly after I made a request that it be revamped into a much more useful form for my teachers, so I'm in hopes that they're soon going to introduce the "Jedi View" I'd asked for. :-)

Hi Lisa,

I had a quick look at the feature request topic and couldn't find your post. Could you please link it here?

I need this tool enough that I'm writing code to generate it myself from data exported from Khan Academy. It's one thing to request a feature that would need to be coded from scratch. In this case we're just asking to maintain access to a tool that has already been coded. Very frustrating.

Along with the view being gone, the Excel file that you could download from the Grid View was way better then what you get when you download from the Progress view.  We are sorely missing the Excel document that had student names listed in the left most column and then topics across the top with the words practived, level 1, etc written in the cells.

Missing that report is going to cause those of us using it at my school many extra hours of figuring out grades based on Khan Academy.

Hello all! I added a request to the wish-list being compiled for the Khan Academy developers regarding bringing back the Grid View and embedded this thread in the request. Hopefully, it will be back soon. Please let me know if you have any further questions, comments, or suggestions. Thank you for posting. 

The Grid View was valuable for students to keep on task during the class period. All I had to do was select the skills I had assigned on the grid and kids could see their progress (or lack of it!!). There was a bit of a competition to do well and not hide in the shadows.

@MrsLeifield, you are extremely fortunate to have a class where all of your students need the same practice and skills at the same time. For most of us, this is not true and Khan Academy *was* the best option around for supporting highly-differentiated classes with a minimum of time required for organisation. These recent changes force the "all the same" model and makes any differentiation extraordinarily tedious to implement and manage.

There are plenty of other tools that manage the regular classroom model that you outline but Khan Academy was the only option doing it differently. Many of us are very frustrated by this loss as they have fallen into line with conventional education software approaches.

I'm an adult learner who does khan academy challenges from time to time to keep up my math skills, but the grid view was by far my favorite thing.  I was just telling some coworkers about it today and was really excited to show it off, so I was disappointed that it was removed. It was very satisfying to see it getting fleshed out as I built up my skills.  There is nothing that serves that purpose that I can see anymore.

I hate that the grid mode is gone as well. It was a great visual tool for tracking progress especially for the world of math.

Hi Lisa (and others),

I've just posted over in the tech issues and workarounds thread that I've written some Excel code to generate a grid summary from the exported data.

Drop on by if you think it would be helpful for me to clean up the code and release it publicly.

I have been using KA for over a decade and a half.  

I really do like the new format.  I have the students take the course challenge.  Then I can see who already knows a skill.  If they are proficient or mastered, I give them something more challenging.  This year, since COVID, the state has reduced the number of standards, I assign those skipped standards to students who already know the days content.

I think this years version of KA I've seen in a long time.  Remember when it was a bunch of circles all connected, starting with telling time.

If assign a goal and have the students do the course mastery challenge, you will get fabulous information about students current ability that will allow you to differentiate instruction.  You can teach students that are ahead to watch videos and attempt work on their own.  You can make small group for students that are struggling.  You can invite those that are ahead to be tutors, if they'd like. 

When a student takes a test, little stars appear on the topics they need more work on.  

There is so much data now available, it is sad to see someone stating self-destructive.  

This thread was about bringing back the grid.  They brought it back!  They even color coded it.  

They listened!  

Hi Mike,

It's not the same as the original built-in grid, but I've written a tool in Excel that will let you do something similar that might work for you. Original post here:

https://khanacademy.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/community/posts/115000753531-Grid-view-you-can-have-it-back

Cheers,

Chris

Hi hope the grid comes back, because without it takes hours make an evaluation. I won't use Khan anymore until the grid comes back.

The grid is so much easier to use for grading because who only assigns one lesson at a time?

I would really like to make an assignment with several lessons and open it and see the stats for the entire assignment, Not a single lesson.

What can we do to get this back?

I can't even find the skill progress view at all? Where is it? Shouldn't it be between Assignments and Activity? 

The skill progress tab only appears if you have a Math mission selected for your class (under "settings")

It's one of many frustrations with this new system.

Hello Steve! I know that the Khan Academy developers are aware of how much users miss the Grid View and a replacement feature is in the pipeline.  Please let me know if you have any further questions, comments, or suggestions. Thank you for posting.

It is discussions like this that make me extremely cynical about the forums and their ability to influence the direction of Khan Academy. This request:

• should have been easy (turn back on functionality that had already been coded)
• had been requested by many people through multiple channels.
• has had plenty of time elapsed for any action to be taken

This earlier discussion around mirroring the maths setup to other subjects had even more vocal user support over the last 4 years and appears to have been similarly ignored by Khan Dev team.

https://khanacademy.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/community/posts/201372254-Really-like-the-math-setup-would-be-great-to-have-it-applied-to-Physics-and-Chemistry

The only conclusion that matches this observed behaviour from the developers is that they make system design decisions based on something other than anything users say in this forum. Occasionally there will be the pretence of having addressed a request/suggestion but the "solution" never seems to actually address the actual matter at hand.

After a quick look through the forum posts, I can't find a single counter-example. Are there any examples of suggestions from the community that have had any impact on the Khan dev team's design decisions?

Lisa Krueger - this has been in the pipeline for two years now. Is there any sign of it going live?

Unfortunately, what you're looking for is right here:

Thanks Doug Massey. At our school, we're using Mathspace, which also has a similar tool available.

Watching Khan Academy pedagogically self-destruct over the last few years has been very sad. They even removed the option of downloading the "everything" dataset that I used to create custom views (including a mastery grid).

OK, I'll bite - where is this fabled new grid? The only thing I can find is the activity log, which gives an anaemic view of recent activity with no ability to drill down and see more detail:

The old skills grid would allow a user-selectable combination of skills to be displayed with the current mastery level for a combination of students. By hovering an clicking, more detail could be viewed on any of the colour-coded boxes in the grid.

Hello, chris.heddles!

I understand how confusing this must be. Nonetheless, rest assured I'm here to further assist you.

If I'm not mistaken, I think that the color-coded grid Mrs. Edgar is referring to is the Assignment Scores report available in the classes on your Teacher Dashboard.

The scores in this report are color-coded, each color referring to the performance your students achieved for the skills evaluated in the assignments they completed.

For a complete guide on how our Assignment Scores report works, check out this article.

If you'd like to get more help with Khan Academy, please submit a support request. Our support team will be more than happy to help you.

Dustin
Community Support

Thanks for the great visual Dustin, that is what I was referring to.  Two things that would make it better would be to know when something has changed since I last graded or looked at their work, and having those same colors on the student end, so that RED, sub-par assignment stands out and they can easily find what they need to remaster.

Hi Dustin,

Thanks for your reply and information.

For those who have a very teacher-directed approach, this probably works very well because students only do questions inside Khan Academy when directly instructed to do so by their teacher.

For many of us, students do most (or all) of their practice outside the assignment structure. In this case, we don't care when or how a student gained a skill, all we care about is the student's current demonstrated proficiency in this skill. This data is totally to teachers/coaches.

My understanding is that self-guided practice through the system was Sal Khan's original vision for the site. All students have different gaps and learning requirements, so they all need different combinations of learning activities at different times.

I, too, miss the old grid.  As a solo user, I enjoyed being able to easily visualize my progress--kind of like punching holes in a bingo card.  The current system does not create the same sense of motivation or accomplishment when I complete exercises and master skills.  For those of us using the program solo (i.e., not as part of a class where a teacher is monitoring multiple students), that grid system was great.  I ask that you bring it back.

I was very unhappy about the grid, but have come to realize the virtues of the new system Khan's got in place. If you assign the exercise to students, under that class, you get an easy-to-grade report with "15/16 completed" per exercise, for example, and then a detailed report option showing which questions tripped the students up.  It's always difficult to accept change, but I'm there now!