Content update: Now revised: OER Project World History is refreshed and ready for students and teachers

Is the former version of the course still available somewhere? My son had been working on this course prior to the revision and now his mastery has been reset in many topics. This is very discouraging for him and he prefers the format that he was used to from all the time he had spent working on it. We would prefer to finish the course he had begun rather than asking him to redo so much to regain his mastery and change formats mid-course. 

If revising a course is going to reset the mastery percentage, it would be very helpful to alert everyone using the course that such a change is coming.  I would encourage Khan Academy to start alerting people at least 3-6 months ahead of time (since someone may take a break over their long school vacation) and give them an estimate of when the change will happen (such as "August 2025" or "Autumn - Winter 2026").

Hi JaniceHolz   this indeed was a miss. We usually give prior warning via banners on major course updates. However, in this case it did not happen.

Alex G

I hope this experience has led Khan Academy to put better safeguards in place so that this is unlikely to happen again.  It sounds like it has been very disruptive and demotivating for some of the Learners. (There's a similar report by Hayden Last on https://support.khanacademy.org/hc/en-us/community/posts/35990190013325-Courses-updated-then-mastered-percentage-lost)

Is there any way for Learners to continue the course they had started, rather than the revised course?  (Especially since Khan Academy gave them no warning of the change)

Hi Janice, 

I'm a content creator at Khan Academy, and I'm partly to blame for the messaging about these updates. This course is provided through a longtime partner, OER Project, who made the updates to these courses. Our messaging on Khan Academy wasn't great, but we will make sure that this doesn't happen in the future. I apologize that the new course is disrupting learning in the old course.

Overall, the updated course will support student learning through more engaging lessons, improved articles, and clearer exercises. But, if you'd like to return to the old course, here are links to all the old units for WHP: Origins to the Present. (We keep the links open in case learners or teachers have saved them in course materials.) I hope this helps! 

• Unit 1: https://www.khanacademy.org/humanities/whp-origins/era-1
• Unit 2: https://www.khanacademy.org/humanities/whp-origins/era-2-early-humans-250000-years-bp-to-3000-bce
• Unit 3: https://www.khanacademy.org/humanities/whp-origins/era-3-cities-societies-and-empires-6000-bce-to-700-c-e
• Unit 4: https://www.khanacademy.org/humanities/whp-origins/era-4-regional
• Unit 5: https://www.khanacademy.org/humanities/whp-origins/era-5-the-first-global-age
• Unit 6: https://www.khanacademy.org/humanities/whp-origins/era-6-the-long-nineteenth-century-1750-ce-to-1914-ce
• Unit 7: https://www.khanacademy.org/humanities/whp-origins/era-7-the-great-convergence-and-divergence-1880-ce-to-the-future

Ben Chleboun,
Thank you for the information.

christilindstrom,
The original course is available; see Ben's comment above this for links to each unit.

Hi! I wanted to suggest that for future course revisions, perhaps retaining exercise URLs will preserve skills? I've noticed that this is often done on the math courses on Khan Academy, so there's a lot of common skills across what are otherwise different curricular curations.

The revised WHP Origins looks exciting, and I think the Origins name could be continued - even if to spark debate among students on whether, and how, we might study origins and what that means!

I'm curious if the 1750 course has been retired - I wish it weren't because it's a rather useful curation of modern world history, and serves as a refresher for many contexts. There's AP History of course but that's tailored to AP requirements while 1750 had a provocative starting point that also sparks critical discussion: the politics of naming origins, inflection points, and periodisation in history.

While humanities courses ultimately need real-time dialogue, including such things and signposting points for discussion would be great in the mastery-based format that KA offers courses in.

Also, on a related OER note: I'd love to see mastery exercises for Climate Project too!