Progress updates may kill Khan for our school
We have used Khan Academy extensively for the past four years and this latest update may have single handedly put it in the grave. I speak on behalf of many students and my principle in frustration over this change. If changes aren't made our school will have to drop Khan from our program and scramble for something else right as the school year begins.
A huge concern of mine is the new progress page. I assume the old one will be done away with soon. On the new page there is no place to see how much time a student has spent or how many skills have been mastered in the last day, week, month, etc. Accountability tools for teachers have just gone out the window. Please, please, please, bring back a way that I can see that on the new page.
Another long term concern is the way the "units" work. According to the documentation mastery can only happen during a unit test or course challenge "Got a Proficient skill correct on the Unit test or Course challenge." https://khanacademy.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/115002552631-What-are-Course-and-Unit-Mastery- I know that missions are different but you can get 100% on the mission and not the unit (at least in my experience, maybe it is a bug?).
- You must complete a loooooong assignment to master just one skill. If I have mastered all but one skill in a unit I must take or retake the challenge or unit test. This means that I must take a 30 question (at least in the case of the one I tried on my account) test of 29 skills that I have already mastered and 1 skill that I have not. Even for students who work at a decent speed this is a huge time suck.
- One typo can cause an insane amount of frustration. I was so glad when Khan dumped the idea that you had to get 100% to move on last year. Now it is back and in the worst way. People hit the wrong key and get questions wrong. Under this new system putting the decimal place in the wrong spot or even a key not responding could cost you another 15-30 minutes of trying to redo one of these long tests to get that one last mastered skill.
- Students will now be faced with either being perpetually stuck at 80% mastery on skills or the students will be spending the entire practice time doing tests full of skills they already know to try to get that mastery instead of practicing skills that they need to be working on.
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