Khan Academy has spent the last year developing and testing a new Mastery System to support our bold mission is to offer a free, world-class education to anyone, anywhere.
As of today, users in English-speaking locales who use desktop browsers will see this new system in action.
For a description of the new Mastery system, check out this article!
Great question, dsilvernail. We don't have diagnostics (yet!), and Mastery Challenges are specific to missions, but if you're working in a course that has a course challenge, you could have students start with that. You could also give a third-party diagnostic to see what skills your students need to work on and go from there. Interested to hear if other educators have thoughts on this!
The updated mastery system is GREAT -- the disconnect between Explore, Practice, and Missions was a huge source of confusion.
That said, I do think the scoring percentage between mastery points and mission completion should be reduced to a single score. It's confusing to explain that you are 63% through the mission but have 80% of the mastery points. Plus, there's really no extra benefit to this.
The mission gives an adaptive way to achieve mastery -- it's the "AI" part of Khan Academy. You can use a more linear approach with section quizzes and unit tests where you/coach/parent control what is worked on. But fundamentally they should be measuring the same things -- mastery of the topic to a given level of proficiency.
You've gotten a few complaints that there will no longer be a way to see how many articles and videos are left to view. Having this is good for knowing that new content has been added. Is there a chance that these complaints will be acted upon, with the counts of articles and videos not yet viewed being added back in some time in the near future?
It is good news to know you are working on it. But IMHO it is not what we were asking for. What you are implementing is just a point system that allows you to get the mastery through exams and videos... it's not bad at all but what I think the people was asking to implement in other courses was the Spaced Review feature of the Mission system. Which forces you not only to pass the tests and then archive the mastery with the unit exams but to review it and to have it reviewed serveral times to ensure you won't forget it, or identify what you do forget if so.
I might be wrong but the most important thing students can learn is how to study and how to retain what they have learnt and that is what the spaced review system helps to teach them.
So this improvement is better than nothing but I hope in a future both systems are available for the students.
Best regards.
I agree with Javier, the new mission system doesn't really have the spaced out repetition aspect. Also, the system is still kind of clunky? Like, there's a lot more menus you have to go through to switch from video to practice (before you just kept going in a row through the explore menu or through the mission).
It's not bad, but it kind of feels like a much more different website. I don't know how much of this is me not liking change and how much of it is me finding it confusing or unhelpful.
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