Transition from Missions: An Appeal from a Life Long Learner

Dear Khan Academy Developers:

While I understand the reasons for Khan Academy's core focus, you may have an untapped user-base that may not be so obvious from the inside. i.e. not traditional teachers or students or even home-schoolers, but the life-long learner professional crowd who actually uses Khan Academy every so often for refresher modules on various topics. This demographic may be larger than you think, so if you are reading this, and it's you too, please swallow your pride and chime and own it to actually let K.A. know who their users are. I can't be the only one from this usually anonymous demographic I hope. I also suspect that there may be quite a few teachers with a K.A. account for themselves. Please tell me I'm not alone ;(

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OK, so yes, I'll admit that I have an engineering degree and I bop into K.A. every so often to brush up on some differential equations. After all, what human being actually remembers all those trig-conversions and integral substitutions if you don't use them every so often? So yeah, I'm a huge fan of the upper-level STEM content. K.A. is great for that because you can actually snap into a module and get a quick 15 minute refresher on some weak-spot in your knowledge base. I've even found a few topics in statistics that I never remember learning at all in school. JAVAscript was not taught in my engineering discipline and is useful to learn in a structured way.

Furthermore, it's even occasionally refreshing to see how the grade-level basics are being taught with interactive applets, which is a slightly different experience from when I was in school with only a chalk-board, and makes me think of things from a fresh perspective.

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So now my humble appeal:

Can you at least program dirt-simple birds-eye overview (like the grid-map with shaded blue colored squares from "Missions") that shows all your progress in a field of knowledge? The square map was wonderful, because from my perspective I really don't care about the grade breakdowns, only the content. Thinking of the knowledge as a continuity rather than grade-level compartments is fantastic...also I can refresh-topics as fast as I need. Can you please please please leave a colored grid map view for STEM topic modules somewhere? That is how I quickly scan for refresher-content of interest.

Thank you so much!

Regina Litman

19 februari 2020 04:34

I'm "chiming in" as a lifelong learner, although I'm a frequent poster here who often does refer to my lifelong learner status in my posts. I much prefer the Missions over the Mastery system, especially since Khan Academy has decided to not allow us to have a Reset button for those long unit tests.

When I contacted Khan Academy privately about at least making the Reset Unit Tests button available just to adult/lifelong learners, they told me basically that they don't want to make certain options available to some users but not to others. (Huh! As a user of the iPad app more than of the website, I can tell you that there are a few things not made available to app users.)

carol

20 april 2022 16:51

As part of our Support Community improvement project, we’re preserving inactive posts that have historical or community value and closing them to new comments. This is one of them!

If this post covers a topic that you’re interested in discussing with the community or requests a feature you’d like to see on Khan Academy, you can try to find an active post about it and add your thoughts (or feel free or create a new post if it doesn’t yet exist in the forum).

Transition from Missions: An Appeal from a Life Long Learner

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