I feel like crying now

Hi Nikhil,

Thanks for posting. I remember using missions quite often as well, and the new Course Mastery system is definitely different. However, it seems that there were multiple issues with having Missions as the primary system to help students master skills, and that information along with additional information regarding the removal of Missions is available in this article. 

I've seen some different reactions to the transition from Missions to the new Course Mastery system, and I've been thinking about potential ways to retain or integrate important elements from the Missions model that users especially enjoy into the new mastery system.

I'll share this thread with the Team, so if you have any further thoughts or any ideas, feel free to share them here. If you'd like to mention what aspects of the Mission system you particularly enjoyed and/or what aspects of the new Course Mastery system you don't like as much or anything like that, we're always happy to hear input from the community! Community plays a big role in improving Khan Academy for the world, so always feel free to let us know what you think. ;D

I agree, Missions were the best. They were better then the new stuff.

Yeah... it's so sad, but we can't rally or something... PLEASE KEEP MISSIONS!!!

I never used or heard of Missions until they mentioned that is was going away.

Everything Thrice

Hmm. They were AMAZING! 

Cyrus Parson thank you for your interest.

What I liked about missions and don't like about mastery is that if a new skill is added to an existing unit, in which I have already achieved mastery through either the mission or an earlier administration of a unit test, I need to take a whole unit test to now have mastery of the whole unit. This puts me at a risk of losing mastery on skills I already mastered, plus I have to continue to retake the unit test (sometimes containing 30 or more questions/problems) to get back to the mastered level.

In the missions system, questions usually appeared six at a time, sometimes with a previously-mastered skill thrown in. But if it was a situation in which only the new skills remain to be mastered, fewer than six questions were presented. Even which a question involving a previously mastered skill was missed, it only took about one more session of six or fewer questions to get everything back to mastered.

One difficulty with trying to get back to a mastered level, which rarely affected me but got complained about here by others, is that if there were multiple missed questions in a certain period of time, a student could not get back into missions until a certain amount of time, between 2 hours and 2 days, had elapsed.

But all in all, I think that Khan Academy should have kept and broadened the missions system. Instead of moving math courses that had the missions system over to mastery, the sciences, humanities, and other courses, which didn't have missions should have been given them instead of the mastery system. In addition to World of Math, there could have been World of Science, World of Art History, etc. And if the programming language was obsolete, how difficult could it have been to convert missions to a new programming language?

Even the badges, that I worked so hard to get are all being retired now. I really want to rage quit Khan Academy now.

Let me put this into perspective: 90% of everything I've learnt pertaining to maths or the sciences is from Khan Academy. It really gives me a bad taste in my mouth that so much hardwork counts for nothing. 

Don't give us that "old codebase" excuse. I know a LOT of JS and Python, and I am SURE that the KA website is built on top of a JS flavor. So, really, how hard could it be?

Cyrus Parson , I have been on this website for almost 8 years, and I loved missions and I still do. It breaks my heart to see so much effort coming to waste. 8 years, 10000 hours+ on Khanacademy count for nothing? Damn.

So, before you start getting rid of Da Vinci and Magellan, as a reminder, keep missions. 

Think Again

Yes, I agree with that. Missions needs to stay.

Missions has always been part of Khan Academy. You did not need to do 19 problems, just to master one skill.

Sure, maybe the wait times were a little rough, but still,

This is what I say:

MISSIONS NEEDS TO STAY! 

The missions are not near it.

Cyrus parson, I appreciate you sharing the threads, because if I have a suggestion, it's to instead of spending all of the programmers' time trying to add parts of missions to that course mastery thing (not even close), just make a faithful recreation on their new codebase of theirs.

This is nothing about nostalgia. The missions were an affective and engaging way to learn, and were free from any boring rigid structure of you learn A for a month in 567489608734218679 different ways and then B and then C. You can learn whatever you want whenever and however fast, and

Every single recommendation for what to learn next felt right. It never got boring any single time

actually it was boring when I was done, and there was no more. good thing there was always another mission on a higher level.

Missions were pretty great, I didn't have many nitpicks about them, but Khan Academy has moved on since I started, and I accept that sometimes something new must come. So thanks Cyrus for being active and responding. 

That was quite the different response to your previous one, so I will try to be calmer. I appreciated Missions, and while Khan Academy is moving on a bit, at some point they still have the same goal and yet are changing how they do it. This is perfectly fine, except I think that some of us have quite the attachment to this program, and that their mission (oops that's a real term so ignore that) hasn't changed too much. They are trying to spread out, but if they were already going to replace missions with something completely new then they might as well have tried to keep it less linear. I know it's already been four months without missions, but there's nothing really motivating me to learn more. No WOM. No huge percentage marks taunting you and pulling you in. Nothing to show improvement. Nothing to show how far you are. (I also have a complaint about the stop you after 4 instead of get 4 in a row and try forever, but that's not the point here). I understand that they are moving on, but it is a real shame, in my (arrogant) opinion. I do appreciate when the advocates come in and it's very nice and maybe they can say something to others but in the end we already know why they took missions from us. We already know that, it wasn't a surprise in June. I do feel that the dev team is as stubborn as us, and it's been so long so I will probably have to leave this topic be, and also the non-dev moderators can't really do anything. I appreciate the people who had the power to and also did push this problem a bit to the actual staff. But if the team looked at the thread like Cyrus Parson said then I'd like to say that my main difference is probably the rigidity of course mastery, and that missions would recommend related tasks that you seemed interested in while course mastery is in order, and if you're sick of something then it demotivates you since it's so rigid.

I never utilized or knew about Missions until they,,,, referenced that is was disappearing.

As a teacher, I know my content.  I know what is appropriate for every student.  Since I do a lesson before I assign it to students, whether it's on paper or online, I know whether my students are ready for it.

I can't imagine having students and not being able to go into a lesson, do a problem or two and assess whether my students could do it.  If a teacher can't tell whether their students are ready for the next step, they don't know what the students do and don't know, and they aren't doing their job.

Missions included sequential learning, ignoring grade level.  A student could start at the beginning (below grade level), fill in holes, come up to grade level and then go beyond.  Because now the units are broken down into tiny pieces by grade level, students who grasp the material quickly are bored, and students who need more time are wasting time on pieces and parts that don't matter.  You also have plenty of students who are embarrassed to sit next to friends and peers and have them see that they're working on material that is below grade level.

I want the ability to ignore grade level and do what is best for my students.  For now, that means assigning every math class to a student and sorting through to find the lessons they need.