The most amazing community
I'm a Guardian on Khan Academy, and as a Guardian most of my attention is focused on the bad, the mad and the sad parts of conversations on the site. This could be quite depressing if it was not totally outweighed by the energy, joy and care I see unfolding every day. I see students helping students, teachers, professionals, retirees, unemployed, underemployed and disabled people sharing their time and resources for the good of the community. Some of them are organized in teams, others just keep answering questions, delivering evaluations and setting examples of their own accord - year after year!
This summer, I ran a small, private project to improve Intro to JS Project evaluations. The people I approached knew very well that there was no badge at the end and no official recognition, but they agreed to help because they believed the effort would be a step in the right direction for the CS community. It was only a small group, 10 people, but the team managed to deliver high quality evaluations for around 5% of the projects delivered, and assist the Guardians with tasks like identifying plagiarized projects. The team also identified problems with wording of the pass requirements for some of the projects, leading to confusion and errors, and known ProcessingJS bugs and documentation issues. This is now being looked into by Khan Academy.
The response from the people I approached was overwhelming. In fact, the whole project snowballed because of "friend recruitment" so I had ask them not to invite more people, even if they qualified : )
This is the greatest part about Khan Academy for me: the way we learn from each other, and together accomplish something more than each of us can do when working separately.
I would like to thank the following people, listed alphabetically after their nicknames on Khan Academy:
AI, An0n3m0us, Benjamin Clements, ChrisRennick56, Homeskool99, Hopper Is Me, Isaac Emerald, Jett Burns and Legolas Greenleaf.
I would also like to give thanks to Bob Lyon for what he did for the article ProcessingJS: random(a, b) sometimes returns b
(and for being a great resource and always challenging me to learn more.)
and finally I'd like to thank Laurie from Khan Academy who allowed me the use of some necessary KA resources, and SpongeJr for playing "ideas ping pong" before and during the project.
Best of all, I know there were a lot of other people I could have asked for help, who would have assisted, eagerly and skilfully!
A long stemmed rose to all of you: @-->--
[Edited by Inger Hohler 31.08.2017 - to correct Isaac's name!]
[Edit by Inger Hohler 01.15.2018 as Homeskool99 decided not to be anonymous about participation anymore.]
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