Why did you remove Missions?

Hi, Chau-

There are several reasons that Khan Academy is saying goodbye to Missions. One major reason is that the Missions code base (the building blocks that make Missions work) is very old, causing errors and disruptions in the Missions experience, and making it increasingly difficult for developers to maintain. And in conceiving the mastery learning system we want for the future, we recognized some key gaps in Missions that made it difficult for use in the classroom:

• Teachers couldn’t assign Missions to students and track their progress against those assignments, which made it difficult to track student work and progress. Course Mastery is assignable.

• It wasn’t clear to teachers how Missions evaluated a student’s understanding, especially how students progressed to Mastery. With Course Mastery, the framework for student progress is simpler, more predictable, and more transparent- making it a better tool for coaching conversations.

• Missions weren’t integrated into the Course Library, so teachers and learners often didn’t know how (or whether) what they were working on fit with their curriculum or specific needs. Course Mastery is integrated into the Course Library.

• Missions were limited to Math and some Computer Science content. Course Mastery is available for many science and humanities courses too.

Khan Academy is committed to continuing to improve Course Mastery. In 2020, Mastery Challenges and elevated Course Challenges were added to encourage acceleration through familiar material; and enhancements will continue to be made that support engaged learners and efficacious use of class time.

I hope this helps!

that doesn't mean that you cannot bring back missions with new and improved code. Something about Missions is very useful, maybe it's lack of structure in what order you do things. It's recommendation system is based off of what you're interested in, and off of what you still need to know. Every recommendation that it gave me felt correct, and course challenges don't even try to reccomend. it's this then this then this, no matter what. There was even world of math, where at one moment you were doing stuff way beyond your grade level, and then you were counting shapes again, keeping all math fresh.  (partially a response to FreshBakedPizza)

lo i have never even seen missions so can somebody tell me what it is about

just a sec I will copy and paste from another response for a same question :)

Copied and pasted from another post I responded to (https://support.khanacademy.org/hc/en-us/community/posts/360070492471-Missions-are-the-Best-)

• ok. so the way it worked, was you had a progress bar with a percentage. big circle, 100% mastery is the full circle. there are 5 levels: not practiced, practiced, level 1, level 2, and mastered. you have boxes on the left with all the practices and it's colored in based off of your level. you have a stream, where it automatically recommends assignments and videos for you based on what you've been doing and what you need to know. You can add manually by clicking on the boxes. The new thing is so structured!!!!!!! After doing enough practices, or enough hours passing, you can do a mastery challenge. It's similar to the current one, except with all the levels, it's more meaningful. You can level up 1, level down 1, stay the same, and sometimes a change of 2. You are also tested on things that are Mastered in order to make sure you still know it. Leveling up is separate for each task. There's a mission for each grade level, an extra one for K-2, and also one for all of math ever, where you are on a mastery challenge and one question is crazy algebra, and then the next question is suddenly just counting teddy bears. It's all amazing. Seriously, if there was a problem with the code, then they should have remade it instead of pushing snippets into random places.

  Hope that helps.

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