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learningequality
Feature Suggestion: Coach created lesson plans
SUGGESTION: A useful feature enhancement would be the ability for a coach/teacher to create custom lesson plan pages for each student and each course.
DISCUSSION: Even though I only have been using KA Lite for a few days, I am finding it somewhat confusing to navigate, especially for my students. Looking the Khan Academy web site, I noticed the suggested Math Tracks for U.S. grades 3 to 8. Since KA Lite is deployed internationally, a pre-configured U.S. based plan would not work. My suggestion is to add the ability to easily create custom web pages for: 1) each student and 2) a particular course or topic.
IMPLEMENTATION: Assuming that each student record has some unique ID in the database, a single page with that ID as part of the URL could be put in a "students" folder. The home page would look for that HTML file when the student logged in. If no page existed, then the home page would not change. However, if a page existed, then it could be added at the top of the links under "Learn by Watching Video!
To create this page, I would suggest a simple approach, using concepts from build your own web solutions. A pre-formated page could be used with a placeholder for the student's name at the top. The coach/teacher would populate the lesson plan by checking the desired sub topics from an expanding list on the right side. The expanding list format used for downloading videos could be used. A constraint could be that only the lowest sub topic could be selected and added to the student's list. By selecting individual sub topics one at a time, the coach/teacher could then build a lesson plan based upon his/her normal teaching routine.
What about the "pain" of building individual lesson plans for a group of 30 students. That is where the second concept of creating a "course/topic" lesson plan comes in. These HTML files could be stored in a different directory. Each page would have room for a title and description at the top. Like a student's page, the coach/teacher would select sub topics in the appropriate order for the class or topic.
Now the pick list for choosing topics on a student's page would need to include a pick list of available "course/topic" lesson plans. Thus a student's lesson plan could consist of a list of one or more course/topic lesson plans plus any supplemental topics that the student needed to review.
Once these features were added, other coaches/teachers could share course/topic lesson plan pages for common needs. For example, a set of Common Core plans could be created. Or a set of plans to support the WorkKeys exams in the U.S.
Jon Lockwood PS - I wasn't sure where to post this suggestion.
Hey Jon, thanks for the note! We've actually been working on precisely this feature, "behind the scenes" for the Nalanda Project, a large deployment we have in India. We're calling the feature "playlists" (you can search through our issues to see more), and currently the mappings are hard-coded, and then teachers can assign them to particular groups of students. Before it's launched to the master branch, we hope to add the ability for teachers to create their own playlists dynamically.
Lovin' this discussion and can tell Jon that it is also happening slowly on the west side of Chicago if only on my lonely computer and my wayward branch. Works like most things from KA Lite spectacularly.....particularly the quizzes which allow students to retake exercises tied to a specific playlist.
On Mon, Jul 7, 2014 at 8:55 PM, Jamie Alexandre [email protected] wrote:
Hey Jon, thanks for the note! We've actually been working on precisely this feature, "behind the scenes" for the Nalanda Project, a large deployment we have in India. We're calling the feature "playlists" (you can search through our issues to see more), and currently the mappings are hard-coded, and then teachers can assign them to particular groups of students. Before it's launched to the master branch, we hope to add the ability for teachers to create their own playlists dynamically.
— Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub https://github.com/learningequality/ka-lite/issues/2217#issuecomment-48263599 .
QUESTION: How useful is this in the U.S when Khan Academy is creating curated lists for Common Core? At first one might answer it is not as long as a student has internet at home.
DISCUSSION: I setup KA Lite for a Mexican family that does not have internet nor iPhones. I have an iPad Mini with Verizon and could use it to access the KA Academy web site when at their home. However, I don't want to "loan" my iPad to the students. Therefore I configured my old MacBook Pro (2006) as a standalone solution using KA Lite. I also downloaded various Mac related training videos from YouTube.
But what about students who have internet? The "real" question is "What type of internet do they have?" Today most of us have cable or DSL connections. Some also have satellite connections. However, the telephone companies are trying to get out of the "wire line" business and move everything to wireless. Those of us who have iPhones or iPads know that monitoring our data usage is very important. Therefore the ability to create a "stand alone" KA Lite "application" that syncs to a KA Lite cloud server would be very valuable. The coach/teacher would monitor the progress of their students from the cloud and create "playlists" which would sync back to the students computers. Thus the students could not blame KA Lite when a high usage internet bill comes in. Rather, it was the result of a 20 hour marathon on War of Warcraft or downloading HD Netflik videos.
To implement this concept would require the packaging of KA Lite as an installable application rather than a git installed solution plus understanding terminal commands.
Jon Lockwood - retired computer programmer An Apple computer user since the Apple II days First programing language was PDP-8 assembly language
Hi @noteswiz,
Thanks for your reply! This is certainly a use case and minimizing internet usage is one of the goals. Also, we do plan to have playlists as a syncable model, and student progress is already being synced, so remote coaches will be able to track their students' progress. This is currently a planned feature, and we'll make sure to ping you once this has been implemented. I'll keep this issue open to make sure you find out once we have this.
