Good Day - Hope you are well.
Quick question that I was not able to answer via the RACHEl Friends nor Khan Academy sites.
Ques: Khan Academy is publicizing “Course Mastery” application which provides individualized student support. Does RACHEl contain this application or a similiar “off the Internet” application where you can register students and track individual progress using the RACHEL?
Thanks for you time - I appreciate!
Allen
Hi @KSSP-01 – RACHEL has the KA-Lite application (Khan Academy Lite) which does register students and track individual progress as they watch videos and complete or attempt exercises. I am sure it is not a perfect match for what Course Mastery is, but it is a very good alternative system.
Jeremy - Excellent feedback. Thank you for your immediate and very helpful response. I am not that familiar with the KA-Lite application but now I am. We will attempt to put this to use in 2020 at a few of our sites. AM
Actually Rachel also includes Kolibri which contains Khan and some additional material and which provides better tracking of student progress. From what I have read on the forums, KA-lite is being deprecated in favor of Kolibri.
Brian, thank you very much for this update and steerage. I will take a look at what Kolibri offers and see if we can use this a multiple disconnected networks. Really appreciate your reply. Brian, are you using Kolibri now at some locations? If so, how is that working out? AM
Hi @KSSP-01, Yes I am using Kolibri at our location. It seems to be an improvement over KA-lite. It allows you to create a bit more structure than KA-lite. I find, especially with math, that it is best to keep the students on a linear path, rather than having them jumping all over the place and getting into lessons that are way over their head. Makes it easier for the teacher to assess their progress. Kolibri is working on Android 4.1 (quite old tablets we have), but I had to install Chrome as the browser. The version installed on Rachel has a problem with the ‘Exams’ function, so you cannot create a new exam. However, I have found that I don’t need this to get plenty of functionality from the system. its a little tedious, but you can use the ‘Lesson’ function to create a linear series of khan materials (videos, exercises). There is also a button to allow the kids to wander around at will, and I wish they would provide the admin a switch to turn that off, but so be it. Most interestingly, there is some mention on the Kolibri forum that they are working on an ‘app’ that would run on android, and allow students to take home assignments etc. That will be quite exciting if they can get that working. Such a function already exists for Moodle, but there is almost no ‘pre-prepared’ lessons available for Moodle (that I can find).
I have installed Kolibri and Moodle on separate Pis and indeed Laptops with Raspbian but I’m not sure how effective they are simply because the teachers at these locations do not yet have the expertise ot get the best out of them.In time I.m sure they will be great but in the mean time people use Khan Academy to help their delivery.
I think KA-Lite is no longer in development and Kolibri is intended to replace it. It might be better to start out with Kolibri and learn it rather than KA-Lite which won’t get updated.