As of today, you can now share your Khan Academy badges on Facebook using the new Open Graph protocol. In normal speak, it means that you’ll get richer, more interesting displays of your badges on Facebook if you choose to share them, like so:

So, how does it work?

Say your name is Mary Littlelamb, and you earn a couple of badges:

If you click on the “Share” button,

This dialog will pop up asking for you to grant us permission to post on your behalf. In order to share the badge on Facebook, you must click “Allow”. Otherwise, we can’t share it. =(

After a short delay (hopefully not too long; we have to wait for Facebook to confirm that the publish action went through), the badge will appear in your Facebook Timeline!

If you miss the opportunity to share from a badge notification dialog, you can also share from the “Recently Completed Activity” section of your Khan Academy profile page.

Just hover over the badge you want to share, and the same share links will appear in gray:

After sharing several badges, a neat Khan Academy “Badges earned” section will appear in your Facebook timeline:

You can edit or remove this view.

If you’ve shared more badges than can fit in the display case, you can customize which ones get shown by clicking on “View Individual Stories”.

On the resulting page, you can change the settings for individual badges.

Here, Mary wants to make sure “Addition and subtraction” shows up in her Timeline.

Back on Mary’s Timeline, we can see the changes were put into effect. Woohoo!

At the end of it all, Mary’s friends will be able to see her activity in their Facebook Newsfeed. Way to go, Mary!

If you click on a badge, you’ll end up at a page more info about what it takes to earn the badge, as well as a ginormous list of all the badges you can earn on Khan Academy.

Happy sharing!

Stephanie, Desmond, and Marcos

Developer Tom Yedwab writes here about using “A/B” testing to compare the effectiveness of changes we make to the site.

“Data is easy to collect but hard to interpret, never giving you a clear result that confirms your hypotheses. However, even noisy and confusing data is invaluable in forming and testing hypotheses about user behavior.”

Our most recent tests were for our new “Watch” menu:

and our new “topic pages”:

We hope the menu and new pages are making it easier for you to find great videos!

From developer Marcia Lee:

about a week ago, we released hovercards (not to be confused with hoverboards). the next time you watch a video on ka, mouse over the name of someone who has posted a comment, question, or answer!

the observant ka user will recognize that hovercards are mini versions of a user’s public profile, with her avatar, name, five hand-picked badges, and some stats hinting towards her commitment to the site.

discussing a video on ka is intellectually fruitful, and the hope is that hovercards make the experience more joyful and more human. human in that you can imagine the other people who also mulled over which five badges to share, who also played around with their arrangement until their display case looked just right, and who are embarking on educational journeys that cross paths with your own.

give it a try and let us know how you feel!

check out more screenshots chronicling this feature’s development.

From instructor Brit Cruise:

One of the most exciting aspects of joining the Khan Academy team was the potential to explore new ways of integrating video and software. As a new faculty member, I hope to deliver mini-courses as journeys. These journeys expose a user to a chain of concepts, ultimately leading to a field of study they will be encouraged to explore!

Instead of having the user answer questions after each video, I realized it would be beneficial to have them visually explore key concepts in real-time through exploratory exercises (Brett Victor does this brilliantly). I see this as a vital analysis phase in the experience; the salient aspects are a powerful learning mechanism.

Perhaps it’s because I grew up playing Will Wright’s video games that I was never a fan of right or wrong answers. Instead, the rewards are a result of your own discoveries:

With the help of David Sissitka (one of the many awesome volunteers who kick in @ Khan Academy), I was able to deliver some initial demos within 3 days of conceiving the idea:

Do you think you can mimic a coin flip?

and:

Have you ever seen your frequency fingerprint in real-time?

Check out these first two (of many) explorations that are intended to supplement the journey into cryptography series. This is just the first step in what I hope will be a long and exciting experiment in education: