Mastery overview

There are two components to Mastery - Mastery Learning as a concept, and a Mastery Framework, which represents how Mastery is expressed within the Khan Academy product.

In the Khan Academy context, personalized, mastery learning means students have as much opportunity as possible to practice, get feedback and prove proficiency on their individual needs, remediating or accelerating as necessary. They are not pushed ahead in lock-step which causes the accumulation of debilitating Swiss-cheese gaps.

We recognize that depth of proficiency/mastery must be balanced against reasonable content exposure and that a completely linear progression is not always reasonable or ideal. Students may often move ahead before full mastery is obtained as long as their gaps are not limiting and they always have further opportunity to revisit and further master material.

You can learn all about Mastery from Sal Khan himself:

The mastery framework is how Mastery is expressed within the Khan Academy product. Mastery is / will be a fundamental platform component that all products within Khan Academy will build upon.

Within the Mastery framework, for particular skills, you can either be familiar, proficient, or mastered a particular skill. The model for that can be found here.

By Back To School 2018, Mastery will be exposed to students and teachers. For students, it will be exposed in the content library, the primary place students interact with Khan Academy. For teachers, it will be exposed in teacher dashboards.

The public-facing explanations of the Mastery Framework at Khan can be found here.

Our goal is to ensure the key use cases of Missions is moved into Mastery. How we’re tracking on our progress here.

Missions are personalized math experiences in which students can learn at their own pace, master skills that are challenging and appropriate for their level, and use hints and videos to learn and review.

The problem with Missions is that it was created as a stand-alone Product with Khan Academy, rather than as a foundational Platform piece that is represented throughout the website (and didn’t exist on our mobile apps at all).

An articulation of this problem was the deviation between the Missions product and the Content Library product. The Content Library product is where users landed from Google, users joined in on discussion, and users did exercises/quizzes/unit tests to evaluate their skills.

This deviation lead to Mastery being siloed in Missions, rather than being core/fundamental to everything Khan Academy is about. The Mastery Framework intends to resolve that by embedding Mastery into everything that we do, starting with the Content Library with the Mastery V1 project.

Head here to see the progress of bringing Missions functionality to Mastery.