Where should you go online to advance your understanding of a topic or study something new? For academic subjects, start with the excellent Khan Academy. It’s one of the best online learning services, particularly for math, science, social studies, and language arts. Its many lessons contain videos, readings, and interactive exercises, which are sequenced so that you can start from square one with any subject. On top of that, it’s completely free! For its combination of deep learning and no-cost entry, Khan Academy is a five-star Editors’ Choice winner for free online learning tools.
Khan Academy started when Sal Khan began tutoring his cousin from afar. Khan was a financial analyst, and his cousin needed help with his economics and math homework. Khan recorded videos of a virtual blackboard with voice-over narrations to explain different concepts to his cousin. He began posting them on YouTube.
Today, Khan Academy is a nonprofit organization that cultivates academic courses and makes them freely available online. It has a reputation for being strong in math, economics, and finance, and it has partnered with other institutions and educators to expand into more fields, such as philosophy and art history.
Since July 2020, the site has concentrated on educational topics for kindergarten through early college. Even within that scope, there are small gaps in the content catalog. Khan doesn’t touch music appreciation or foreign languages, for example. It does, however, translate some courses into other languages. For example, you can take an introductory algebra course taught in Spanish.
Khan Academy excels in all the areas where it focuses, but it isn’t the only online resource for academic learning. Coursera, an Editors’ Choice winner, is a site that lets you enroll in college courses from Yale and other universities for free. Then there are services that teach specific, quantifiable job skills; Udacity is a good example. Others, such as LinkedIn Learning, focus more on soft business skills, like managing employees and communicating. MasterClass, another Editors’ Choice winner, recruits famous instructors, such as Steve Martin (comedy), Natalie Portman (acting), and Serena Williams (tennis).
As mentioned, Khan Academy and the organization that runs it are 501(c)(3) nonprofits. Their mission is “to provide a free, world‑class education for anyone, anywhere.” Therefore, Khan Academy is totally free. You don’t even need to make an account and sign in to access the lessons.
If you do make an account and sign in, you can keep track of your progress in various courses and access other features. One of these extra features is to give a teacher, tutor, or parent access to your learning history and let them assign challenges or assignments to you.
Khan Academy’s well-designed courses cater to students in the American education system. Many of its courses follow the formal curriculum assigned to the different grade levels.
In addition to math, economics, and finance, Khan Academy covers science and engineering, computing, arts and humanities, test prep, college prep, career prep, and English language arts. Most of these topics have specific courses within them. For example, you can enroll in Precalculus, US history, and an LSAT prep course. There’s no limit on the number of courses you can take, which is a nice touch.
A mobile app, Khan Academy Kids, offers materials for young learners ages two to seven. There’s an iPhone app, an iPad app, and an Android app (there are apps for the regular Khan Academy, too). Students in primary school can check out courses in English language arts and math that align with their education years, such as Second Grade Math.
Another example is AP courses. AP, or Advanced Placement, is a program in the US in which students can take courses in high school, if they qualify, that count toward their undergraduate degree. In other words, students can take a university course before paying for university, and if they pass a standardized exam at the end, they get college credit. Khan Academy’s AP courses prepare students in a particular subject matter, but the students must take the formal test wherever it’s given; they cannot take the test or receive the final credit via Khan. Coursera, meanwhile, enrolls you in college courses from Yale and other prestigious universities for free.
Thankfully, Khan Academy still offers insightful courses on learning how to code. These include introductory lessons on computer programming topics like CSS, HTML, JavaScript, and video game development. The lessons also include helpful videos and built-in tools for practicing your coding within the site itself.
With an active, verified account, you can participate in student discussion forums to obtain additional knowledge. Although there’s no live phone chat, Khan Academy’s support page offers resources for learners and parents, along with helpful tips and tricks taken straight from the community. However, Khan Academy’s coding content is relatively limited compared with dedicated coding courses. If you want to take your education beyond intro classes, consider Codecademy and Treehouse, our Editors’ Choice winners for free and paid coding courses, respectively.
Khan Academy is built around video lectures, short readings, interactive quizzes (usually multiple choice), and comment threads. When you enroll in a course, you get access to all the video lectures and other materials that are in that course, and they’re presented in a sequential order. Typically, a course contains units, which contain lessons, and within the lessons are videos, readings, and quizzes.
In many cases, the sequence of lessons and units matters because you need to acquire foundational skills before you can advance your knowledge. Math courses are a good example. If you already have a particular skill, however, you’re free to skip ahead. In some courses, it might make sense to jump into the material you want to learn or review, rather than plow through each and every lesson in order. For example, if you already have a strong understanding of the First Amendment to the US Constitution, you might skip ahead to the second.
Some educators might dispute whether the term “course” is misleading in Khan Academy. It’s a term used by both accredited institutions and more casual places of learning. The courses in Khan Academy refer to a group of learning materials. Some of the courses may have instructors who reply to comments, but you don’t get an assigned instructor who offers personalized attention. Likewise, you don’t have formal classmates or a timeline in which you need to work through the material. Khan is entirely self-paced.
In the case of AP courses or even test prep, Khan acts more like a book on the subject than an individualized class. You can use Khan Academy in the same way that you might use an SAT prep book to learn strategies for passing the exam and see examples of questions. The big difference is that Khan Academy is free and interactive.
The experience of following Khan Academy’s lectures and lessons varies based on the subject matter and who presents it. Founder Sal Khan hosts some of the videos because they were the initial inspiration for creating the site. Those videos set the tone and style overall.
A good example of Khan’s style can be found in the lessons on retirement accounts in the personal finance course. The videos there use a virtual blackboard where Khan writes a few notes while he talks. You listen to him explain, for example, the difference between a traditional IRA account and a Roth IRA. When he gets into the particulars and starts to make an example about how much money each account will contain, he writes down the figures: the principal investments, how much interest they earn, how much someone would pay in taxes on those accounts (and when), plus whatever fees they would incur for early withdrawals. It’s very similar to having a teacher and a blackboard, only you don’t see the teacher.
The tone is friendly and clear. Khan often repeats what he’s just said as he writes it down. For some learners, this style may come off as tedious. Others may see it as an advantage because the learner gets a moment to pause and synthesize the information.
Other materials in the personal finance course were not created by Sal Khan but by contributions from other parties. For example, Better Money Habits supplies text and two short videos. The videos have a more commercial feel than Sal Khan’s, but the content is non-promotional and helpful.
Given Sal Khan’s previous background as a financial analyst, he’s a great resource for information on the economy and math. When it comes to subjects in the humanities, however, Khan Academy typically relies on other experts. There’s an art history lesson about Islamic arts made by The British Museum, for example, another by TED Ed, and one by UNESCO. Some videos were produced by Khan Academy with the help of experts in the field who were brought in to develop content.
Khan Academy tracks your progress as you work your way through the material. It captures how many minutes you spend watching video lessons and reading texts, as well as your quiz scores. You also earn mastery points as you learn, plus badges for reaching various milestones. They’re cool little rewards for your achievements, if that’s your thing.
Not every course has quizzes, but those that do contain a wealth of questions. If you take a short quiz with only four questions, and then retake it later the same day, you’re almost guaranteed not to see the same questions.
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