Make your KA Lite installation lighter, put a bird on it.

About

When placed in your KA Lite's installation directory, open start.html for serverless browsing of your KA Lite's videos and exercises.

Why this is useful

At a very basic level, the least we can do is deliver educational videos to students on some digital medium. As Sal Khan pointed out in his book The One World Schoolhouse, "... Video lessons would be a significant improvement over what's available now. Their availability would ameliorate the teacher shortage situation; kids would at least be able to pause, repeat, and review the lessons. And it would be a win -- wouldn't it? -- if we could give kids in the world's poorest areas even a cheap approximation of what the wealthy have." The KA Lite project, in my mind, is about giving kids in the world's poorest areas more than an approximation of what the wealthy have and to do that we're going to have to be scrappy. KA Lite's unique selling proposition is that it offers an experience that's more than just watching videos or even doing HTML based exercises, it raises a red flag for a teacher so they know when a student is stuck and it highlights the students who excel so a teacher can direct the students who can mentor to the students who need the help. The purpose of Flying Owl, or as some have called it KA "Extra" Lite, is to capture the struggles and the epic wins of the students while they are not in the classroom connected to a server.

Sal points out that old TVs with first generation DVD players can found in impoverished areas, you might be surprised to find there's even the occasional netbook, an internet cafe, an e-reader, they all come out of the wood work when a community or a family puts their mind to it. Flying Owl is a project aimed at taking advantage of those fringe devices by offering a browser based experience of Khan Academy without the need of a server that then allows the student to export their progress data and carry that back to the server for their teacher to see. All the student needs is some form of digital memory (CD, USB thumb drive, SD Card) and they can take the Khan Academy experience to any device in their community with a web browser and then bring that activity data back with them to school.

Installation

Place this directory in your KA Lite directory and then open the start.html file. Your done! Well, almost. This includes a pruned version of the topics.json file because most browsers (Chrome, Android web browser) will choke (QuataExceeded: DOM Exception 22) if you put that into localStorage. You may want to roll your own topics.json file or help out with the efforts to make a file system based JSON store so the whole topics.json doesn't have to be loaded all at once (see GIST https://gist.github.com/rjsteinert/5080816).

How this works on the technical side

The start.html page loads a modified topics.json into your browser. It's been modified for a JSONP callback because WebKit browsers don't support XMLHTTPRequest when using file protocol. When that finishes loading, you are prompted to go to topics.html where you can browse the "Source of all knowledge", the topic tree. When you drill down far enough, the links lead to video.html which will load a video from your ka-lite's content directory and also form a link to HTML exercises in your ka-lite directory. When you click on the exercise link, it brings you to that exercise's HTML page.

What works with which browsers

Browsing the topic tree

• Chrome on Mac (passes, as long as the topics.json file is so large that it exceeds localStorage limit)
• Chrome on Android (N/A) -> Can't figure out how to open a file...
• Android browser (passes, as long as the topics.json file is so large that it exceeds localStorage limit)
• Firefox on Mac (passes, even with the entire topics.json)
• Firefox on Android (passes, probably needs a smaller topics.json file depending on your hardware)

Watching Videos

• Chrome on Mac (passes, has support for mp4)
• Chrome on Android (N/A) -> Can't figure out how to open a file...
• Android browser (passes, has support for mp4)
• Firefox on Mac (fails, no support for mp4 AND the flash fallback fails when used on file protocol)
• Firefox on Android (fails, no support for mp4 AND the flash fallback fails when used on file protocol)

Exercises

• Chrome on Mac (fails, no support for XMLHTTPRequest when using file protocol)
• Chrome on Android (N/A) -> Can't figure out how to open a file...
• Android browser (fails, no support for XMLHTTPRequest when using file protocol)
• Firefox on Mac (passes)
• Firefox on Android (passes)

Room for improvement

Capture more data

Capture amount of video watched as opposed number of times watched. Capture exercise progress data.

An import function in KA Lite for progress data

The whole point of saving the progress data as files is so that the student can bring their "homework" to class so the teacher can see their progress.

Exercise player

Using the html files in the Khan Exercises is problematic from a UI perspective (the login, signup, etc. buttons are confusing) and those html files actually do an XMLHTTPRequest to render themselves which causes them to fail on WebKit based browsers.

Exercises dashboard

Only the topic tree for videos is exposed at the moment. That means you can only get to an exercise by going to its related video.

Integrate the KA Lite video player and all its features

Most noteably, subtitles.

Cherry pick the topics.json file so only topics that have videos show up

This could work on two ends, when KA Lite does its import from the Internet it could generate a slim version of topics.json. The other end is perhaps giving the user the option of only taking part of what is on the KA Lite installation. Loading a giant topics.json into a mobile browser is less than ideal.

Turn topics.json into a JSON store so the browser doesn't have to load the entire topics.json file all at once.

You'd be surprised how even the most modern version on Chrome chokes on localStorage, albeit, due to defined quotas creates the dreaded QUOTA_EXCEEDED_ERR: DOM Exception 22. Even KA Heavy has this issue (https://code.google.com/p/khanacademy/issues/detail?id=7936). It's possible to write a script that breaks out topics.json (or any JSON for that matter) into a neat folder/text file structure so browsers only have to request the part of the JSON they need. See my gist for an idea of how to make a file based JSON store.

Less javascript, more static html

Instead of loading topics.json into the browser and asking javascript to render topic and video pages, render topic and video pages as an html tree. Think like Jekyll.

Capture user activity data in the browser, prompt user to save it to the file system, have it picked up with a sync back to ka-lite or have user import manually

Mainly from a functional stand point, the difference of using Flying Owl as opposed to KA Lite is that that your activity data (mastery on topics, points, etc.) is not saved, nor can you see a the progress of other users for the sake of coaching. We could however build this out to prompt the user to import an activity data file (so they can see past progress) and also export an activity data file to save their progress. Getting even crazier, contained in your own user file you could store references to other user files that would then allow your browser to build a coaching page for you to see others' activity data.

Incorporate other KA Lite goodies

:)

Inspiration

In character, in manner, in style, in all things, the supreme excellence is simplicity.

by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (Thanks to Sal Khan for using this quote in his book One World Schoolhouse)

Put a bird on it.

by Kari Neumeyer and Fred Armisen of Portlandia

Credits

Flying Owl coded from R.J. Steinert's hammock in Ghana. R.J. Steinert is CTO of Open Learning Exchange and is a big fan of putting birds on things.

Thanks to the KA Lite and KA "heavy" team for making awesome sauce!

Thanks to Sal Khan for all of the awesome videos and inspiration. Your book rocks btw.