Khan Academy Review

Khan Academy is a free, online collection of over 4,000 academic videos. Online learning and Massively Open Online Classes (MOOCs) are all the rage right now and Kahn Academy is at the forefront of the movement. It is one of the most popular learning resources on the web, and the iOS app is a perfect portal to its vast information archive. The iPad version has more features than the barebones iPhone version, but both allow for easy access to instructional videos and should be in every student’s arsenal.

The Khan Academy iPhone app is not as good as accessing the website on a desktop or laptop computer, but it definitely gets the job done. The iPhone app is simply a portal to viewing videos from Kahn Academy. The website is much more full feature, and on it users can make an account, collaborative with peers, and track their progress on a “Map of Knowledge.” The iPhone app doesn’t allow users to login and access their account or do anything besides watch video.

The iPad app is another story. On the iPad, users can login to their account, see their achievements, and track their progress. Users who have an account also get credit for watching a video. Another great feature of the iPad app is that videos can be downloaded for offline access. The iPad version is definitely more full-featured than the iPhone version, but that isn’t surprising since the first version of the app was only for the iPad and iPhone compatibility was added later. Hopefully the iPhone version will be updated to allow users to login and track their progress in the future.

A minor inconvenience I noticed is that the categories in the iOS app don’t match up perfectly with the website. For instance, the website has computer science as its own category, whereas the app has it as a subset of Science and Economics.

I personally love Khan Academy. I used it when I was in school to get help and I highly recommend it. The website is great and the iPad version of the app is almost as good. The iPhone version of the app is barebones right now, but hopefully it will be updated soon to include more features. Either way, the videos are great and totally justify downloading this free app. Salman Khan, the creator of Khan Academy, is a phenomenal teacher and is a truly gifted at explaining difficult subjects.