Boredom + Coffee = MAGIC! (Or, MORE THAN TWO-THOUSAND Khan Academy practice sets aligned to the CCRS and TABE 11/12)

Who am I kidding? GO SOOOOOOOOOX!!! 
WOOOOOOO HOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!

Maybe it was the fact that last night was a day off of the World Series. (Disclaimer: I'm a Red Sox fan....not the crazy rabid "The Red Sox are WICKED [expletive] AWESOME!" kind...but a fan nonetheless.) Maybe it was because it's been sitting on my To-Do List for a couple months. But, with inordinate amounts of caffeine in my system last night, I finally pulled together a set of Khan Academy practice sets aligned to the College & Career Readiness Standards for Adult Education and to TABE 11/12.

2,020 practice sets to be exact. 

How to Get the Alignments

I've put view-only versions of the alignments in Microsoft Excel and Google Sheets formats on a drive folder that can be accessed by going to CrowdED Learning's website via this link. Disclaimer: The spreadsheets are not perfect....there's truncated text I need to figure out how to fix and a handful of "Coming Soon" listings that I did not remove because I want to have those as placeholders to add once the practice sets have been created. 

Once you've either copied a Google Sheets version to your drive or downloaded the Excel version, you will see that by clicking on any of the linked activity titles, it will lead you directly to that activity. 

Notice these are not the Khan Academy videos with which you might be familiar. Fear not. You will see when you go to the activities that Khan Academy lists related instructional video content for each one. So, you could guide students to attempt the activity and select the related video(s) if additional support is needed. 

Or, perhaps you could join a volunteer team with CrowdED Learning to help us create alignments of all the instructional video content as well. (Hint hint!)

The content is sorted by CCRS/TABE level and domain, and ordered based on the TABE 11/12 blueprint within each domain. Each link launches a practice set from Khan Academy. 

Where do we go from here? 

I'd love for folks to use the comments section to share ideas for what we should do next. In the near future, we will be pulling together a Google Group to discuss how adult educators might use this and what additional formats might make them more instructor- and student- friendly. To stay up-to-date on these things, please join our mailing list.

More importantly, this work took in total around 5 hours for me to get done. There are lots of other sites such as Khan Academy for which similar Common Core State Standards alignments have been done. There are also plenty of states who have been cobbling together resources to supplement their curriculum and, in many cases, collecting it all on spreadsheets such as the ones we just created. Or, as was featured in the August Fantastic & Free First Friday's blog, folks have gathered and aligned content from sources such as Khan Academy and then organized them to make them more readily available and accessible for learner self-study.

What if we started pooling our collective expertise to do similar projects and then put it all in one place?

That's the world CrowdED Learning is looking to create by way of the SkillBlox Learning Plan Generator. What if instructors could indicate the resources they wish to use—both publisher and free—indicate they skills they wish to teach, and then be pointed directly to  what they have available to teach those skills? What if we could generate learning plans that help us see how learners respond to being given multiple resources aligned to a skill they need to learn....by way of multiple modalities? How could a tool such as this allow us to gain insight as to what learner agency looks like when given a set of learning options? 

How can you help? Join the Crowd!

There is so much we can do if we work together! We have a series of webinars coming up over the next few weeks to share the work we are doing and tell more about how you can help. In the meantime, here's how you can get involved:

1. Sign up for our newsletter to stay up to date on our projects and opportunities to volunteer or spread the word of our work. 
2. Become a volunteer! If we all tackle this work in small, organized efforts, imagine the impact we can make? 
3. Join the Crowd! We are going to soon be launching a #jointhecrowdedu campaign to raise awareness and raise funds for the development of SkillBlox. In the meantime, please sign your name to let people know this is necessary work to support the adult education field and increase learning opportunities for our nation's adult learners. 
4. Join us for one of our upcoming webinars on topics such as blended learning using publisher content and OER via Canvas, realistic strategies for integrating technology in the adult education classroom, and more.

[For those who care: How did I do this?]

Khan Academy offers the raw data as a download by way of this link. The alignments they offer, however, are to the Common Core State Standards. From there, I had to ask my...."younger vintage"...roommate who's a whiz at Excel to create a lookup thingamabob that entered in the College & Career Readiness Standards for Adult Education in a separate column. 

I then took the TABE 11/12 blueprints and coded each row within the spreadsheet so that, once this massive list was sorted, it would sort by the CCRS/TABE level, the domain, and finally the order the standards are listed within each domain on the TABE 11/12 blueprints. 

If you are not a TABE 11/12 user, it's still a helpful sorting structure. However, if you want ALL the CCRS and not just those that are on TABE 11/12, you will see way at the bottom the other CCRS standards are still in the files. You could simply re-sort by CCRS Level and Domain and you'd have what you need. 

There are a handful of hidden columns in here that are used to make the sorting nice and neat and just the relevant information visible. Feel free to monkey around with things if you choose to make a copy for yourself. 

Enjoy!!!

THANK YOU!!!!!!

Special thanks to Khan Academy for the amazing work they are doing to increase access to quality learning resources! 

Khan Academy's content is generously licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 United States license.
(About this license.)