Jonathan Field - Maker of Random Stuff

Khan Academy Offline

So at first I felt a bit odd downloading and distributing a collection of Khan Academy videos for offline usage, being that they’re already freely available online, but it turns out lots of people want the same thing. Apparently there’s a big overlap in the Venn diagram of “places that need better educational resources” and “places that don’t have fast, cheap internet access”.

Just before my most recent trip to SA, I found a guy who was doing much better job of it than me, and so I started using his package instead. After a bit of back and forth it was determined that while the package would benefit from being updated, he didn’t have the time. So I offered to help out.

After learning a bit about Khan Academy’s API, re-downloading all the videos, learning about Handbrake Encoding Options, and yes, hacking a bit of perl, I came up with this preliminary update.

I’m discussing with others now about what tweaks to make so that it can be most useful. Although I’ve moved away from coding in general these days, I do still enjoy the flow that comes with it.

Also, I think this is the first project where I didn’t resent CSS layout by the time I was done. Now that’s progress!

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6 Responses to Khan Academy Offline

  1. Thanks so much for taking the time to do the KA on a stick facelift. I’m about to take 20 tablets down to a middle school in Guatemala and your refresh saved the day.

    I’ll be supplementing with exercises from the KA-lite tool.

    Thanks again. I hope you are enjoying retirement.

    • Great to hear you’re making use of it! Were you able to get the whole RACHEL package? It includes some other nice resources beyond just the Khan Academy stuff.

      The KA-lite package is great and coming along nicely. We hope to integrate it into RACHEL in the future, but for now the Khan Academy on a Stick is a nice simple way to get started with the videos.

      Cheers, and good luck :)

  2. I’ve looked at RACHEL before and indeed it is great. However, most of the content isn’t quite as well put together as the KA stuff. Additionally, the extra content might prove to be a distraction for what we are trying to implement, which is a study on the effectiveness of KA in the (middle school math) classroom.

    Thanks again.

    • Thanks for the feedback, it’s very helpful to hear how people are using these things in the field. Best of luck with your math efforts!

  3. Jonathan
    We have used Khan on a Stick successfully by loading it onto hundreds of of Ubuntu hard drives on computers we send to developing countries. Recently we have asked to do the same on Windows 7 machines. The Khan is on the hard drive but does not run on Firefox. A message pops up where the video should be that says. “This text will be replaced” Any idea of a solution? Many thanks for your great work…Jack

    • Sorry for the long time in replying — Khan Academy On a Stick uses mp4 videos which is not supported in older versions of Firefox. Since 2015 or so it should support mp4.

      While Firefox supported other formats, including them would have doubled the size of KAOS, or allowed us to include half as many videos. I decided to stick with mp4 as it seemed to be the most widely supported. Hope your projects are going well!

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