Introducing KA Lite: An Offline Version of the Khan Academy That Runs on Almost Anything

in Education, K-12, Online Courses, Technology | December 19th, 2012 5 Comments

Salman Khan’s mod­el for free online edu­ca­tion hinges on the micro lecture—brief tuto­ri­als on near­ly every sub­ject under the sun—delivered through YouTube. Launched in 2006, the Khan Acad­e­my now has a library of 3000 videos. That’s not bad, espe­cial­ly for a site with the ele­vat­ed goal of pro­vid­ing a “free world-class edu­ca­tion for any­one any­where.” With the help of hun­dreds of vol­un­teers, the site’s con­tent is acces­si­ble in 18 lan­guages. But even with all of that effort, Khan does­n’t achieve the glob­al reach that it promis­es. The fact is that only 35 per­cent of the world’s pop­u­la­tion has access to the inter­net, which puts the idea of online learn­ing behind a vir­tu­al fire­wall for many peo­ple.

Enter Khan Acad­e­my Lite, oth­er­wise called KA Lite. This new ser­vice tries to work around that fire­wall. Soft­ware devel­op­er Jamie Alexan­dre and a team from UCSD devel­oped an offline ver­sion of Khan’s learn­ing mod­el that can run on just about any­thing. Once you down­load the KA Lite soft­ware and install it on a Lin­ux or Win­dows serv­er, stu­dents can start watch­ing Khan videos and exer­cis­es on computers/devices as tiny and cheap as the $35 Rasp­ber­ry Pi. Actu­al­ly, the whole serv­er can be run on the Rasp­ber­ry Pi!

You can down­load the soft­ware here and find instal­la­tion instruc­tions here. Jamie Alexan­dre offers his own intro­duc­tion to KA Lite here.

Khan Acad­e­my Lite sits nice­ly along­side the free apps released for the iPhone, iPad, and iPod Touch ear­li­er this year. Be sure to check them out.

Find more K‑12 Resources in our col­lec­tion of 200 Free Kids Edu­ca­tion­al Resources: Video Lessons, Apps, Books, Web­sites & More

Kate Rix writes about dig­i­tal media and edu­ca­tion. Read more of her work at and thenifty.blogspot.com.


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Comments (5)
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  • jr says:
    January 1, 2013 at 8:31 pm

    Bring­ing high qual­i­ty edu­ca­tion to the world is the main goal of web­sites such as Khan or MathTV.com.

    Reply
  • Cw3D says:
    May 23, 2014 at 5:03 pm

    Down­load link is bro­ken I would love to use it when this is fixed. I love Khan Acad­e­my!

    Reply
  • Denny Baumann says:
    April 17, 2015 at 1:02 pm

    KA and KA Lite are both great prod­ucts. The fact that KA Lite is designed to work off-line is even bet­ter. I want to use it on a serv­er which we call Haiti Inter­net In A Box. These will go into a lot of schools in Haiti which either don’t have an inter­net con­nec­tion or sim­ply can’t afford it. While I wish there were lec­tures in Cre­ole, we are hap­py to be using them in Eng­lish and French. The prob­lem is that KA Lite presents lec­tures in ENGLISH even if we’ve select­ed French on the open­ing page ( giv­en that there isn’t a French lec­ture avail­able on the sub­ject. ) I think that KA Lite should be “pure” in that it sim­ply should­n’t present the lec­ture in the WRONG lan­guage, once anoth­er lan­guage has been set as the “default” lan­guage. Am I doing some­thing wrong or is there a prob­lem with KA Lite in this area.

    Thanks,

    Den­ny

    Reply
  • weihaowen says:
    October 20, 2019 at 10:02 pm

    i like KHAN

    Reply
  • weihaowen says:
    October 20, 2019 at 10:06 pm

    HI

    Reply

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