Khan Academy reclaims a third of every training hour with Supademo

About Khan Academy's professional learning team

Khan Academy partners with school districts across the United States. Rachel Anderson's professional learning team delivers live virtual and in-person sessions for the teachers and administrators inside those partnerships, builds and maintains the on-demand material for everyone who cannot attend a live session, and supports teachers with questions throughout the year.

The team is ten people. Alongside them sits a district success team of roughly twelve more, working with the same teachers.

What challenges did the team face before Supademo?

Live sessions were being consumed by product basics. The team had always worked from slide decks, filling them with screenshots and arrows to show teachers where to click.

"A lot of times within our sessions, we just fell into complete point and click, click here, do this, do that type training. And it really wasn't getting to the heart of what we wanted teachers to be able to know and to do with Khan Academy."

Rachel Anderson

Professional Learning Specialist at Khan Academy

At its worst, an entire session could be consumed by setup and product basics.

And at the start of the school year, the first stretch of every session went the same way.

Building the material was slow too. Capturing screenshots and adding arrows and annotations to slide decks was, in her words, very time-consuming. For anyone who missed a live session, the fallback was a video or a help center article that was "very much just steps that they would have to read through and follow."

And two dozen people were solving the same problems separately. The team's instinct is to build something the moment a teacher hits a problem, which across two teams produced a quiet duplication problem.

The cost was not only wasted effort.

On top of all of it, Khan Academy had just rebuilt its entire website, so even long-standing partners needed to be shown where everything had moved.

Why did Khan Academy choose Supademo?

It came to Rachel by internal recommendation rather than a search of her own. A colleague on another Khan Academy team had found it and passed it along, and her team needed no persuading.

What they needed it to do was specific. First, give two dozen people one shared place to work from, so they stopped rebuilding the same job aid for one district at a time. Second, provide the demos Rachel wanted embedded alongside the video lessons in the on-demand educator course she was about to build.

She and her manager took it to leadership on that basis, and asked to buy it "even if it's just for this year to build the course."

How does Khan Academy use Supademo?

Three people author, and everyone else copies. That is what makes a small group able to serve a much larger one.

The model is deliberate down to the recording method. They capture in HTML specifically so that whoever supports a given district can copy a master and add that district's own details. Masters are chosen by asking which behaviors every teacher needs regardless of district, then organized into folders by audience: students, teachers, administrators.

Rachel ran internal sessions to make it hold. One for creators on customizing a master, one for viewers on finding and distributing them, and one specifically on what not to touch.

Distribution reflects who the audience actually is. Teachers reached through districts are not sales leads, so resources go out as public links paired with a form at the end as a knowledge check. Showcases carry a district through a sequenced learning path; demo hubs answer questions at the point of need.

See one of Khan Academy's teacher walkthroughs

This is a live demo built by Rachel. It is the kind of walkthrough a teacher now clicks through before a training session begins.

What results has Khan Academy achieved?

Teachers now arrive ready. The team sends a showcase as pre-work before a session, and a more comprehensive one afterwards.

Three authors now serve two dozen teammates. This is the part that makes the model scale. Duplicated effort collapsed into a master-and-copy library, so the rest of the team personalizes rather than rebuilds, and the language going out to districts stays consistent.

That changes what the live hour is for.

Resources survive product changes. "Our whole onboarding flow, we're in like the fifth iteration of it since May, because we keep tweaking things. Supademo has been very helpful where we can just keep the same link, these resources already have the demo link on them, so let's just go in and swap out this step each time the product team updates onboarding."

And training survives when the calendar doesn't. An ice storm shut West Virginia schools for two weeks, taking out two hours of scheduled data training. In a school district that time does not come back. As Rachel puts it, it is not "all right, we'll pick up when everybody's back in the office kind of thing… no, their calendar is moving on. We've just lost our PD time." She built a showcase instead, a demo per report with her own voiceover and a form as a knowledge check, and it then did the job a second time.

What's next?

This is the team's first back-to-school season using Supademo, and the early signals are already good: teachers report that having something just-in-time to refer back to has been useful when they cannot remember a workflow. Rachel is equally clear that the real assessment comes later in the fall, once the season's trainings are behind them.

The second unit of the educator course focuses on AI, so demos covering Khanmigo are next.