ELKINS — The Randolph County Board of Education unanimously approved a recommendation from Superintendent Dr. Shawn Dilly for Randolph County Schools to enter with the Khan Academy.

An online educational platform, the Khan Academy offers support in learning and progress for students, teachers and parents. The program, which is often used for test preparation, features instructional videos, practice exercises and personalized learning dashboards.

According to the agreement posted on the district’s website, the contract between Randolph County Schools and the Khan Academy is for $10,000.

“The Khan Academy agreement is part of our secondary efforts to bring PSAT and SAT preparation to the high schools this year,” Dilly said. “I know we are going to be exploring potentially even bringing that down into the middle schools as we go forward.”

Dilly said the partnership with the Khan Academy is much cheaper than it would be with other companies as it offers an array of free tools to do such things as monitor students’ progression.

“When you look at other companies, you’re paying not only for the assessment, but you’re also paying for the tools,” Dilly said. “So this is a much cheaper approach and has been endorsed by quite a few counties throughout the state. Actually I believe that Ohio County is using this approach and they are ranked No. 1, if I recall correctly.”

Board of Education President Rachel Burns said she knew from her own experience with her own children using Khan Academy, that it offers a substantial amount of individualized attention to each student using the service.

“We will be piloting this year the PSAT at the ninth and 10th grade levels, as well as part of our benchmarking components,” Dilly said. “That should hopefully give us a better option to see exactly where kids are preparing for the SAT.”

Board member Sherri Collett asked Dilly when students would be able to access the Khan Academy.

“They can already,” Dilly said. “What this does is enables us to actually start tracking the data on actual usage, scores, and things. So some of the teachers have already gone ahead and started building their environment, so it hasn’t been a hold up in that regard. It’s more of us kind of creating that plus some professional development that is included as part of this.”

Collett asked, “So this is just an adjunct to what’s already happened?”

Dilly told her that it was.

“So the staff has already been trained on it and all of that,?” Collett asked.

Dilly said, “No not yet, that’s part of the process we are trying to implement very late at this point, but we are anticipating not a lot of challenges with it because it is very intuitive, for the basics anyway. We are hoping we can build some quick expertise so that we can roll it out a little quicker.”

Dilly said the late decision to have the agreement with Kahn was due to the school district struggling to find a good tool that it wanted to give to students.

“It was a very late decision, but we felt like choosing a better tool right now is the way we want to go, especially with our outcomes and performances in our high schools,” Dilly said. “We are pretty pleased with this choice going forward.”

Dilly said despite what many people believe, the Khan Academy is there to help students with more than just math.

“A lot of people think of Khan Academy as exclusively math and that is where it started,” Dilly said. “That’s not where it is at now. There are elements to help prepare students for all three (math, English, science).”

The next regular Board of Education meeting will be Sept. 16 at 5:30 p.m.