KA Lite 0.17 series launched

Elizabeth Vu
Learning Equality
Published in
3 min readFeb 16, 2017

KA Lite 0.17.0 released

These changes, together with a series of substantial cleanups, have made the way for a new 0.17 series.

What’s important to know: While upgrading from 0.16 to 0.17 in terms of software is easily done, you have to get new content packs and download missing videos or download the full batch of resized videos again (English, French, Spanish, Swahili and Portuguese).

Big thanks to everyone from the community who’s been helping our team continually raise the quality of the software!

Direct links to installers:

Mac OS: https://learningequality.org/r/osx-installer-0-17

Windows: https://learningequality.org/r/windows-installer-0-17

Debian/Ubuntu: https://learningequality.org/r/deb-bundle-installer-0-17

Raspberry Pi: https://learningequality.org/r/deb-pi-installer-0-17

Installation Guide:

http://ka-lite.readthedocs.io/en/0.17.x/installguide/install_main.html

Release notes + release history:

http://ka-lite.readthedocs.io/en/0.17.x/installguide/release_notes.html

Roadmap for 2017

Later in 2017, Learning Equality will be launching the successor of KA Lite, called Kolibri, which will have very similar features to KA Lite, but will also be a platform for many other educational resources besides Khan Academy.

Because of the popularity of KA Lite, we are continuing to support deployments by providing fixes to problems that directly affect current usage. These include issues related to new browsers, operating systems etc. We are also still optimizing regarding performance issues.

If you are creating a new deployment at this very moment, feel assured that KA Lite is still alive and will be maintained for the rest of 2017, after which point we will be recommending that you migrate to Kolibri.

In the meantime, if you need new features in KA Lite, we welcome you to join the community and contribute. In other words, we (Learning Equality) encourage you (community members), to feel empowered and take responsibility for the future of KA Lite.

Release Notes

Please read our full and final release notes before installing: http://ka-lite.readthedocs.io/en/0.17.x/installguide/release_notes.html

Content

Contents have been updated from upstream Khan Academy. We have solved issues regarding merging contents from Youtube and KhanAcademy.org, meaning that inaccuracies in 0.16 content packs are solved.

  • Languages fixed/added in 0.17: Kannada, Malay, Polish, Swahili, Zulu
  • Languages updated: Bulgarian, English, Bengali, Danish, German, Spanish (Castilian), French, Hindi, Indonesian, Georgian, Portuguese (Brazil), Portuguese (Portugal), Tamil, Xhosa
  • Languages with remaining issues: Arabic, we are still receiving wrong data from upstream APIs that we cannot fix.

General updates:

  • English subtitles are now available by default for all videos in the English content pack.
  • Many exercises are rearranged and updated, as with javascript libraries. This will solve an unknown number of javascript errors, for instance #5316

Note: After upgrading to version 0.17, you should visit the Manage tab to upgrade your language and videos. You can also use kalite manage contentpackchecker all — update to automate the download and installation of new content packs.

You should always upgrade the English content pack because it contains exercise data needed by the other content packs. However, most installers bundle the English content pack, so after updating the software, you may find that you only need to upgrade other installed languages.

New features

  • New management command clearuserdata, makes it easy to prepare a prototype device for subsequent cloning. #5341
  • Patch from Rachel means you can now deeplink a page in a specific language, using this URL shortcut: /api/i18n/set_default_language/?lang=es&returnUrl=/learn/khan/math #5342 — (Thanks: Jonathan Field)
  • OSX 10.11 (El Capitan) + MacOS Sierra 10.12 are now supported.
  • Updates for improved Raspbian Jessie support.

Bug fixes, code cleanup, and remaining known issues

There’s a lot! Refer to the full release notes: http://ka-lite.readthedocs.io/en/0.17.x/installguide/release_notes.html

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Published in Learning Equality

Learning Equality is committed to enabling every person in the world to realize their right to a quality education by enabling teaching and learning with technology, without the Internet.

Written by Elizabeth Vu

Program Associate, Sloan Foundation; Co-Founder and Advisor, @LearnEQ

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