I am updating the RACHEL KA-Lite deployment and installed the latest contentpacks for 0.17.3. I noticed however that there seems to be some strange issues. A few examples:
- precalculus has only 18 videos instead of well over 100 like it had before, several other base math categories have very few videos
- most of the math videos are part of India-specific curriculum, and many other curriculums (common core) are absent
- algebra-home (and geometry-home, arithmetic-home) are catch-alls for subtopics, but instead have different videos that are not in the sub-topics (algebra1, algebra2)
The category tree doesn’t match what’s on the KA site, nor the old version, nor the Spanish version (the videos are all in different places). If I had to guess it looks like someone was testing a customized category tree for a deployment in India and it never got put back to the general structure.
Or I just don’t understand something 
Any help is appreciated!
Hi @needlestack!
I think we had a discussion about this together with @benjamin as far as I remember.
When we were building the 0.17.3 content packs, it seems that Khan Academy had some changes on their data. Some videos/exercises were lost, some were added, and some were transferred to other categories (like the one you’ve mentioned). We aren’t sure what were those changes since I can’t seem to find any documentation or announcements about it
Thanks for the response!
Yeah, it looks very much to me like the version you grabbed was transitional or broken. For example, let’s check out the precalculus branch. Here it is under 0.16.x:
Here it is under 0.17.x:
What’s interesting is that if you go to the current KA site, it looks like the old version:
https://www.khanacademy.org/math/precalculus
On the live KA site you can’t see the whole tree expanded, but if you navigate around you’ll see that it has far richer content similar to 0.16.x.
If you take a particular video – say “Intro to arcsine” highlighted in the first playlist above, it is included in 0.17.x, but only appears under the “Class 12 (India)”, the “in-in-grade-12-ncert” slug, not in any general area. This is true of lots of videos: they seem to have been pulled from the main playlists and put exclusively into India-specific curriculum playlists.
But if you go to the KA website or API now, you’ll see that is no longer the case. That video is on the main playlist – check out the path displayed here (this video is the first entry under “children”):
http://www.khanacademy.org/api/v1/topic/inverse-trig-functions-precalc
In fact, the “in-in-grade-12-ncert” slug, indeed the whole “Class # (India)” subtree is no longer accessible from the math tree:
http://www.khanacademy.org/api/v1/topic/math
It really looks like you somehow got a temporarily mixed up version. I am pretty sure if you rebuilt the English contentpack now you’d get a very different tree structure with most videos back in the main topics. And that makes a lot more sense for a general audience.
Is there any way to update this presently?
@needlestack great find!
It really looks like you somehow got a temporarily mixed up version. I am pretty sure if you rebuilt the English contentpack now you’d get a very different tree structure with most videos back in the main topics. And that makes a lot more sense for a general audience.
We will be releasing 0.17.4 pretty soon, I’m just not quite sure when. We’ll rebuild the content packs too. I wish KA has some documentation on what changes they are making on the structure of their Videos/Exercises if ever they make changes.
Is there any way to update this presently?
I’m not quite sure if this fixes the main problem but I would suggest that to just use the 0.16.x english content packs for the 0.17.3 installers if you just really need the old structure right now… (although you’d get an annoying message saying that you need to upgrade your existing content packs to the latest one).
Hmm, yes there are definitely an issue when everything is downloaded through the resized videos torrent set, an unessential amount of Indian classes in Math that will probably be very confusing for non-Indian students… well, quantity seems higher rated than quality, that would be for sure!
@mrpau-eugene let’s talk about if we can build a new content pack, see how it looks, and then decide if we need special filtering?
@mrpau-eugene - thanks for the suggestion - I did not realize the 0.16 contentpack would work with 0.17.3. I will give that a try, though I want to emphasize this isn’t just a personal preference – for most users the 0.17 topic tree is basically broken: most math videos are missing from the general topic tree.
@benjamin - it looks like that github issue is the same one I’m seeing, just another example. I know KA changes stuff a lot (I’ve rebuilt KA On a Stick several times, and I understand the pain ) - but this truly looks like a different situation: the videos were in place both before and after the 0.17 contentpack was created, it was just unlucky enough to be created while they were moving stuff around and it all ended up in the wrong topics!
I know KA-Lite is in maintenance mode, but from a user perspective this seems to me as big a bug as anything fixed since 0.16. I can’t update KA-Lite in RACHEL until this is fixed.
Thanks so much for your time and hard work, as always. Sorry for the trouble. You folks are great
Yes, definitely read you on this – suffering from a bit of “developer blindness”, you know when the system is in place, and you just assume the data is trivial… your nick name vs. last name reminds me of that conflict… too much stack experience, too little field 
Will report back on the time line ASAP.
Haha, I hear you. Despite my name it’s been almost a year since I was really out in the Field myself Thanks again for your help.
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An update on this: @mrpau-eugene created an updated content pack with no luck, the Indian topics stay around.
We can all acknowledge that the online English version doesn’t have the Indian topics, so we’re just looking for which data field to use to filter them out, and we’ll get another content pack going.
Thanks for your patience (btw. building new content packs takes ~2 days, so we might have one to test by the end of the week)
Thanks for the quick effort - it is very interesting and surprising that they still show up since I can’t even find them through the API. Are you building from the API or some other resource? I’m pretty familiar with the API so if you want me to take a look I would be happy to do so. Is the code that builds the contentpacks in github?
A related question - I assume the KA-Lite system can support having the same video in multiple topics, yes? That is, the same video can appear in both “arithmetic” and “common core grade 4 math” for example? Though it is confusing to have the India curriculum appear, the real trouble is that the relevant videos don’t appear in the general topics. If they appeared in both, I could just hide the India topics
@needlestack
I assume the KA-Lite system can support having the same video in multiple topics, yes? That is, the same video can appear in both “arithmetic” and “common core grade 4 math” for example?
Yes! KA-Lite does support having videos in multiple topics.
To clear things up, it was a problem with the content packs maker. When building the content pack, it turns out that it filters the data to only have 1 existing video. So for example, if y2-uaPiyoxc is mapped to
khan/math/early-math/cc-early-math-counting-topic/cc-early-math-counting/counting-with-small-numbers/
then it will never be seen in other topics such as
khan/math/cc-kindergarten-math/cc-kindergarten-counting/kindergarten-counting/counting-with-small-numbers/
We’ve been working on it since December and we’ll be releasing 0.18 soon to fix this issue.
In the mean time, you can check this out Fix videos only showing in one content node by mrpau-eugene · Pull Request #78 · learningequality/ka-lite-content-packs · GitHub
you will see a temporary english content pack (https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Mxiq0Iy5lAuESveKpuCvmXSHyIO7zg5h/view). You can download and try it with the KA-Lite you are using but there seems to be a glitch when displaying the download size of the topics/videos (I don’t think it’s a major issue btw).
