As a user of Aleks can you describe what makes it better than the Khan Academy?

Thanks for asking the useful follow-up question, which I upvoted to encourage that kind of behavior here in what is meant to be an informative online community.

My experience as an actual, PERSONAL user of ALEKS only began yesterday, when my wife (the registered user) started taking the accounting course, with me second-chairing as we discuss the exercises together. But all of my children have used ALEKS

http://www.aleks.com/

for a while, so I will discuss its strengths in relation to Khan Academy

http://www.khanacademy.org/

and in relation to the Art of Problem Solving (AoPS),

https://www.artofproblemsolving.com/

another Web resource that all HN participants ought to know about. The strength of ALEKS is its thorough research base on curriculum topic interconnections based on the "knowledge spaces" theory

http://www.aleks.com/about_aleks/Science_Behind_ALEKS.pdf

that gives the ALEKS program its name. The online assessment that begins each ALEKS course identifies exactly what each learner already knows (in the scope of the syllabus of an ALEKS course) and suggests next topics to cover based on just what will broaden the learner's knowledge base enough to link to new unlearned topics that the learner can learn after first learning the current unlearned topics. ALEKS uses adaptive, periodic assessments to keep a learner in his or her "zone of proximal development," to use a term from another learning theorist, and is relentless in checking for gaps in knowledge or previous topics that the learner has forgotten. For my oldest son, who got past the top level of the ALEKS curriculum years ago, the ALEKS courses were perfect for spot review of a course (for example, high school algebra 2) just before a semester final in the distinct, accelerated mathematics course he was in at the time.

http://www.mathcep.umn.edu/umtymp/

For my younger children, ALEKS is less repetitive than the courses at the local high school that my second son tried out for a while (we are mostly homeschoolers) and very accommodating of the radical acceleration (precalculus topics at sixth grade age) that my third son is now pursuing in math studies to support his interest in science. The advantages ALEKS has over Khan Academy include more open-ended online problems, very careful research on interrelationships of topics based on knowledge spaces theory, thorough and complete syllabuses for each course based on international best practice, and smooth transition from one level of the ALEKS program to the next. ALEKS has a moderate list price (with discounts for longer enrollment terms or multiple enrollments from the same family, and UNLIMITED free trials). The cumulative progress information available to learners who pay the moderate price for ALEKS is quite useful and increasingly familiar to schools.

Advantages that Khan Academy has are low list price (free), a syllabus that goes up to higher-level topics than ALEKS (multivariable calculus and linear algebra, with the sky the limit for future courses), and the engaging online videos. We are still light users of Khan Academy in our household, but precisely because several HN participants are improving the Khan Academy exercise engines, I will encourage my children to use Khan Academy more and more over the next few years, and I could use it myself to learn math beyond precalculus.

The Art of Problem Solving (AoPS) is an online community I have participated in for years. (My screen name originated there.) The free program Alcumus there

https://www.artofproblemsolving.com/index.php?mode=interacti...

illustrates some ways that other online programs could serve up problems rather than mere exercises. The online community there supports some extremely interesting online classes that get into MUCH harder problems than those served up by Khan Academy.

Does this answer your question? Thanks for asking for more details.