The partnership between Khan Academy and Microsoft aims to change the way teachers interact with students. Khanmigo for Teachers is an AI-powered teaching assistant that offers a wide range of features to support educators in their daily tasks. Khanmigo generates creative lesson plans, suggests student groupings, and adapts text passages to different learning levels.
Khanmigo has been designed to mitigate issues around cheating by focusing on providing support and guidance rather than direct answers. The AI tutor asks questions and encourages critical thinking, akin to the Socratic method.
Khan Academy also implements guardrails and safety mechanisms within Khanmigo, ensuring that student activities are visible to parents and teachers and flagging problematic questions or comments for review.
While large language models have been the driving force behind many AI advancements, small language models (SLMs) like Microsoft's Phi-3 family of models offer a more cost-effective and efficient solution for specific tasks, such as math tutoring.
Khan Academy and Microsoft are collaborating to explore the development of new, open-source SLMs based on Phi-3, with the goal of providing state-of-the-art maths tutoring capabilities.
Sal Khan, the founder of Khan Academy, believes that SLMs have the potential to dramatically increase the speed at which AI-powered education tools can be made accessible to more people.
By operating locally on devices, SLMs could provide teacher tools and tutors for resource-constrained schools outside the U.S. that lack computing infrastructure.
By providing free access to Khanmigo for Teachers and collaborating on the development of small language models, these organisations are working to empower educators, personalise learning experiences, and make high-quality education more accessible to students worldwide.
As Sal Khan notes, the advent of AI-powered teaching and learning is reminiscent of the early days of education, when one-on-one tutoring was the norm. As Khan aptly put it, "We can use the same tools to treat every kid like a future emperor."