Khan Academy Releases Khanmigo, a Generative AI Learning Tutor

AI has been a concerning subject for many educators since the release of ChatGPT in November 2022. But if Khan Academy has its way, AI won’t be doing a student’s work, instead it will become a supercharged tutor and teaching assistant. This is where Khanmigo comes into play.

This fall, over 8,000 students and teachers we get their hands on Khan Academy’s AI tutor. Khanmigo aims to bridge the gap between educators and students by providing individualized guidance to students on all major subjects.

Imagine, an AI-powered tool that can identify weaknesses in a student’s understanding of math, science, or history. Though the pilot was launched back in March with the release of ChatGPT 4, Khan Academy seems to be ready to scale its test further to expand Khanmigo’s reach.

Three years after the Covid lockdowns, the effects of impromptu virtual learning are still being felt with many studies showing either mental health declines with students and/or academic declines due to the lockdowns have proven to be lingering problems.

With Khanmigo, an individual’s learning capabilities could help educators get students back up to speed at their pace using the power of generative AI. As reported back in March, Khan Academy got early access to ChatGPT 4.

This allowed the company to train the model on their learning content. During this tough process, the nonprofit also worked to add guardrails to ensure that the tone of Khanmigo was encouraging to students while helping them with content they were struggling with.

But it’s not just students who will enjoy the power of AI. Teachers will get their help and the AI program will also act as an assistant to the educator. Doing so, can help with lesson planning, and rubrics, and even identify students that the teacher may need to focus on.

For AI, this could be a step forward as fears of students using AI to either do their work or help them cheat in other ways has been a major point of discussion for educator groups. In one case, a professor in Texas had to walk back accusations of cheating pinned on some students after he attempted to use ChatGPT to identify AI-generated content.

As one could imagine, that doesn’t work well. If proven successful, Khanmigo could be the foundation of AI-powered tools entering the educational system to further improve outcomes.