Khan Academy and Microsoft will bring free AI learning to schools

During your traditional event Microsoft Build 2024, the platform Khahmigo, initially launched in March 2023, will now be released free of charge for teachers and students in the US. A Khan Academy and Microsoft have come together to bring learning via AI that teaches students to develop reasoning instead of sending direct answers. Understand the launch of the new product.

Khanmigo innovates learning

Initially launched in March 2023, the platform khanmigo is a solution for Khan Academy that allows teachers around the world to improve their classes through artificial intelligence.

Instead of spending hours in front of a screen planning lessons, teachers using Khanmigo spend a few minutes receiving complete lesson templates, all through artificial intelligence capabilities. Topics can be adapted for students of different ages through some text commands.

Before being released to US teachers, there was a US$4 charge to cover the infrastructure costs of the khanmigo. The AI ​​learning platform uses technology called SLMs (acronym for Small Language Models or small language models), which has some features of the famous large language models (LLMs), but requires less capacity to run, in addition to being trained on fewer parameters.

Teachers who already use the platform in their daily lives highlighted its usefulness precisely because it is not a resource that sends answers directly, but rather helps students reach the answer in an explanatory way. Furthermore, animations based on the daily lives of children and young people are created to facilitate the understanding of complex subjects.

What's really great from a teacher's perspective is that the platform doesn't give my students answers, it gives me questions. Science is about asking really good questions. This is how we learn, grow and innovate.

Melissa Higgason, chemistry teacher at Hobart High School.

Microsoft's role

To enable the AI ​​learning platform to be rolled out in US schools, the Microsoft made its AI infrastructure available, Azure OpenAI Service. In a simplified way, the creator of Windows will make its servers available solely for AI activities to cover the infrastructure costs that the Khanmigo platform had.

During the Microsoft Build 2024, it was also announced that Khan Academy and Microsoft have joined forces to explore opportunities to improve AI tools for math classrooms in an affordable, scalable, and adaptable way with a new version of Phi-3, a family of small language models (SLMs) developed by Microsoft.

By donating access to Azure AI-optimized infrastructure, Microsoft is enabling Khan Academy to offer all K-12 educators in the US free access to the Khanmigo for Teachers pilot, which will now be powered by the Azure OpenAI Service.

Microsoft at its event to launch news for US schools.

The two organizations will also work to integrate more Khan Academy content into Copilot and Teams for Education, a free version of the popular Microsoft Teams app to enhance collaboration and personalized learning to meet the needs of educators and students.

The integration will make Khan Academy's educational library available to even more students while providing high-quality content to Copilot and Teams for Education users.

How does AI learning work?

Khanmigo's purpose is to put an end to bureaucratic processes that generally demand a lot from teachers, so in addition to helping to create lesson plans, these professionals can also receive help to generate examples for students.

Additionally, upon receiving student performance data, the platform suggests groupings of students or “levels” passages of text up or down for students who are struggling or need more challenge. When all tools are used together, Khan Academy points out that savings of five hours can be realized.

Teachers are overworked and record numbers of people are leaving the profession as a result. School districts in disadvantaged areas have been hit especially hard, with teachers citing low pay and unmanageable workloads, exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic, as some of the main reasons they are giving up teaching. Using AI in education is not only a powerful way to potentially help accelerate student learning, but it is also a way to make teaching more sustainable.

Sal Khan, CEO of Khan Academy

Launch and availability

The khanmigo will be released from today (21) to teachers and students from the 3rd grade in the USA. Microsoft hopes that the new feature will innovate education through artificial intelligence and also shared in its press release that this is just the first step of the new features that are on the way.

We're excited to tackle these important challenges with Khan Academy. This model has the potential to improve accessibility, reliability, and experience for AI-powered math classes on products like the Khanmigo platform.

Deirdre Quarnstrom, Vice President of Educational Products at Microsoft

The new product does not yet have a date to arrive in Brazil

A Khan Academy operates in Brazil with support from the Lemann Foundation, providing education support to primary and secondary school students. All material is available free of charge on the NGO's website, which also forms partnerships with Education departments to bring knowledge to public schools.

During the event of Microsoft, a date for the platform's arrival in other countries, including Brazil, was not mentioned. Our country is still moving towards implementing AI tools in education, especially in public schools.

One of the factors that most influences this delay is the lack of infrastructure in public schools, but we hope that companies like Microsoft be the way for this to work. Do you think we can see the Khanmigo platform in Brazil, at some point? Tell us Comment!

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With information: Microsoft News