Microsoft has partnered with nonprofit educational organisation Khan Academy to provide millions of K-12 teachers in the USA with free access to Khanmigo for Teachers, a “time-saving and lesson-enhancing” artificial intelligence-powered teaching assistant.
Launched in March 2023, Khanmigo for Teachers provides teachers with an array of AI-powered tools to expedite administrative tasks and make lessons more engaging. For example, the tool can help teachers generate first drafts of customised lessons plans within minutes, create student groups for team tasks, monitor student performance, and more. Khan Academy estimates this can save teachers an average of five working hours each week. Meanwhile, students can use Khanmigo to ask questions and seek support, access translation tools and chat with others.
Previously, Khan charged educators $4 per month to cover the costs of developing and testing the technology and accessing the large language models that powered Khanmigo for Teachers. However, it can eliminate these costs now that the AI assistant has been migrated to Microsoft Azure OpenAI Service.
“With new advances in generative AI, we launched Khanmigo to be that personalised tutor for every student, and to be a teaching assistant for every teacher,” said Sal Khan, founder of Khan Academy. “We’re really excited to give access to these teacher tools for free; it is going to make a dramatic impact in US education.”
Khanmigo for Teachers provides access to lesson plans and learning objectives
Khan hopes the partnership with Microsoft will provide more support for teachers so they can bring personalised teaching and learning into more classrooms. “We can use the same tools to treat every kid like a future emperor,” said Khan.
In addition, Khan Academy will provide Microsoft with educational materials so it can train its Phi-3 small language models to further improve and scale AI tutoring tools. The aim is to develop an affordable AI-powered maths tutoring tool.
Microsoft will also integrate more Khan Academy content into Copilot and Teams for Education.
Speaking at Microsoft Build, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said: “We’ll be working [with Khan Academy] to use Phi-3 to make maths tutoring more accessible. And I’m also excited to share that they’ll be making Khanmigo, their AI assistant, free to all US teachers. I’m super excited to see the impact this all will have and what Khan Academy will do.”
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella speaking about the partnership with Khan Academy at Microsoft Build