Enhancing the future of education with Khan Academy

Published by Microsoft Education Team

Today, we announced a new partnership with Khan Academy to help turn the promise of AI in education into reality and increase access to innovation. As part of the partnership, Microsoft is enabling Khan Academy to provide free access to Khanmigo for Teachers to all US educators, we’re collaborating to explore opportunities to improve AI-powered math tutoring with a new open-source small language model, and bringing high-quality education experiences to more learners.

AI holds potential in education to accelerate learning, prepare students for the future, improve efficiency, and so much more. To realize these benefits, we need to address challenges like accuracy, overreliance, cost, connectivity, efficacy, and providing enough support to educators. We can only accomplish this through collaborative efforts across technology providers, academia, the education community, governments, and non-profit organizations like Khan Academy.

Providing Khanmigo for Teachers to all US educators for free

Khanmigo for Teachers, a pilot AI-powered teaching assistant, is free for all US educators as of today due to our partnership. Khanmigo streamlines class prep and gives teachers more time and energy to spend with students. As your planning ally and instructional collaborator, Khanmigo leverages Khan Academy content to simplify AI for teachers. No prompting is required. Khanmigo will help create engaging lesson hooks, provide insights on student performance, recommended assignments, and support for refreshing your knowledge.

“Khanmigo brought back the joy in my classroom. It’s given me new confidence in what I’m able to do as a teacher to help build young innovators that are going out into our world. And it’s changed my perspective on what I want to be doing in 10 years, I can’t imagine myself doing anything else.” – Melissa Higgason, Chemistry teacher at Hobart High School, Indiana, US.

We’re excited to now power Khanmigo for Teachers with Azure OpenAI Service to provide increased availability and support the Khan Academy team in making efficient use of the technology. Khanmigo is currently available in the US, and we look forward to the difference it will make for more educators over time.

At a time when educators likely have more on their plate than ever, we hope free tools like Khanmigo for Teachers and Microsoft Copilot can help them to save time and focus on what matters most. Copilot offers AI-powered chat with current responses from the web and links to sources, image generation and analysis, and commercial data protection. Our latest research found that educators have already started to find value from tools like these by creating class materials, brainstorming new ideas, simplifying complex topics, and differentiating instruction with AI assistance.

Making math more engaging with AI-powered tutoring

There’s an urgent, global need to address math learning gaps, and we believe part of the path forward involves making math more meaningful, personalized, and engaging for students. Many students lack access to foundational courses and have difficulty seeing the relevance of math to their own life and goals. We hope to seamlessly integrate real-world scenarios catered to their interest, provide real-time coaching support that detects mistakes and adjusts problems accordingly, and spark excitement in STEAM education and careers.

To make progress on this vision, we’re collaborating with Khan Academy to explore how to improve AI-powered math tutoring in a more affordable and scalable manner with an open-source fine-tuned version of Phi-3, Microsoft’s family of small language models (SLMs). Khan Academy will support model enhancements by providing explanatory educational content including high-quality math problem questions and step-by-step answer sets, ongoing feedback, and benchmarking data to evaluate performance. None of Khan Academy’s user data will be used to train the model. 

This new version of Phi-3 has already been fine-tuned by Microsoft for calling Python code for complex calculations and was trained on data from Accelerate Learning and UPchieve including synthetic math tutoring chats. It can generate problems for specific grade levels and math topics, help students learn through guided explanations, and provide customized summaries of tutoring sessions for students and teachers with initial functionality supporting middle-school math.  

With enhancements, this version of Phi-3 aims to offer enhanced math accuracy, support additional grade levels, and explore additional functionality such as giving students feedback based on their handwritten notes. Phi-3 is a family of small language models (SLMs) which offer many of the same capabilities as large language models (LLMs) but are smaller in size and trained on smaller amounts of targeted data. Phi-3 models not only outperform models of the same size and next size up across language, reasoning, coding, and math benchmarks, but they also do so in more cost-effective ways. Further, SLMs offer the opportunity to use powerful AI models on devices in places with low or no internet connectivity.

“We’re thrilled to tackle these important challenges with Khan Academy, this model has the potential to improve the accessibility, reliability, and experience for AI-powered math tutoring in products like Khanmigo.” – Deirdre Quarnstrom, Microsoft Education Product Vice President

Bringing high-quality education experiences to more learners

Microsoft and Khan Academy are collaborating to bring AI innovations and high-quality content to education. We’re getting started by bringing more Khan Academy content into Copilot and Microsoft Teams for Education for millions of learners.

Research indicates that every minute spent on Khan Academy can lead to learning gains. Created by educational experts, Khan Academy’s trusted library of content covers math PreK-12 through early college, grammar, science, history, AP, SAT prep, and more. Copilot already includes Khan Academy references in relevant responses, and we’re working on making the content even more accessible and interactive. We’ll also bring Khan Academy content into Microsoft Teams for Education to streamline educator workflows while creating a focused and contextual environment for learners.

Microsoft Teams for Education is a powerful, free communication app for schools that enhances collaboration and learning. It integrates everyone and everything in one place and has been designed to support the needs of students, educators, staff, and guardians. Khan Academy has now added a new “Share to Teams” feature in its platform to enable easy sharing and application of Khan Academy content in student assignments.

We’re looking forward to continuing our collaboration and bringing more AI opportunities to life. Get started today with Khanmigo for Teachers and Microsoft Copilot as an AI assistant for educators, and stay tuned for updates.

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