Artificial Intelligence Tools Could Save Education Says Salman Khan
September 9, 2023
Around the world, more than 600 million children are missing basic math and reading skills. Artificial intelligence (AI) could be a major tool in tackling this problem, says Salman Khan, founder of Khan Academy, an education non-profit based in Mountain View, in California’s Silicon Valley. “We’re at the cusp of using AI for probably the biggest positive transformation that education has ever seen,” Salman Khan said in a TED talk earlier this year.
In 1984, research published by Benjamin Bloom stated that one-to-one tutoring, with regular testing and feedback, results in a vast improvement in a student’s academic performance. But providing such tutoring to all students was unattainable due to cost and scalability issues since it requires a teacher for each student. Bloom was a professor of education at the University of Chicago and Northwestern University.
AI has the potential to scale tutoring economically and provide every student with access to an AI-powered personal tutor – to enhance deep understanding, confidence, clarity, and empowerment - and every teacher with an AI teaching assistant, Khan said.
During his TED talk, he gave a live demo of Khan Academy’s new AI-powered guide, Khanmigo, which offers one-to-one tutoring, including in math and computer programming. Khanmigo, which has been designed to write with students rather than for them, helps them with exercises, detects mistakes, identifies misconceptions, and provides feedback.
Khanmigo encourages dialogue and debate by providing a safe space for students to fine-tune their arguments, which can give them more confidence in class. It encourages collaborative story writing and provides feedback on drafts, which helps students improve their writing abilities.
For teachers, Khanmigo acts as a teaching assistant by explaining answers and teaching methods, helping with lesson planning, and creating progress reports. This allows teachers to spend more time and energy on one-on-one interactions with their students.
However, AI comes with limitations and risks and Khan Academy communicates this to every parent, teacher, and child who uses Khanmigo. It limits the amount of interaction individuals can have with the AI per day. Also, each child’s chat history and activities are visible to parents or guardians and teachers so they can stay informed and involved in their child’s education. The platform also uses moderation technology to detect inappropriate interactions, and when it does, it sends an automatic email alert to an adult.
8,400 FREE educational videos. Two billion views.
Since 2009, Khan Academy has been offering free online learning tools for courses from Kindergarten to college level, including in math, science, computing, history and grammar; also on test preparation, careers and personal finance.
The tools include practice exercises, instructional videos, and a personalized learning dashboard which enable students to learn at their own pace, in and outside the classroom. Over 8,400 videos offer simple explanations of key learning building blocks for students ages 2 and up, as well as adult learners. The focus is “on skill mastery to help learners establish strong foundations, so there's no limit to what they can learn next.”
The academy also offers free online tools for parents and teachers, including a dashboard, to better understand what their children or students are up to and how best to help them.
In the 2021-22 school year, during the COVID19 pandemic school closures, Khan Academy registered 15 million new users, taking the total to 140 million users. Also, that year, 1.5 million students spent 18 or more hours on its tools, an average of 30 minutes per week during the school year. The academy’s YouTube channel has nearly 8 million subscribers and its videos have been viewed more than two billion times. One of its most watched videos is You Can Learn Anything video.
The academy’s content is translated into more than 36 languages, including on Spanish, French, and Brazilian Portuguese versions of its site. They are also widely used in India. The YouTube India channel, which includes 1,400 videos, has nearly 700,000 subscribers. Some of the content is translated into Hindi, Tamil, Kannada, and Gujarati.
The number of students using the academy’s tools is remarkable considering that it does no advertising. It has attracted users worldwide largely by word-of-mouth publicity and media coverage. Today the academy has more than 1,200 employees, including software developers, teachers, designers, scientists, and content specialists.
A cartoonist, doctor, lawyer, or Wall Street career?
In 2004, Salman Khan started tutoring his cousin Nadia with her high school math course work. Soon he was tutoring several cousins, and then, dozens of others. In 2009, he founded Khan Academy with the financial backing of Ann Doerr, who has a BS and MS from Rice University, Houston; she is the wife of the Silicon Valley venture capitalist John Doerr.
Prior to founding the academy, Salman Khan worked as an analyst at Connective Capital Management, a hedge fund based in Boston. He was born in Metairie, a suburb of New Orleans, Louisiana. He told a reporter for The Dawn that New Orleans is “the one part of the US that looks like India: big roaches, humid weather, corrupt government and spicy food.”
Khan’s mother Mahooda was born in Murshidabad, near Kolkata, India, and his father Jamal Khan, a pediatrician, was from Barisal in Bangladesh. He was brought up by his mother, who worked several jobs to raise her son as a single parent, according to The New York Times.
Khan attended Grace King High School, a local government-run school in Metairie, where a few classmates were fresh out of jail and others were bound for top universities. While in high school, he sketched cartoons for the school's newspaper, wanting to be a cartoonist or an architect. He played guitar and sang - or “growled” - in a heavy metal band.
In high school, he gradually developed an interest in theoritical physics, Khan told Joint Venture, a blog run by a Silicon Valley community group. So, he took advanced mathematics courses at the University of New Orleans. In 1994, he graduated at the head of his high school class.
While in college, at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Khan took seven or eight courses a semester, with plans to become a doctor or a lawyer. He earned two Bachelor’s degrees from MIT in math and computer science. He was elected class president in his senior year. Khan went on to earn a Master’s in electrical engineering and computer science, also from MIT. In 2011, at age 35, he was one of the youngest commencement speakers at MIT’s graduation ceremony, according to Wired.
Khan spent two years in California working for Oracle, the software firm. He then earned an MBA from the Harvard Business School. While at Harvard, he reconnected with Umaima Marvi, a Pakistani woman he knew from M.I.T. Marvi was completing her medical education at Harvard. The two married in 2004; one of their wedding receptions was held in Karachi. The couple live in Mountain View, California, with their two children Imran and Diya.
Salman Khan of Khan Academy at his TED talk 2023
$99 annual cost for using Khanmigo
Khan Academy’s mission is “to provide a free, world-class education for anyone, anywhere.” It can offer free education tools, except for Khanmigo, because of funding from donors. In 2021, for instance, the academy raised $59 million for its annual budget, including $25 million from foundations and individual gifts, $16 million from corporations and $8 million from smaller donors.
Donors, who have given over $10 million, include the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and John and Ann Doerr, as well as companies like Google and Bank of America. The Tata Trusts have donated over $5 million and HDFC Bank over $1 million; both are based in Mumbai. There are no Indian American billionaires among donors who have given more than $1 million.
Bill Gates, philanthropist and co-founder of Microsoft; Laurene Powell Jobs, widow of Apple founder Steve Jobs; and Ratan Tata, head of the Tata Trusts and former chairman of the Tata Group of companies in India, are among Khan Academy’s advisers.
In 2020, Salman Khan teamed up with Shishir Mehrotra, a college friend, to start Schoolhouse.world, another nonprofit. Mehrotra is the co-founder and chief executive of Coda, which provides the technical platform for Schoolhouse. Coda offers online tools for employees to work together remotely, including a single platform to create worksheets, documents, presentations and to-do lists. Mehrotra’s company was valued at about $1.4 billion in a 2021 funding round, according to Forbes.
With the help of volunteer tutors and support from the online platform Zoom, Schoolhouse offers free tutoring in high school math via video worldwide. It reaches nearly 50,000 learners from more than 100 countries, with the help of over 6,500 volunteer tutors.
But, as Bloom’s research found, Schoolhouse is constrained in its ability to tutor more students one-to-one by the number of volunteer tutors it can attract and the time they can devote. Now, through the AI based tutor Khanmigo, Khan expects to provide one-to-one tutoring to millions around the world.
However, AI comes with limitations and risks and Khan Academy communicates this to every parent, teacher, and child who uses Khanmigo. It limits the amount of interaction individuals can have with the AI per day. Also, each child’s chat history and activities are visible to parents or guardians and teachers so they can stay informed and involved in their child’s education. The platform also uses moderation technology to detect inappropriate interactions, and when it does, it sends an automatic email alert to an adult.
Also, while students, teachers, and parents can access Khan Academy’s content for free, there is a cost to use Khanmigo. Users of Khanmigo, which is currently in beta testing and available only to those in the U.S. over 18 years of age, are required to pay an annual donation of $99. “Each interaction with Khanmigo incurs costs. Your donation helps us support Khan Academy’s mission while giving you access to a groundbreaking learning experience,” according to a blog on its website.
Perhaps, in the near future, access to Khanmigo will also be free for students due to additional donations and big discounts on its use of AI and related services provided by vendors, including Microsoft whose ChatGPT powers the AI based education tool.
Khan emphasized that everyone has a role to play in shaping the future of AI in education. He said, “Instead of worrying about students using AI to cheat…We all have to fight like hell for the positive use cases.”
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