Microsoft announces that it will offer its AI tutor 'Khanmigo for Teachers,' which has been used by more than 65,000 students, free of charge to all teachers

On May 21, 2024 local time, Microsoft announced a new partnership with Khan Academy , a non-profit educational organization, to realize the potential of AI in the education sector and expand access to innovation. As part of this partnership, Microsoft explains that it will provide ' Khanmigo for Teachers ' free of charge to all educators in the United States.

Khanmigo For Teachers Now 100% Free for All US Teachers, Thanks to Microsoft Support - Khan Academy Blog
https://blog.khanacademy.org/khanmigo-for-teachers-is-free-for-all-us-teachers-thanks-to-support-from-microsoft/

Khan Academy and Microsoft partner to expand access to AI tools that personalize teaching and help make learning fun - Source
https://news.microsoft.com/source/features/ai/khan-academy-and-microsoft-partner-to-expand-access-to-ai-tools/

Enhancing the future of education with Khan Academy | Microsoft EDU
https://educationblog.microsoft.com/en-us/2024/05/enhancing-the-future-of-education-with-khan-academy

Microsoft and Khan Academy partner to show how AI can transform education | VentureBeat
https://venturebeat.com/ai/microsoft-to-enhance-khan-academys-ai-bot-with-azure-openai-service-develop-phi-3-math-model/

Microsoft teams up with Khan Academy to make the Khanmigo AI teaching assistant free
https://www.engadget.com/microsoft-teams-up-with-khan-academy-to-make-the-khanmigo-ai-teaching-assistant-free-153008848.html

Khanmigo is an AI tutor with a proven track record of being used by over 65,000 students. Khanmigo is a learning AI that can be used by students, parents, and educators, and can be used by parents to help their children with their homework and by teachers to create learning plans for students. However, it cost $4 (about 630 yen) per month to use.

Microsoft and Khan Academy have announced that Khanmigo for Teachers, a teacher-oriented version of Khanmigo, will be available free of charge to all educators in the United States from May 21, 2024. Khanmigo for Teachers helps teachers build lesson plans and assists with instruction by utilizing Khan Academy content, which offers a wide range of free online classes. It will provide support for creating hooks to get students interested in classes, insights into student performance, recommended assignments, and more.

By using 'Khanmigo for Teachers,' teachers can significantly reduce the time they spend preparing for lessons. Past studies have shown that using 'Khanmigo for Teachers' can reduce the burden of 'lesson preparation work' by more than 50%. Therefore, Microsoft and Khan Academy said, 'The goal of our new partnership is to give teachers time to focus on what really matters: teaching their students.'

In addition, 'Khanmigo for Teachers' uses Microsoft's Azure OpenAI Service , which means that it can access AI models such as OpenAI's GPT-4o, GPT-4, Whisper, and DALL-E 3. Not only this, but it seems that significant cost savings can be achieved in other areas as well.

Khan Academy founder Sal Khan said, 'Teaching is an overworked profession,' pointing out that teachers are underpaid and overworked. If teachers use AI, he argues, 'it can make education more sustainable.'

Meet Khanmigo: Khan Academy's AI-powered teaching assistant & tutor

In addition, Microsoft announced that it will use its small-scale language model Phi-3 to help improve Khan Academy's math instructional content. By using Phi-3, the company will cooperate in creating higher quality learning content while increasing the number of lessons available for Microsoft Copilot, a chatbot, and Microsoft Teams for Education , which provides practical learning tools for educational institutions and students.

Regarding the reason for using the small language model Phi-3, technology media VentureBeat wrote, 'Using the small language model Phi-3 makes sense because it is specialized for one thing: teaching mathematics. If the training data is mixed with non-subject matter, it is prone to hallucinations and misinformation that hinder the learning process, but this is not the case in this use case.'

In addition, Microsoft has fine-tuned its version of Phi-3 to call Python code for complex calculations, optimizing it for the use case of training AI models based on data from Accelerate Learning and Upchieve. The result is an AI that can help student users learn with guided tutorials or generate problems for specific levels or math topics while providing customized summaries.

'We're excited to work with Khan Academy to address these important challenges,' said Deidre Quarnstrom, vice president of education products at Microsoft. 'This model has the potential to improve the accessibility, reliability and experience of AI-powered math tutoring in products like Khanmigo.'