Microsoft and Khan Academy, the free online educational website, have announced a partnership to make the latter’s relatively new Khanmigo AI tool available for all US educators free of charge. With Khanmigo, teachers can streamline class preparation without needing to enter prompts; it will generate engaging lesson hooks, give insight into student performance, offer up recommended assignments, and help teachers refresh their knowledge about topics.
Commenting on the partnership, Sal Khan said that record numbers of teachers are leaving the profession because they are swamped by big workloads and aren’t making very good money. Today’s announcement applies only to Khanmigo in the US. Still, in time, it will hopefully launch globally to help teachers in poorer countries where there is also a big strain on teachers due to understaffing and large workloads.
Before this partnership, Khanmigo previously cost educators $4 per month. These fees covered the cost of developing and testing new technology and accessing the large language models that Khanmigo is powered by. As a result, teachers will save $48 per year.
As part of the deal, Khanmigo will now be powered by Microsoft’s Azure OpenAI Service. Microsoft’s “donation” will allow Khan Academy to scale the tools more widely and ultimately give all K-12 teachers in the US access at no cost.
Another part of the deal says that Khan Academy will give Microsoft access to explanatory educational content such as maths problem questions and step-by-step answers to help develop the maths tutoring capabilities of Microsoft’s Phi-3 small language model. Khan Academy will also provide feedback and benchmarking data to evaluate performance, but it should be noted that no Khan Academy user data will be used to train the model.
The final aspect of the deal will see the two organisations work together to integrate Khan Academy content into Copilot and Teams for Education. Both benefit from this, as Khan Academy will see a greater reach of its materials while Microsoft will see its tools become more useful.