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Education Microsoft AI

Microsoft Launches Free AI Assistant For All Educators in US in Deal With Khan Academy (nbcnewyork.com) 35

Posted by msmash from the how-about-that dept.
Microsoft is partnering with tutoring organization Khan Academy to provide a generative AI assistant to all teachers in the U.S. for free. From a report: Khanmigo for Teachers, which helps teachers prepare lessons for class, is free to all educators in the U.S. as of Tuesday. The program can help create lessons, analyze student performance, plan assignments, and provide teachers with opportunities to enhance their own learning.

"Unlike most things in technology and education in the past where this is a 'nice-to-have,' this is a 'must-have' for a lot of teachers," Sal Khan, founder and CEO of Khan Academy, said in a CNBC "Squawk Box" interview last Friday ahead of the deal. Khan Academy has roughly 170 million registered users in over 50 languages around the world, and while its videos are best known, its interactive exercise platform was one which Microsoft-funded artificial intelligence company OpenAI's top executives, Sam Altman and Greg Brockman, zeroed in on early when they were looking for a partner to pilot GPT with that offered socially positive use cases.
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Microsoft Launches Free AI Assistant For All Educators in US in Deal With Khan Academy More

Microsoft Launches Free AI Assistant For All Educators in US in Deal With Khan Academy

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  • OMG (Score:5, Insightful)

    by fredrated ( 639554 ) on Tuesday May 21, 2024 @11:21AM (#64488015) Journal

    I guess AI is going to be everywhere. Just shoot me now.

    • Worse than that it will be partnered with a source of vides that have a highly variable quality. Some of the physics videos I have seen from Khan vary from just plain wrong to highly confusing and badly explained. These are not going to be improved by an AI assistant that has zero knowledge of any physics concepts and simply parrots the next word it thinks matches best.

    • Long as it's not in your pants, you'll be OK.

  • Most schools will have teachers who can make good use of this for some classes, for a whole collection of reasons. English teachers will want to teach college-bound students how to properly cite sources when generative AI is involved. IT and possibly some art classes may want to teach students how to construct prompts that get useful results out of generative AI; many of the details will be obsolete by the time they graduate, but it's still useful to have a foundation to build on. Some teachers may even

  • If (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Ol Olsoc ( 1175323 ) on Tuesday May 21, 2024 @11:25AM (#64488027)
    If I know Microsoft, and I do, it might be free for the moment, but not for long.

    Get enough schools to use it, then switch to a subscription model.

    • Re:If (Score:5, Insightful)

      by nightflameauto ( 6607976 ) on Tuesday May 21, 2024 @11:33AM (#64488041)

      If I know Microsoft, and I do, it might be free for the moment, but not for long.

      Get enough schools to use it, then switch to a subscription model.

      You aren't thinking evilly enough.

      This is step one of the AI takeover of education. Get educators to use the AI tool to help develop the lesson plan. After a few years of gathering data on teacher corrections to the AI created plans, start selling the "learned" lesson planning to school districts with the promise it will save teachers time. Once fully inserted into the teaching sector, starting ramping up the pressure to replace teachers outright with the AIs. In a decade or so, if the dream holds and the AIs are, "meh, but close enough," we'll have taken one more step into lowering our educational standards, and making the rest of the world look better in comparison. Can you imagine an entire generation of Microsoft educated Americans?

      There ya go. Let that nightmare simmer for a bit. We won't be happy until we've let the corporations take over every aspect of American life. AI can make that process so much more efficient. Especially if they can shoehorn it into our education.

      • Quote: "We'll have taken one more step into lowering our educational standards"

        This ship has sailed. What you're talking about is even worse; It'll end up being AI-based learning, but only enough to do the jobs your overlords need you for.

        Once education professionals (the real ones, not the ivory tower academics that publish bullshit then go on to shovel the same bullshit into classrooms as part of their personal ed tech companies) are completely out of the picture there will be nobody stopping the inevitab

  • diversification (Score:5, Insightful)

    by groobly ( 6155920 ) on Tuesday May 21, 2024 @11:39AM (#64488053)

    Diversification is the key to success. This is creating a single source for everyone, the exact opposite of what is best.

    • Re: (Score:1, Troll)

      by Seven Spirals ( 4924941 )
      My public school teachers were mostly interested in abusing me and other students. If they lose their jobs, get taken to reeducation camps by cultural-revolutionaries, die screaming in fire, or otherwise are not doing great, I'm going to be the absolute last one concerned.

      Khan Academy's learning materials and teaching methods are head-and-shoulders better than what my teachers used. Since most teachers absolutely suck balls, having some competent videos or AI assistants would have been a godsend for me.

      • Where do you live where teachers are literally beating you?

        • Yes, that's absolutely correct. I had beatings from many teachers and administrators (mostly vice principals and principals). In Texas, at least when I was a kid back in the 1980's the law allowed any teacher or staff member to administer "corporal punishment" with just about zero rules (for example, I had instances of multiple "swats" administered from teachers on the same day). So, they used ping pong paddles, cricket bats (didn't know what those were until later, as we don't have Cricket in Texas), vario
          • my public school days were in Massachusetts in the 1960's through the 1970's. There, at that time, they were phasing out the concept of public school teachers being allowed to administer corporeal punishment. I the schools I was lucky enough to attend, it had already been phased out.

            I know a shop teacher that got sucker punched by a student in 10th grade, he whiped around so fast it was hard to believe, grabbed the student by the shirt and bum-rushed him until he was backed up against the wall with the t

            • Punishment doesn't work. That's why we're electing one back into the presidency.

              • I know. My mom used to work in mental health, specifically counseling for prisoners. what she learned in that job was very educational for me, a teen at the time. Yeah, punishment doesn't work. (no sarcasm implied)

            • I know a shop teacher that got sucker punched by a student in 10th grade

              My "industrial arts" teachers were cool. I never had any problems with those guys. They were mostly vets and good ol boys in Texas. It was the admin staff and mostly women who were swinging on me with exotic objects. It wasn't The Devil's Own, they only beat me, thank god they didn't sexually assault me, too.

              • Yeah, our Shop teachers were cool also. that one kid, he was just an ass. One of our shop teachers had a hot 69 roadrunner, i forget which package was on it but this was 71-74, so, it was looking brand new. When we did small engines, he would take us out to talk at the differences between 2 stroke and four stroke engines. Another shop teacher would also.... but he had an old, crappy Volvo (late 50's? early 60's?) and he was always comparing it to the roadrunner (because he had a funny sense of humor)

          • Your parents chose to have that done to you, they can't do it without consent.

      • One wonders if you presented as an evil wee beastie bent on screwing with your peers and the teachers.
        • I was rebellious and talked back when I was spoken down to. I didn't disrupt class or make it unteachable. In any case, I'm not sure what excuse is good enough for beating on a 4th grader. Extra assignments, detention, or in-school suspension would have been better options in my opinion.
          • we had this one kid, I shan't mention his name, but he, in 7th grade, went by the junior high he was in (and I was in) and threw a bunch of molotov cocktails through the windows one saturday night. Apparently he had ordered a copy of the Anarchists Cookbook and tried to burn the school down. Now, him? If they had paddled him what good would it have done? He was already a career criminal and had had several weeks of his life spent in 'juvie' , all the cops knew him and later on in 9th grade I was in a class

    • Diversification is the key to success. This is creating a single source for everyone, the exact opposite of what is best.

      Yes...and no. Diversification is good if the different sources are of roughly equal quality in both the level of understanding and accuracy. When it comes to a subject like physics it is important to be accurate and since current AI algorithms are predictive text engines whose algorithms select the best word to place next in a sentence with zero knowledge of any physics concepts it is hard to see how those AI-generated sources will be of equal quality to current human-generated ones....although partnering

  • How long will the Kahn Academy last now?

  • If it doesn't plug in to Google Classroom, it sucks. Better to wait for the inevitable Google version of this to come out (probably this summer).

    • Would you trust such a project wouldn't get canceled in three years, like much of the rest of their stuff?

  • "Microsoft Launches AI-Free Assistant For All Educators in US in Deal With Khan Academy"

  • If everybody begins educating kids the exact same way, Erroneous ideas will propagate throughout the generation being educated. I worry about stifled creativity. There probably shouldn't be one standard way to educate everybody. Richard Feynmann spoke of the power of being able to approach problems using a different set of tools but if everybody gets the same training everyone will be using the same set of tools.
  • A handful of the Microsoft licenses my company uses (we have loads) cost more than a teacher's salary in the US... does nobody in America think that education is worth more than the pittance it currently pays? You can bet teachers will still be squeezed for time, even with a fancy new assistant!
  • This is such a groundbreaking initiative! As someone deeply passionate about education and community engagement, I believe tools like Khanmigo for Teachers can truly revolutionize the way we approach teaching. I remember reading an inspiring piece on how individuals can impact their communities on https://papersowl.com/examples... [papersowl.com], and this move by Microsoft and Khan Academy seems like a massive step in that direction. By empowering educators with AI, we’re not only enhancing the learning experience f

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