Microsoft and Khan Academy Team Up to Improve Access to AI Tools for Teachers

Microsoft and educational non-profit Khan Academy have joined forces to bring time-saving and lesson-enhancing AI tools to educators. By donating access to Azure AI-optimized infrastructure, Microsoft is enabling Khan Academy to offer K–12 educators in the U.S. free access to the academy’s AI-powered teaching assistant, ‘Khanmigo’.

Khan Academy Founder Sal Khan remarks that leveraging AI in education not only accelerates student learning but also contributes to making teaching more sustainable. Reportedly, the two companies will also collaborate to explore opportunities to improve AI tools for math tutoring in an affordable, scalable, and adaptable way with a new version of Phi-3, a family of small language models (SLMs) developed by Microsoft.

As part of the agreement, Khan Academy will grant Microsoft access to educational content, including math problem questions and step-by-step solutions, to aid in developing AI-powered math tutoring features with Phi-3.

Additionally, Khan Academy will supply continuous feedback and benchmarking data for performance assessment. Also, user data from Khan Academy will not be utilized to train the model.

Further, the two organizations will collaborate to integrate more Khan Academy content into Copilot and Teams for Education to provide high-quality content to the users. The integration will also open up the academy’s massive educational repository to more learners.

Khan believes that this partnership will support teachers in bringing personalized teaching and learning to more classrooms, enabling students to overcome the toughest challenges.