Microsoft, Khan Academy Partner to Make Khanmigo Teaching Tool Free
thejournal.com
thejournal.com
No I haven't used it. I don't like how it's being marketed though. I very much do not trust GPT 4 on the level where I am ready to have it educate the young.
Which essentially means the hallucination problem needs to be solved, which is a ways off.
If the government spent a fraction of the money tech is using to hype up LLMs on compensating teachers, we wouldnt have this mindset. We shouldn't have such thoughts of "we don't expect the most of our techaers" to begin with. Paying teachers more is a lot easier than solving hallucinations (as you probably saw, even Google is needing To manually edit gemini responses. The kings of automation).
The (sad) state of things in the world right now mean teacher will be seeing your kid almost as much as you will. Maybe even more. So we should be more particular in who that person is, and what lessons they bestow on students. You wouldn't let any ol stranger baby sit your kid, so why the same for teachers?
Grants got me through school, so I'm content being taxed up the nose. But I'm an outlier in my tax bracket for that opinion.
But yeah, "individualism culture".
There is no reliable evidence that schools improve learning outcomes either. Maybe it's all just some kids being born with higher intelligence and curiosity. If they attend a school, the school takes the credit for their achievements. If they use Khan Academy (or whatever other website) instead, the website takes the credit.
There's decades of evidence, just compare school results (even the lowest quartile) to homeschooling. I'm sure there's tons of literature in that field.
Despite our repeated attempts to do so, teaching a full k-12 curriculum is in fact not something then vast majority of parents are ready to do. Even this tool isn't vying to replace teachers. If anything it wants to replace the teaching aides (aka tomorrow's teachers who are learning how to manage a classroom). It may be worse in that regard since its eyes are on the future without considering the human element of the future.
I think it's easier to ask the collorary: do you trust your kid(s) to self learn K-12 material on their own time instead of going to school? Why or why not?
pg likens it to a prison: https://paulgraham.com/nerds.html
Some schools are awful: https://nypost.com/2014/01/12/no-space-no-books-no-leader-no...
Newark: Zuck's $100,000,000 barely made a dent in math https://www.chalkbeat.org/2017/10/16/21103581/the-100-millio...
On the other hand, I knew since 2011 that this was possible instead:
https://archive.nytimes.com/opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/20...
I have proposed specific ways to reform education 10 years ago:
https://slashdot.org/submission/17320965/microsoft-sorry-kid...
"Today, we announced a new partnership with Khan Academy to help turn the promise of AI in education into reality and increase access to innovation," began Microsoft's Tuesday post explaining it would make Khanmigo for Teachers (an AI-powered assistant) free to all educators in the US. But while Microsoft’s donation of Azure OpenAI Services may enable Khan Academy to offer their teacher tools to all teachers at no cost (Khanmigo previously cost teachers $4/month), Microsoft suggested it's still too cost prohibitive for even the world's most valuable company ($3.2T market cap) to pick up the monthly $4-a-head large language model (LLM) bill (public pricing, school pricing available by request) for the nation's 50+ million K-12 students.
To help schools fund AI efforts, Khan Academy has in the past provided 1:1 coaching to Indiana educators on how to snag $50K AI grants to pay for Khanmigo from their state. Teachers and students from Indiana's AI grant-winning Hobart High School, a Khanmigo pilot participant, were featured in Microsoft's AI in education media releases as well as Khan Academy co-founder Sal Khan's just-released book on AI in the classroom, which earned a thumbs-up from personal AI tutor evangelist Bill Gates.
Microsoft apparently hopes to solve the AI student tutor cost problem at scale with AI portion control for schoolchildren, explaining: "The companies [Microsoft and Khan Academy] will also explore how small language models (SLMs) such as Microsoft’s new Phi-3 family of models, which can perform well for simpler AI tasks and are more cost effective and easier to use than larger models, might help improve and scale AI tutoring tools. To that end, Khan Academy is collaborating with Microsoft to explore the development of new, open-source small language models based on Phi-3. The goal of the exploratory work is to enable state-of-the-art math tutoring capabilities in an affordable and scalable manner." Which aligns nicely with the goals of BillG and the Gates Foundation, which gave Khan Academy another $4.5M late last year "to continue the development and scale Khan Academy Districts to become the leading Math supplemental curriculum solution in the US."
> In another layer of the partnership, Khan Academy will help Microsoft train an open source version of the latter's new small language model (SLM), Phi-3, with the goal of creating an AI math tutor for students
>To that end, Khan Academy will give Microsoft access to its math-related data, including math problems with step-by-step solutions. Data from Khan Academy users will not be part of the training data, the companies said.
Presumably any successful outcomes with this will result in a culling, starting with aides and specialists. Add declining enrollment and you have strong incentive.
Many websites provide teacher packs; this offering is a hyper-customized, always up-to-date version of the same.
One may hope it’d just help teachers be a ton more effective, or at least less over-worked. We’d need about twice as many to deliver really good education, but instead the pool of teachers is shrinking, so we’re gonna need tech just to tread water on education quality.
Having a new teaching tool is no substitution for teachers. Teachers are there to classroom manage, manage/coach students to learn, and baby sit.
If this is really what actual teachers think of teaching in 2024, Gen Alpha truly is doomed.
The learning part is on the student, anyway. You can only assist them while they do it. And that mostly means breaking down stuff into lessons, taking care of the learning environment, answering questions as they arise, keep students from cutting each others hair off, and keep them busy until their parents come home from work (although I agree the last part is a bit of a cynical take).
1. To teach students whatever society deems at the time is general education. This is straightforward, don't think I need to elaborate here.
2. To widen the horizons of the youth on what's possible to do in the world. Ideally they'd inspire students and guide them towards their potential passions and interests. I'd never be here in tech if my 4th/5th grade teacher didn't inspire me into STEM. He worked at NASA before, he was my first exposure to Carl Sagan, he had all sorts of neat astronomical examples ready whenever the science unit came up. I didn't end up as an astronomer, but it did show me something I never would have looked into otherwise as a kid
3. A resource (or pointer to a resource) for students. Be it if the students are struggling in studies, are curious about particular topics, or want to try and plan a future pursuit. They should help students not only learn, but learn to learn.
4. Lastly, as a state guardian. A teacher should be one a child should feels safe confiding with should issues involving their parents, peers, or even other teaches arises. They should have some emotional intelligence to balance between what administration wants and what the student needs at that time. This also may include identifying mental or medical issues in students, and at least able to start the trail of investigation should there be more than lack of interest holding some students back.
If we compare notes we agree on #1, and you have maybe a small inkling of #3 and 4 for our definitions. The only separation from school and day care in your definition is the lessons, thought these days daycares also do that.
If society just wants government funded supervision while the parents engage in taxable labor for half their waking life (or more), we should just be honest about that.
Id way rather our school district bought an Xtramath account and taught the kids math facts in a simple way than waste money on AI that does not work or feeds misinformation.
I'm not sure why that implies that the paid plan is not available outside of the US.
Seems a little too much on the noise?
Also, Sal Khan's family is Bengali originating from India and Bangladesh.
> They are descendants of Rahmat Khan, a 16th-century Pashtun chieftain