Artificial Intelligence

Microsoft Beefs up Copilot Education Features, Expands Khanmigo for Teachers

• By Rhea Kelly
• 06/18/24

Microsoft has announced a spate of new education features within Copilot for Microsoft 365, enabling teachers and students to utilize generative AI for content creation, automated feedback, and more. The company will showcase the updates at the upcoming ISTELive 24 conference in Denver, CO.

Among the new capabilities:

• Guided content generation to help teachers create assignments, lesson plans, lecture slides, and other learning materials in Microsoft 365 apps (such as Teams, Word, and PowerPoint);
• The ability to align content to more than 5 million education standards (via the EdGate repository of academic and CTE standards);
• Quiz generation through Copilot in Forms, which can generate quiz questions and answers, provide step-by-step solutions, and assign quizzes to classes in Teams for Education;
• Suggested AI feedback, based on individual student progress, rubrics selections, or assignment instructions, which teachers can review, edit, implement, or discard as desired;
• Interactive practice experiences, such as guided chat or AI-generated study materials that can be created by educators or by students; and
• Built-in learning and teaching extensions that guide users through tasks.

Microsoft is also introducing education data integration, enabling schools to use institutional data to help Copilot generate more helpful responses based on personal and organizational information. The integration will draw data from Teams for Education (such as classwork, assignments, grades, class rosters, and more) as well as learning management systems.

Building off of its recent partnership with Khan Academy, Microsoft is expanding free availability of Khanmigo for Teachers. The AI-powered teaching assistant tool will now be open to educators outside the United States (an e-mail signup is available to notify educators when the tool becomes available in their region).  

Additional upcoming releases include:

• A new Lesson Crafter tool for Minecraft Education, which will be available for free in the coming months;
• Speaker Progress, Microsoft's newest Learning Accelerator, will be generally available by July;
• A Math Progress Learning Accelerator will be available for preview in July; and
• A new learning tools interoperability (LTI) private preview will bring Learning Accelerators and Teams Assignments to a school's learning management system.

For full details on these announcements and more, read the Microsoft Education blog post here.