What AI Gets Right and How It Will Be Used in the Year Ahead
A lot of the conversation about AI in education is dominated by extremes — on the one hand, I've seen unrealistic promises that overstate what AI can do today and on the other hand, fears of AI replacing teachers or legitimate concerns like cheating. I believe the truth lies in the middle: AI has tremendous potential to do good in education while honoring and upholding the essential role of teachers. However, its success will depend on how we choose to use it.
Let me be clear: Teachers are more important than ever.
A caring teacher can inspire a love of learning, build confidence, and even change the trajectory of a child's life. Research shows that when students feel cared for by someone at school, they have better outcomes, including higher engagement and achievement. That's why no technology — no matter how advanced — can ever replace the human connection that teachers provide.
Yet when new technology is introduced into the world, it's natural to worry about the impact on people. When I started uploading math lessons to YouTube in 2006, people were concerned that Khan Academy videos would replace teachers. Then, like now, technology was a way to free up teachers to do the very human work of instructing a classroom of kids. My goal was to give teachers time back so they can spend more time working directly with students.
Today, teachers can save a meaningful amount of time by using AI. For example, AI can help write lesson plans, generate multiple-choice quizzes, compose parent e-mails in Spanish, write exit tickets, and so much more. Teachers can use AI to refresh their knowledge and brush up on topics they haven't taught in a while.
At Khan Academy, early feedback from school districts suggests that our AI tool for teachers could save as much as five hours a week. Think about that: five extra hours, week after week. Over time, those hours could add up — creating time for teachers to connect one-on-one with students, time to collaborate with colleagues, time to try out new hands-on projects. I'm hopeful that AI may be able to reduce teacher burnout and attrition rates.
I've always said that if I had to pick between amazing technology and an amazing teacher, I'd pick the amazing teacher every time. Technologies like AI are a tool. Teachers are the heart of the classroom. Ideally, we don't have to pick between them, we can complement great teachers with great technology.
Fears about students using AI to write their essays are solvable.
Cheating continues to dominate the conversation about AI, and understandably so. If you have an honest conversation with young people these days, they will admit it's tempting to use AI tools like ChatGPT to write essays. After all, ChatGPT can write an essay in a snap.
For teachers and technologists alike, detecting AI-generated text can be a challenge. Some teachers allow AI for brainstorming, while others ban its use entirely. Right now, ChatGPT feels like the Wild, Wild West.
But when AI is adapted for the classroom — with appropriate guardrails, transparency, and engineering — a different possibility emerges. AI can help students write without doing the writing for them, while minimizing opportunity to cheat. This turns an educational concern into an educational opportunity.
For example, teachers are already using AI writing tools to assign essays. The AI acts as a guide, prompting students to think critically. It helps them understand the assignment, think through a thesis statement, and create an outline — all under the supervision of a teacher. The student alone is tasked with writing the essay. The AI doesn't do the writing for them.
Teacher oversight is key. Teachers are the instructional decision-makers and receive a continuous flow of information from the AI about how students are doing throughout the entire process. Teachers can grade more efficiently as a result because AI surfaces valuable insights about student writing — without requiring them to comb through every draft.
Well-designed AI tools for writing monitor for cheating. They alert teachers to potential instances of plagiarism. For instance, if a student pastes text from outside their outline into their draft, the teacher receives an originality flag. The teacher can review the history of what happened. Essentially, it's using AI to fight AI.
The tools aren't perfect — yet. In the year ahead, I'm optimistic we'll continue to see many advances and a strengthening of the efforts to combat cheating. For our part, we're glad to be making our AI writing tool, Khanmigo Writing Coach, available free to teachers in the coming weeks as part of our mission to provide a free, world-class education for anyone, anywhere.
For learning, use AI in service of practice.
Stand-alone chatbots are not the best educational use of AI. While they can be helpful in some contexts (like brainstorming), chatbots still hallucinate and make errors. However, when AI is paired with high-quality educational content and teachers are the instructional decision-makers, we see better integration in classrooms and lower error rates.
In this setting, students work on existing academic materials and existing problems that are written and verified by humans. The AI serves as a helper. At Khan Academy, our prompt engineers instruct the AI to use trusted educational content. We direct the AI to validate its responses against our library of verified solutions before responding to students. We pass correct answers to the AI behind the scenes (without revealing the answers to the students) and share a sequence of human-generated hints to help guide students toward understanding.
This creates a system where the AI is there to encourage students to work on practice and help them stay on task, with guidance from their teacher. AI becomes a resource, which is in some ways like the articles and videos that accompany our practice problems — in other words, another tool available to students who are struggling to understand a concept or need help getting unstuck on a problem. I think of AI as being in service of practice, and practice is the heart of what students do in order to succeed. The practice is where the learning happens. And importantly, at Khan Academy, our practice materials have proven efficacy to show they work.