Enter Khanmigo - AI's impact on education

After my graduation from high school last year, I had some exams to prepare for in the coming months. Normally, the plan was for me to stay back in school and just join the program there but due to costs and some other factors, the situation changed and my dad said that I would have to prepare on my own.

I was lost for words.

Not because of how much I missed my friends or whatnot but simply the fear that this was a venture that no one should carry out on his own.

In the coming weeks, I learned to pull my weight and get some work done. The primary aid for my preparations was the globally acclaimed online education platform.

You guessed it-Khan academy. I spent hours on end surfing through personalised self-paced lessons that were designed by some of the most talented tutors. Each lesson was perfectly crafted with comprehensive explanations followed by brain tasking exercises in order to make students think deeply.

It's no shock that Khan Academy has become such a hit in making free high standard education available to so many people across the world. As a matter of fact, I passed my exams pretty well simply by making use of it.

But what role has AI played in the last few months on the growth of education on platforms like Khan Academy?

This week I watched a Ted Talk on YouTube delivered by Sal Khan (the owner of Khan academy, if that wasn't obvious already) and it blew my mind. My attention span is quite short but this video had me hooked from the first three sentences. These days it's like almost everyone is hopping on the AI train but not until I listened to this talk did I realise just how beneficial Artificial Intelligence could be for Education.

He was explaining their new Large Language Model, Khanmigo (LLM's are basically anything that looks like Chat GPT). The model has been incorporated with so many features that it can now act as a tutor far much better than anyone would expect.

Popular belief is that LLM's don't handle maths problems well and while I myself have personally experienced this, Khanmigo is definitely tackling that issue. Sal sighted an example of a student asking Khanmigo for the answer to a mathematical equation and it wouldn't provide the answer despite being asked but rather walked the student through the process of arriving at it. From chatting with characters from your favourite novel to receiving step by step instructions on solving problems, it is hard to see how this isn't a win on every side.

A great issue facing many universities especially here in Nigeria is the student to teacher ratios where one lecturer takes a class of a thousand plus students. This isn't taking us anywhere. Platforms like Khanmigo are here to bridge that gap and make 1 to 1 student to teacher ratios a reality.

Sal rounded of his talk addressing what could be seen as the dilemma that has been the talk of the year and he couldn't address it any better:

“I think all of us together have to fight like hell to make sure that we put the guardrails, we put in — when the problems arise — reasonable regulations. But we fight like hell for the positive use cases. Because very close to my heart, and obviously there’s many potential positive use cases, but perhaps the most powerful use case and perhaps the most poetic use case is if AI, artificial intelligence, can be used to enhance HI, human intelligence, human potential and human purpose”

Just like he said, we must make a conscious effort to apply these dystopian technologies in the right areas to improve our human selves. I mean just imagine what would happen if I had Khanmigo a year ago.

Once again thanks for reading and see you next week.