When UC Santa Barbara Chancellor Henry Yang and Santa Barbara County Superintendent of Schools Susan Salcido and a slew of other educators are in the Arlington Theatre to hear a lecture on a sunny Saturday afternoon, there’s a pretty good chance that lecturer is a BIG DEAL in the education community.
Enter Salman “Sal” Khan, the Khan Academy founder, who almost 20 years ago, famously started out as a young hedge fund manager who was remotely tutoring his cousin Nadia in math, grew that tutoring into a YouTube channel offering short educational lessons via video, and now offers free courses to more than 155 million registered users around the world. Khan Academy is now also a full-fledged nonprofit providing learning tools for parents, teachers and kids in more than 50 languages and used in more than 190 countries.
Khan’s UCSB Arts & Lectures talk, on the heels of promoting his 2024 book Brave New Words: How AI Will Revolutionize Education (and Why That’s a Good Thing), focused primarily on AI and some of the positive things it is bringing to the table.
His company’s version is Khanmigo, the first AI tutor built on GPT-4 technology and designed around learning science principles. And throughout his presentation, Khan emphasized that both the Khan Academy and Khanmigo have used technology in conjunction with human contact and that, “we are all actors in how this is going to play out.”
He talked quite a bit about what he called “the principle of educated bravery.” Khan Academy was one of the first groups to work with the early versions of GPT, and Kahn was certainly aware of the initial public fears of AI. “Bad people will begin to start using these tools for bad things. Well, hopefully all of us should use it for good things and try to mitigate these risks,” he said. “We can educate ourselves with risk and be brave and move forward. And so we did that. And so we started working on what would eventually become Khanmigo, which is our AI for students as a tutor, but also for teachers.”
The road to incorporating this new technology was not a perfectly smooth one, as Khan discussed through various anecdotes. But as he wrote in his book and explained to the audience, “To get the very best from this technology, we need to reconsider what is now possible. We also need to ponder how to mitigate the risks, our fears and our hesitations. … We are at a turning point in education, one with far-reaching implications that is changing, and will continue to change, everything about learning, work, and human purpose.”
He said, “You know, it’s very tempting when you see a new technology, especially if you have a background in tech. I have a background in engineering; especially if you’re a technologist, it’s very tempting to think that’s really cool technology. I want to use it somehow — which is always the wrong way to do it. You should never have a solution looking for a problem. You should say, ‘Well, what are the problems we’re trying to solve in the world?’ And then we should try to solve them in the simplest possible way. The problem that I’ve thought about a lot, and I realize Khan Academy is there to hopefully help folks solve, is how do we personalize education for and how do we give more people access to world class learning, and how do we support those supporting the students more? How do we support teachers, and how do we support parents more? And if the technology is pencil and paper, so be it. But maybe AI can be part of that solution.”
