How AI is transforming the classroom

SAL KHAN: I am a hundred percent against AI replacing human teachers. I think human teachers are hopefully one of the safest professions in this world. My view of technology has always been it should liberate the human teacher to be able to do more human things, which is forming connections with students, and that the tools, whether it’s AI or other technologies, should really just be about helping that teacher make it more personalized, make it more engaging, et cetera.

RANA EL KALIOUBY: Sal Khan is a parent, entrepreneur, and one of the leading thinkers when it comes to how AI is shaping education. His company, Khan Academy, was an early innovator in online education, and they now support over 150 million learners in 190 countries!

Sal is not only thinking about how AI will impact educators. He comes at this topic holistically – how can AI restructure education to make it better and accessible to all?

Our kids are heading back to school to start a new year and AI is top of mind for lots of us. So on this episode, Sal breaks down how AI is shaping education. We’ll talk about AI tutors, cheating, and what an AI-forward classroom will look like in the future.

But before we get into all of that, we wanted to take a temperature check on how some parents are feeling about AI. So we rallied a few parents on our team here at Pioneers of AI to find out.

LEITAL: My name is Leital and I’m the head of podcasts here at Wait, what? And I have 11-year-old twins, so they’re about to start sixth grade.

So for one of my kids’ fifth grade project he wanted to design a video game that would have an educational component where the user would have to answer questions about Egyptian civilization. And we ended up using this platform called block cells or block cells. He pretty quickly was figuring out kind of how to use it, but he was hitting some roadblocks and getting frustrated. So I said, let’s go to ChatGPT and ask it to help us come up with a roadmap of how you would design a game using that platform step-by-step.

So that was like a really great example, I think, of being able to use it in a fun and interactive way. My other son, he’s more of an AI skeptic, which is funny — 11 years old. He says AI is just gonna take over the world and humanity, and that’s just really dangerous. And so he has more trepidation for sure.

JORDAN: So my name is Jordan Smart. I am a producer at Pioneers of AI and my daughter is seven months old. It would be funny though if I just said, yeah, she used ChatGPT today to figure out how to warm her bottle, but of course that did not happen. So since she is not able to use AI as much as a kid older than her would be able to, a lot of it is just me thinking about how I will introduce the technology to her in the future. I want her to be curious. I want her to be inquisitive and use AI to supercharge and augment that practice instead of being a kind of crutch to take the shortcut, not develop the — I think that really essential foundational desire to just know what something is.

ERIC: I’m Eric. I run marketing and audience here. We have a four and a half year old daughter who kind of speaks and often acts like a much older kid. We may have gotten sort of lucky in some ways that she is not old enough yet to be using it, and in five years, if I’m enough of an optimist about it, it’ll be five years better than it is right now. Right now we’re talking about ChatGPT 5 and all the things it can do, and there are lots of things that are improved. What are the types of things that she is going to be encountering? Because the reality is it just may not be in the same galaxy by that point.

EL KALIOUBY: But parents aren’t just thinking about how their kids use AI. They are also invested in how teachers are implementing AI in the classroom.

Eric used to work as a teacher. That was before ChatGPT, but he can imagine it saving teachers a lot of time on busy work.

ERIC: I think one of the problems with teaching in public schools is classroom management and grading papers and administrative tasks that people don’t feel like they want to do, but I think there are lots of people who want to interact with kids and have a healthy positive impact on a kid’s life.

And if those are the things that you can focus on, if your focus is social emotional, on real mushy human-only skills, I think there are more people who would be willing to do it if you eliminate some of the hardships of teaching because of the augmentation of AI.

LEITAL: I haven’t taught grade school, but I teach a college course. I’ve been doing it for many years. And grading can definitely be so tedious for teachers. It’s probably discouraging if we’re thinking about how can you read the soul and heart that the students put into these papers. But yeah, I guess anything that can help lift the burden — if you can create a rubric that is checking for very specific things, or let’s say the LLM is good for checking grammar or something like that. If they’re co-grading in some sense, I wouldn’t be against that.

JORDAN: If you have a class of like 30 kids, 20 kids in a college course, how do you reasonably grade these papers? You know, correct me if I’m wrong, I know some of my college professors use teacher assistants, TAs, to grade papers. So that’s kind of using a human to augment what you’re doing when you’re grading. Am I just now swapping out a student with an AI model that is helping do the same work? But I definitely understand teachers seeing this as a way to just kind of lessen the load.

EL KALIOUBY: We’re taking on these types of theory and practice questions around AI and education on this episode of Pioneers of AI with Sal Khan. And I promise, no pop quiz at the end.

I’m Rana el Kaliouby and this is Pioneers of AI, a podcast taking you behind-the-scenes of the AI revolution.

Hi Sal, welcome to Pioneers of AI. I’m so excited for this conversation.

KHAN: Thanks for having me, Rana.

Copy LinkRethinking the value of higher education in the AI era

EL KALIOUBY: So you and I share the MIT connection. You did your undergraduate there and I am curious, what was that experience like?

KHAN: MIT — I had found that people tend to either love it or, let’s call it, not love it. And I loved it. I was one of the people that loved it. I found I was like a kid in a candy shop. All the other people were so interesting and inspiring, and it made you better. I think it also builds confidence to be in an environment where the person sitting next to you might be on the Russian math team, and I’m just this kid from Louisiana, but you’re like, okay.

Over time, we’re no different really. So yeah, for me it was a wonderful experience. I met my wife at MIT.

EL KALIOUBY: Didn’t know that. How cool.

KHAN: Actually I gave a commencement address at MIT back in 2012, and I spoke about how many couples came out of the place. And I made a strange joke that maybe it was a DARPA funded breeding project. But anyway.

EL KALIOUBY: I love my time at MIT too. I did my postdoc there and it was transformative. It’s how I started my company and I just love it. I come from a family that highly values education. I’m realizing that there’s a growing narrative contesting the value of a college degree.

I’m curious what you think about that, especially in the age of AI, where you can do all sorts of things with AI — do you really need formal education?

KHAN: Yeah, look, I think there’s a lot to that critique. The cost of a four year degree from a private institution without financial aid is the cost of a pretty nice house in most of the country.

And especially when it’s not clear that it’s even — we’re seeing underemployed folks even in degrees that a few years ago were super sought after, like computer science. We’re seeing kids having trouble getting jobs now. I think people do have to ask the question. Students should be asking what is the return on this investment? And sometimes I get pushback from folks saying, well, there’s so much more about higher education and you’re sitting at the quad.

All these things that I loved about MIT, and I was like, yeah, that’s true. But most people already aren’t going to that experience. They’re commuter students. They’re not throwing frisbees at the quad and joining fraternities and sororities and whatever else. So I do think if we can’t give people at least a path towards economic mobility, then I think we’re not serving them. I do think it needs some reinventing.

Copy LinkHow Khan Academy began with one cousin and a math problem

EL KALIOUBY: Yeah, we will come back to what that future of education looks like in a second, but before we do that, I am intrigued and I’m super inspired by the OG story of Khan Academy. Actually, both my kids use Khan Academy a lot, especially my daughter who struggled with math when she was younger.

She’s fine, but it wasn’t her favorite subject. She was nudged by her mom to use Khan Academy a lot. And she reminds me of Nadia in your origin story of Khan Academy. So I’d love for you to share that story.

KHAN: Yeah, my oldest was very easy to get on Khan Academy and he found math more straightforward. But I’ve had to do some nudging with my younger ones, so the same thing is happening in my house. I think the nudging is even harder when you’re like, why do we have to use it? It’s your software platform. That’s why you’re making me use it. I’m like, no, other people use it too.

Usually that type of flex doesn’t resonate with your kids. But in 2004 — after MIT, I had gone and worked in tech, then I went back to business school, and then I was still in Boston after business school working at a small hedge fund — I got married. A year out of business school, Nadia, who at the time was 12 years old, was having trouble in math. I offered to tutor her when she went back to New Orleans, so I started tutoring her remotely. Slowly but surely, honestly, it was a lot of confidence issues she was having. I had to deprogram that. She got caught up and a little ahead of her class. At that point, I became what I call a Tiger cousin. I called up her school and said, I really think Nadia should be able to retake the placement exam from last year. They said, who are you?

EL KALIOUBY: Cousin.

KHAN: I said, I’m her cousin, and they let her, and the same Nadia that was struggling became one of the stronger math students in her class and was able to place into an advanced track. Word spreads in my family. Free tutoring is going on — before I know it, I’m tutoring five, 10 cousins every day. But with a background in software, I started writing this very simple software to give them practice.

This is back in 2005, 2006. So that was the first Khan Academy. I got the domain name. It was a family project. And then a friend suggested — I was showing this off at a dinner party. The host of the dinner party said, Sal, this is cool, but how are you scaling up your lessons? I was like, it’s hard just getting logistically on the phone and I feel like I’m repeating a lot of the same lessons sometimes.

He suggested, why don’t you record your lessons as videos and upload them onto YouTube for your family? And I said, that’s a horrible idea. YouTube is for cats playing piano. But I gave it a shot anyway. And yeah, that kind of took on a life of its own.

There were some people who offered venture funding for it. It was tempting, but the second or third conversations weren’t what I wanted to do. There were all these people sending me letters from all over the world — most of them didn’t have a penny to their name — about how much it helped them. So I said, this feels like a nonprofit. I’ll do the hedge fund thing, that’s how I make my money. But let’s make this a nonprofit with a mission: free world class education for anyone, anywhere. Then a year later, I said, maybe I won’t make money through that thing. If I can just make enough money for my family to have an upper middle class lifestyle, I’d be happy to devote myself to this thing.

And that’s when I quit my day job. The first year was tough, but by 2010 we had our first real funding from Gates Foundation, Google, and others to become a real organization.

Copy LinkWhy mission driven careers still need practical foundations

EL KALIOUBY: Yeah. My daughter just graduated college and she is very mission driven and impact oriented. I wanna ask you this — she’s kind of thinking through her next steps — what was it like to leave your cushy hedge fund job and start Khan Academy and especially structure it as a nonprofit to have the opportunity to be values driven? What was that like and what’s your advice to her and other people?

KHAN: I get this question a lot from young people, and you could imagine young people are the most idealistic. They wanna change the world in the best way, and I give them what I think is reasonably practical advice: unless you have something that you’re ready to go off to the races with — like you’ve already seen, whether it’s for-profit or non-profit, there’s clear product market fit, you have a clear source of funding.

Most people, especially if they’re socially motivated, are like, well, I just wanna really help this issue and maybe I’ll start a non-profit, or I’ve created a prototype. And I’m like, that’s awesome.

Keep working on it, but don’t necessarily jump in with both feet yet, because that first job really starts to open and close opportunities for you. I’ve seen this with other members of my family where they tried to go a little bit of a non-traditional route out of that first job, and if it doesn’t work, it’s very hard to switch back into a traditional, let’s call it, corporate track.

I know this might sound ironic coming from me, but look, I did follow a conventional path — my first job was at Oracle and then I worked at some venture funded startups where I was able to get a salary, then I went to business school, then I worked at a hedge fund. It was a small hedge fund, but I was getting a good salary and I was able to save up some money.

The business skills that I learned at Oracle and the hedge fund and the MBA, I use all the time. I try to run Khan Academy as the best hybrid of a for-profit and nonprofit. It is a nonprofit, but we try to have all the best practices of being agile and innovative and being really conscientious with our resources the way a for-profit would be.

Copy LinkThe GPT-4 moment that changed Khan Academy’s future

EL KALIOUBY: Amazing. This is great advice, solid advice, and it’s gonna be a required listen for my daughter. Thank you. We’re going to take a short break. When we come back: how Sal became one of the first people to try out GPT-4 and how that revelation led to a huge pivot for Khan Academy. Stay with us. So I just finished your book, Brave New Words, how AI Will Revolutionize Education and Why That’s a Good Thing. So let’s switch to AI and I wanna take us back to the summer of 2022. You got an email from Sam Altman and Greg Brockman basically wanting to show you GPT-4. Tell us about that meeting and how that was an inflection point for Khan Academy.

KHAN: Yeah, when I got the email, we get probably 10 emails like this every day and most of them would go nowhere. But Sam Altman and Greg Brockman were more — I knew of them. I knew they were legit and we got on a Google Meet and they demoed it for myself and our chief academic officer, and they put up an AP biology question and they said, Sal, what’s the answer?

And I — it was something to do with osmosis. I was like, oh, I think it was C, osmosis. And they’re like, okay. And then the AI said, yeah, the answer is C. I was like, oh, this is interesting. I said, ask it to explain the answer. And it did. And then I said, ask it to explain why the other choices aren’t correct.

It did, and it did it perfectly. And I started getting chills. And they said, would you like access? I was like, yes, please.

EL KALIOUBY: So then you packaged all that together in Conmigo, which is Khan Academy’s AI tutor. What intrigued me the most is how you thought about some design principles as you put Conmigo together. So can you talk about some of these, like the Socratic questioning as opposed to just giving you answers and the memory function, which I thought was really interesting? Yeah, talk about some of these.

KHAN: Yeah, well, as soon as I had access I was like, okay, this changes everything. We started having all the debates inside of Khan Academy that frankly the world is still having — which is, okay, this is cool, but what about hallucinations? What about math errors? What about safety? What about cheating? The team was almost split 50-50. Everyone thought it was cool.

Half of the team — and I was probably more on that half — was just like, look, this is too important to not go all in. And the other half was like, hold on a second. But what I told that half is like, look, your fears are a hundred percent valid. Let’s write ’em all down and more. Let’s brainstorm all the ways that this could go wrong and let’s turn these into features. Let’s turn these into guardrails. Cheating is an issue? Well, let’s make sure at least our AI doesn’t enable it. We’re gonna make sure that it’s a Socratic tutor — it’s gonna ask questions, nudge kids in the right direction, but not give the answer. We’re worried about kids doing shady things with the AI, unhealthy things? Let’s give some oversight.

Let’s make sure it’s transparent to parents and teachers where they can talk to the AI as if — you know, the same way if you had a human tutor, it’s great for the parents and the teachers to talk to the tutor and say, what have y’all been talking about? And the tutor might say, well, I’m a little worried about Rana.

She seems a little bit down. That’s good. If a student talked to a real human being and said, hey, I’m really — I wanna hurt myself, that real human being should say, well, here’s a helpline, and by the way, I have to tell your parents this.

Our AI should have that same property. It should have a moderation filter that actively notifies parents or teachers if something is off. On the hallucinations — what if we can anchor it on our content, which we have a lot of, and we saw that dramatically reduced hallucinations. On math errors: now there are a lot of these reasoning models, which are essentially what we had to build from scratch on the first version of Conmigo, where Conmigo had to reason through the math — what are possible things that the student might say and how do they compare to the real answer?

And we saw pretty dramatic improvements in math. We also recognized it wasn’t perfect. It still could hallucinate, it still could make math errors. So we have to educate the students and the teachers about it. And once again, this isn’t a new phenomenon.

Even using Google, you can get misinformation. It’s not like everything on the internet was already a completely vetted source. So it’s really important to educate people that, look, we think Conmigo is by far the most legitimate AI in terms of tutoring and not making hallucinations, but it’s still plausible.

So you need to validate things — don’t rest only on what the AI is saying, double check it. That was our approach and it continues to be, and for the most part I think it’s worked well.

Copy LinkWhy AI tutors need guardrails not just intelligence

EL KALIOUBY: Yeah. I spent most of my career building artificial emotional intelligence and learning is a very social and emotional experience, right? Students can be anxious or frustrated or excited or bored, and the best teacher is gonna clue into these nonverbal signals and then adapt the learning experience accordingly. How does Conmigo do that? Does it do that? Do you agree that these AI tutors need to have emotional intelligence, and what does that look like?

KHAN: The more, the better. But I won’t make a claim that it’s there yet.

EL KALIOUBY: It’s not there yet. Yep.

KHAN: It’s definitely not there yet. We are realizing that a great tutor doesn’t just wait to be asked questions. A great tutor is proactive, motivates, guides. And so this next version that we’re launching is a much more proactive Conmigo that acts as a concierge, acts as a guide, holds students a little bit more accountable, gives teachers a little bit more actionable information instead of just giving the raw data.

So that’s definitely where we’re going. But to be truly emotionally intelligent, you have to be able to see facial expression, you have to hear tone. The demos are already capable of that. I think for it to be truly productized and useful, we’re still a few years away from that.

But I also want to be clear — I still, in any world, don’t view this as a replacement for the real human in the room. Everything we’re doing is assuming that you have that teacher, ideally. Now, we also build for, if you’re a young woman in Afghanistan with no school — how can we help you there?

But ideally, you do have a teacher and this thing can act as a teaching assistant and tutor for you and the teacher, and then it hopefully lets the teacher do even more. So if the AI can sense that Rana is a little discouraged, eventually it can see your face and say, she looks unsure.

Why don’t you go talk to Rana, teacher Sal? That’s gonna be way more powerful than if the AI tells Rana, like, I’m giving you a virtual hug. No — go tell your teacher to look into her eyes and say they believe in her and that they know today’s hard. What’s going on?

EL KALIOUBY: Yeah. My company, Affectiva, developed facial expression recognition technology back in the day. But there’s a privacy concern, right? Do you see a world where we would have the camera on during these learning sessions for the AI to clue into these nonverbals?

KHAN: Yeah, my general principle is if there’s something that can help people learn and get motivated and engaged, we shouldn’t run away from it just because it might also introduce some tough issues. So yes — a camera looking at kids could go very creepy very fast, but—

EL KALIOUBY: Right. But done safely.

KHAN: Done safely, it could be very useful. I imagine in the next five years it’s going to happen. I think you have to be very careful about who has that data, what they’re doing with it, what it can be used for, training, et cetera. But if you can have a trusted party where that information is purely being used to make the learning experience better, then yeah, I think it’s absolutely a legitimate thing to be doing.

You could imagine putting a low-cost camera or several in a classroom already and seeing everyone’s affect and then using that to tell the teacher, hey, you might wanna try this, or you might wanna arrange the chairs in this way, or go walk over to that student. I hope that we have things that can help teachers — not police teachers. It’s a fine line to walk, but if it’s useful, we should do it.

Copy LinkWhat realistic school AI policies should look like

EL KALIOUBY: Yeah. Okay, so let’s zoom out and talk about the larger implications of AI in education. It’s back to school season and I also serve on the board of my kids’ school. Incorporating AI into schools is on everyone’s minds. A lot of students and teachers are using it, but schools in general are struggling with how to incorporate it meaningfully and intentionally.

I just wanted to share some statistics. According to Pew Research, ChatGPT usage has doubled in just a year among teens. But despite this, less than half of schools in the US have official AI policies. So how do you think schools need to be addressing AI head on?

KHAN: I think you gotta start with having a very clear, and I would say realistic, AI policy. Because even some of the places where they created AI policies, they’re not realistic. The AI policy cannot say, don’t use ChatGPT, because they’re going to use it. The first thing I would do actually is make it very clear to faculty that there’s no such thing as an AI detector. Anyone who’s telling you that they have an AI detector is selling you snake oil, because what’s happening is kids are getting falsely accused.

There’s nothing worse than accusing an innocent person of being guilty, especially a young person who’s trying to do everything right. I saw this — I’m also on the board of my kids’ school — and I saw my daughter tell me that she was using AI not to write her essays, but to introduce errors into her essay because her previous essay got flagged for AI cheating.

But when she uses the AI to introduce errors, it doesn’t get flagged for AI cheating. So that’s the first thing: AI policy.

The second thing is you cannot ban ChatGPT. You can’t assume that they’re not going to use it. So with that, if you’re assigning writing or any type of homework, you have three options. Option one is do more in class — if you really care that it is their work and no one else’s, do it in class, which honestly has always been a good idea because you get more support, et cetera.

The second is there are tools like we have something called writing coach where the teacher assigns through the AI, the AI supports the student ethically, and when the student submits it through the AI, the AI can give the teacher transparency on the process. And then I would say everything else — actually use AI.

I think it is healthy, at least once a term, to have an assignment where the kids are told, use any tool you want. Go use AI, create your images with it, create your presentation with it.

Go use ChatGPT. But I want you to be honest about where you used the AI, where was the AI useful, and what did you bring to the table?

Copy LinkRedefining cheating when AI becomes part of learning

EL KALIOUBY: In a minute, we answer some of your burning questions. Yes, we polled parents in my network and our listeners on their biggest AI education queries … and unsurprisingly the cheating question came up high on the list. So stay tuned for a new game we invented: is it cheating or not? Actually, leading up to this interview, I put a question out to parents in my network and also our listeners to submit questions they wanted me to ask you and we had a really overwhelming response. One of the questions we got was around cheating, and you kind of alluded to it. I thought it was interesting — in the book you talked about the cheating taxonomy and how we might need to redefine what cheating is. So say more about that, and then I wanna do a rapid fire. I just wanna ask you, is this cheating or not, and get your reaction.

KHAN: A lot of whether something is cheating or not is dependent on the norms that you set. If you go out of the norms, it’s officially cheating. And then you have to question to what degree your norms are realistic. The chapter in the book where I write about cheating, I start with, well, what was going on before ChatGPT? Like we’re all worried about this, but there was already a lot of cheating. There are already websites that will have a PhD in Kenya or India write your essay for $5 a page. This has existed for 20 years. You have had people going to their sorority sisters, fraternity brothers, or real brothers and sisters to get their essays written.

You’ve had kids with bibles of old exams that have existed in a lot of these places.

So once again, have a realistic policy and police the things that you say you care about, but don’t be unrealistic about the other things.

EL KALIOUBY: Yeah. All right, so let’s do a rapid fire. Is it cheating or not — using AI to write the intro paragraph of an essay?

KHAN: I know this might sound like a cop out answer, but it depends on the norms that the teacher has set. If the teacher has said it is okay, then it’s not cheating. If the teacher says, I want this to be a hundred percent your work, and you go do it with AI, it is officially cheating.

Now the question is, is that realistic? If the teacher’s allowing everyone to go home? But let’s say if we’re doing an in-class assignment and you’re supposed to have your laptops closed, and I want everyone to write this essay, no AI, and I take out my phone and ask ChatGPT — like, that’s cheating.

EL KALIOUBY: Okay. Using AI to brainstorm a story for your Spanish class.

KHAN: My personal view is in almost no cases is that cheating.

EL KALIOUBY: Yeah. Okay. By the way, this was my son.

KHAN: No, I think that’s very good. You absolutely should be using it for brainstorming in any case.

EL KALIOUBY: Using AI to solve an algebra problem.

KHAN: Depends. If you’re stuck on your homework and you are genuinely trying to understand it, I think that’s constructive.

Look, if it’s homework and you’re genuinely trying to learn it, I think it’s fine. If it’s homework and you’re just trying to get out of it and it would’ve been good for you to do it, then, as they saying always goes, you’re only harming yourself.

EL KALIOUBY: Mm-hmm. Okay. One more. A teacher using AI to grade a writing assignment.

KHAN: I think it can be good if they’re very confident that the AI is going to give very robust, consistent, non-biased grading. I don’t think AI is good enough for that yet. We have been doing research into that. We also think — and we’ve had these debates internally — we don’t wanna take the teachers out of the loop.

Our product manager who does our writing coach, where we would probably do this, was a former English teacher and she’s like, look, it was so important for me as the English teacher to understand my kids’ writing. And then I said, well, other people are gonna create tools and a teacher has to grade a hundred papers over a weekend.

That’s a lot of work. You yourself told me, Sarah, that those were like your worst weekends where you have to grade a hundred papers about The Great Gatsby. That’s like 20 hours of work. Can we find a middle ground? So I think it should be — you have to first make sure it’s a hundred percent robust, non-biased.

And then have the teacher in the loop. Whether the teacher has to review every paper — that might not save them time, but at least give insights to the teacher or ask when there’s an edge case, hey, can you review this one? Or let’s create a couple of true anchors together. Let’s have the teacher grade five to make sure, and I’ll give you a different five, so that over the course of the term you’ve seen everyone’s writing, things like that.

I think as long as it’s solid grading with good feedback and the teacher’s in the loop, that could be good.

Copy LinkWhat schools should measure when knowledge is easier to access

EL KALIOUBY: Yeah. Fascinating. Okay. This was another question that actually came from my son’s school leadership. If AI makes content mastery universally accessible, what becomes the new measure of a great education?

KHAN: There are two ways to interpret that question. One way — which I’ve sometimes heard people say, even when internet search came out — is, oh, content’s accessible, no one needs to know content anymore. My answer has always been the people who know content are the people who use the tools the best, so I think content matters. And I think there’s another interpretation of that question: that AI might help us get so much better at content knowledge that maybe we need something else to differentiate ourselves.

I think that would be a great situation. I’m a big believer in solid content knowledge, a solid fact base. But then AI will hopefully open up the aperture. Some of the things that we’ve traditionally called intangibles or soft skills — like communication skills, empathy, listening skills — we could actually start to measure these things.

I don’t think it’ll be like a score where you are a hundred out of a hundred as a speaker. I think already you could probably upload a video of you giving a presentation to an AI and it can give you pretty good feedback: hey, more eye contact, or you’re talking too fast.

And eventually it could say, look, I think you’re in the top quartile of public speakers, which I think would be incredible if that can be part of our portfolio of evidence of our capability.

EL KALIOUBY: Yeah. I was going to go there next. I call them the four C’s: curiosity, creativity, compassion, and communication. I think there’s a lot of concern that using AI will detract from some of these skills. But I’m intrigued by this idea that AI can actually help you become a better communicator, or maybe it can help you find your passion faster.

KHAN: Yeah. Look, right now the main things that seem to matter for high school kids are SAT scores, grades, AP tests — none of those are measuring any of those four C’s that you just mentioned. And then the schools try to look at recommendations and essays, but we know that — well before ChatGPT — affluent kids, and I write about this in the book, are hiring $500 an hour coaches that are helping them look like they are compassionate and empathetic, and hopefully many of these kids are, but some of them maybe aren’t and they’re faking it awfully well on an application.

So I think this is exciting, and it’s not just AI. We have a platform, Schoolhouse World, which is another sister nonprofit to Khan Academy and it’s peer-to-peer tutoring, and kids can certify their knowledge. There’s a way where they take Khan Academy assessments and it records their face and screen while they’re explaining their reasoning. If that looks good, then they go off and tutor and there’s a rating system. And a lot of universities — University of Chicago, MIT, Yale, Brown, Caltech, I could go down the list, there are 40 of these universities — have said, we value that for college admissions because it’s a signal not just of content mastery, but a signal of communication and empathy. Now we just launched this program called Dialogues, where we’re pairing kids with kids with opposite points of view on tough issues — like Israel-Palestine, affirmative action, immigration, gun control, stuff that most of us are afraid to bring up at dinner parties. They’re not trying to convince each other, but they’re trying to listen to each other and their points of view don’t get recorded. It does get recorded that you had a conversation on a topic.

And then if someone says something positive, like, hey, Rana was really curious, Rana was a good listener, then those positive accolades you, Rana, can share with college admissions. And a lot of these same universities are very interested in that.

Copy LinkWhy the future of education is both online and deeply human

EL KALIOUBY: Right. What do you think about online learning versus in-person learning? And I asked that knowing that you have Khan Academy, but you also have the Khan Lab School, which is an in-person school environment. What do you think about that, again, with AI as the backdrop?

KHAN: I think the ideal is both. The Khan Lab School, where my kids go, is a real physical school and one of the design principles of the school — and we’re always tweaking things, it is a lab school — is we should be maximizing human to human interaction. And the reason why I think it’s so important for my kids is I see them navigating conflicts and learning to communicate and forming friendships, and these things which aren’t in the common core state standards or anywhere are incredibly important in an AI world.

They’re arguably going to be more important relative to some of the other things. So yes, I think ideally you have both. Now, that’s not to say that there isn’t a place for, in certain cases, pure online. I just met a young woman from Afghanistan who did not have access to school.

So Khan Academy was her school and she applied to MIT, and they said, well, you have no high school diploma, nothing. We have no idea. And then she certified herself on Schoolhouse World and became a tutor, and then they said, okay. And they admitted her. So pure online can be of use when you don’t have that type of community.

EL KALIOUBY: Yeah. Okay. Another listener question. What’s something about the future of education that you believe deeply in, but think most schools aren’t ready to hear yet?

KHAN: I don’t know if most people agree with me when I say it, but they’re not sure how to operationalize this. I think the more that we can move to a competency based system versus a seat time based system — I’ve been saying this for years, and I believe it more and more, especially with higher ed becoming very expensive and not necessarily delivering outcomes.

It’s a fairly simple idea. Right now, even when you look at college requirements, they say you need to take three years of foreign language, you need to take four years of math. They don’t say that you need to learn how to speak a foreign language. They don’t say that you should know algebra. They just say you need to have sat in a chair and kind of done what you were told for four years.

So I believe in competency-based credit, and a corollary to that is mastery-based learning, which is: I take the assessment to see if I know my algebra. If I’m not where I need to be, I still have the opportunity and the incentive to keep working on it so that I can get to that level.

EL KALIOUBY: Love it. Okay, final question, and this is one I ask of all my guests. What does it mean to be human in the age of AI?

KHAN: My answer to that is I don’t think it’s just about AI. This is something that I’ve been thinking about for a little while now. I feel so lucky to be born in a society like we have, where you’re not held back by what family you come from.

Or, ideally, the color of your skin or your gender. I mean, there are still issues in our society, but it’s much better than almost any other society in the history of the world. But I think in this individualism — which for the most part I’m a very big fan of — we have lost some of the things that we as human beings get meaning from. For most of human history, for hundreds of thousands of years, we would have multi-generations sitting around the campfire together, exchanging stories, singing songs, having rituals, having mythologies, having religions that connect us, that make us think about something bigger than ourselves.

And I think some of that has been lost. So even before AI, I was thinking about ways that — how can I give my own kids, or even myself, ways to have the best of both worlds, where they’re not held back by dogma or traditions, but we can pick and choose and maybe form our own traditions.

And we still find moments where we can think beyond paying the mortgage or our 401k or how much money we have in the bank or how big our house is. More like, hey, why are we here? We’re in this mystery. What is consciousness? What is the afterlife? What does it mean to be a good friend or partner or parent or child? I hope when AI starts to question all of these things about our humanity, that there’s going to be a gravity to some of these very basic but very important questions.

EL KALIOUBY: Yeah. In a weird way, it brings us full circle to the beginning of this, where you were this awesome cousin who made time for Nadia to tutor her.

KHAN: And what I got out of that was something that’s missing from a lot of people’s lives. I was missing that connection with a younger cousin. But there is something powerful about being able to spend time with your family and being a mentor and staying connected and feeling useful to them.

EL KALIOUBY: Absolutely. Thank you so much for joining us. This was an amazing conversation.

KHAN: Great. Thanks Rana.

EL KALIOUBY: Sal thinks we’re overdue for a restructure of our education system. And I have to agree, there’s a lot that needs to change. And AI – if used responsibly, with students, parents, and teachers in mind – will be central to that change. AI will transform what kids learn and how they learn.

Sure, AI tutors are the first step, but I’m also looking towards a multi-modal future, where AI can analyze our interactions, our classrooms, our teaching to make them better. And imagine when AI gets weaved into experiential learning.

What if AI could help my tech-allergic daughter appreciate computer science more by personalizing a curriculum just for her? The possibilities here are endless.