🚀 Future Explored: Chatbots in the classroom

AI is reshaping how students learn and teachers teach.

Freethink

and

Kristin Houser

Jan 25, 2025

Credit: Unsplash+ / Freethink / Ana Kova

It’s 2026. Your son is falling behind in biology, but money is too tight for a tutor. Too tight for a human one, anyways. Thankfully, he’s able to access a high-quality AI tutor that provides the kind of one-on-one help he needs to catch up with his classmates—for free.

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AI tutors

By Kristin Houser

No two students learn in exactly the same way at exactly the same rate, but that’s how they’re taught in the average American classroom: a teacher presents a lesson, tests the class on it, and then moves on to the next lesson, regardless of whether every student fully understood the last one.

Because lessons often build upon one another, this approach makes it incredibly easy for a student to fall further and further behind in class. One-on-one instruction can help them get caught up, but teachers are often stretched too thin to provide it, and private tutors typically charge at least $25 per hour, putting them out of reach for many families.

Tutors built on generative artificial intelligence (AI)—a type of AI that can generate high-quality text, images, videos, and more in response to user prompts—could be the affordable alternative these students need.

To find out how, let’s explore the evolution of educational technology, the limitations of today’s generative AIs, and the ancient Greek philosopher that’s helping a popular educational nonprofit overcome them.

Where we’ve been

"EdTech Through the Ages"

~3300 BC - The ancient Sumerians invent writing and establish the world’s first schools, where students etch their lessons into clay tablets. The invention of papyrus follows about 300 years later. The cheaper, more portable medium makes it easier to spread knowledge to more people.

1440 - Johannes Gutenberg invents the movable-type printing press. This enables the mass-production of books and lowers their cost. Education becomes more uniform, as schools gain access to the same books, and because students no longer have to rely on teachers or shared manuscripts, it’s easier for them to learn at their own pace.

1728 - Boston-based teacher Caleb Philipps begins offering students lessons in shorthand via mail, giving birth to the concept of distance learning. The establishment of the U.S. Postal Service in 1775 takes this to the next level, bringing written materials to more Americans and contributing to rising literacy rates.

1920s - Less than two decades after the first radio transmission, stations begin broadcasting educational content to listeners. The Association of College and University Broadcasting Stations (ACUBS) is founded in 1925.

1953 - KUHT, the U.S.’s first public TV station, begins broadcasting for-credit college classes taught at the University of Houston, giving birth to educational television. The classes are typically shown at night so that people who work during the day can see them.

1960 - Scientists at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign create Programmed Logic for Automated Teaching Operations (PLATO), the first computer-based education system. Students use a keyboard to move through lessons displayed on a screen, and each workstation connects to a larger mainframe computer.

1970s - The first mass-market personal computers arrive. Tech companies begin developing more educational software, often incorporating gaming elements in order to increase student engagement.

1993 - The World Wide Web is made public. By this time, nearly every public school district in the U.S. has at least one computer, and about 63% of American students in grades 1-12 are using a computer at school.

2002 - UNESCO coins the term “Open Educational Resources” (OER) to describe teaching, learning, and research materials released on the internet for free. The OER movement makes education more accessible to students across the globe, and notable early contributors include Wikipedia, Khan Academy, and MIT OpenCourseWare.

2025 - Progress in generative AI has some educators imagining a future in which every student has access to a high-quality AI tutor capable of providing personalized one-on-one instruction on any subject imaginable.

Where we’re going (maybe)

Sal Khan is an expert in educational technology.

Since 2008, the nonprofit he founded, Khan Academy, has created thousands of educational videos, lessons, and exercises on everything from pre-K reading to college-level calculus and then made them available for free online, often in multiple languages.

“We got started with me tutoring my cousins,” Khan told Freethink. “Everything since then has really been about how we could leverage technology to approximate elements of what you could get with that one-on-one personalized tutoring.”

In the summer of 2022, several months before ChatGPT would bring generative AI into the public consciousness, OpenAI’s Sam Altman and Greg Brockman asked Khan if he’d like to take a look at their newest generative AI model: GPT-4.

This was the model that would come after GPT-3.5 (the one powering the first version of ChatGPT), and Khan’s team was among the first people in the world to get a look at it.

“It really was a game-changer,” says Khan. “It was able to surprisingly reason in ways that GPT-3 did not. Yes, it still made mistakes, but it could generate questions and give explanations in a very cogent way.”

“One of the breakthroughs with GPT-4, even relative to GPT-3.5, was its steerability—you can really prompt it to take on personas and act in ways that you think they should act—so very quickly we started making prototypes of it acting as a tutor,” he continues.

Those efforts led to the creation of Khanmigo, an AI-powered personal tutor and teaching assistant that Khan Academy began piloting in March 2023.

“We’re at the cusp of using AI for probably the biggest positive transformation that education has ever seen,” Khan declared during a TED Talk the following month, “and the way we’re going to do that is by giving every student on the planet an artificially intelligent but amazing personal tutor.”

Khanmigo for students

While Khanmigo is built on futuristic technology, Khan Academy looked to a figure of the ancient past when designing its persona: Socrates.

Rather than lecturing his students or directly answering their questions, the Greek philosopher would ask questions that got them to think critically about a subject, and through a back-and-forth dialogue, they would learn.

Designing Khanmigo to emulate this teaching style has helped Khan Academy overcome one of the biggest drawbacks of incorporating generative AIs into education: It’s really easy to use them to cheat.

“It’s easy to put a little wrapper around these models and call it a tutor, but they’re essentially like, ‘We’ll do your homework for you.'”
Sal Khan

If a student asks ChatGPT or another AI tutor for help with an algebra problem, for example, it might just give them an answer. Because of its Socratic design, though, Khanmigo will instead ask the student what they think is the first step to solving the problem and then go from there.

“It’s easy to put a little wrapper around these models and call it a tutor, but they’re essentially like, ‘We’ll do your homework for you,’” says Khan of some of the other AI tutors available today.

This Socratic approach extends to Khanmigo Writing Coach, a generative AI-based tool that Khan Academy developed specifically to assist with writing assignments.

Writing Coach can help students make sure they understand an essay prompt, guide them through creating an outline, and even provide feedback on their drafts, letting them know, for example, if their thesis isn’t clear.

What it can’t do is write anything for them, and if a student pastes 15+ words from a source outside Writing Coach into an essay, the section will be flagged for teacher review. This helps ensure that students don’t have other AIs writing their essays for them.

“The consensus within Khan Academy is that Writing Coach is the most advanced part of Khan Academy,” says Khan.

In addition to flagging potential instances of cheating, Khanmigo and Khanmigo Writing Coach will also notify teachers if they detect anything that could be a safety issue with minor users.

“There’s a lot of notification,” says Khan. “Everything is recorded. Teachers can see those conversations, but the things that they’re getting flagged for are if students are like, ‘I want to harm myself’ or ‘I want to bomb the school.’ Those are getting flagged and getting notified.”

“We’ll never use any of that data to train a public model,” he adds. “We’re very careful about all of the security aspects of it.”

Khanmigo for teachers

When Khan’s team got their Summer 2022 preview of GPT-4, they weren’t just inspired to think of ways the tech could help students. They also started brainstorming how they could use it to support teachers.

“If you think about where teachers spend most of their time and energy, they’re preparing their own knowledge,” Khan told Freethink. “They are planning lessons. They might have to write quizzes. They’re writing individual enrichment plans. Then there’s the evaluation part of the cycle, where they need to see how the kids did. Then they have to write progress reports.”

“It’s rinse and repeat,” he continues. “That whole cycle is most of a teacher’s life, and most of that is not stuff that they really enjoy doing. They enjoy working with students and seeing when the light bulb goes off in their head.”

To remove some of that burden, Khan Academy incorporated tools into Khanmigo that teachers can use to prompt the AI to generate lesson plans, classroom activities, and other resources for them. The latest feature, the Khanmigo Blooket Generator, will even create question sets that can be used to quiz students via the Blooket learning platform.

“In the past, they had to sit there and type the questions,” Khan told Freethink. “Now it will generate questions, and then the teachers just essentially swipe left or swipe right: ‘I like that question. I don’t like that question. I like that, but I’m going to edit that one a little bit.’”

Khan Academy is also developing a tool to help teachers glean more insights from these quizzes.

“Right now, when kids do a Blooket, the teacher just sees the final score,” Khan explains. “We want it so that not only are they creating these quizzes, but then using the AI to create reports on them: ‘Here’s where kids were struggling. Based on this, why don’t we modify tomorrow’s lesson plan to do a little bit of a review of this concept? It seems like everyone’s confused.’”

The next steps

Khan Academy has already piloted Khanmigo in 3rd through 12th grade classes at more than 260 school districts across the U.S. Microsoft founder Bill Gates got a chance to visit one of those schools in May 2024 and was highly impressed with the technology.

“It was amazing to see firsthand how AI can be used in the classroom—and to speak with students and teachers who are already reaping the benefits,” Gates wrote after his visit. “It felt like catching a glimpse of the future.”

Since then, Khan Academy has announced a partnership with Microsoft that makes Khanmigo available for free to teachers in more than 40 countries. School districts then pay a yearly fee for each student they want to have access to Khanmigo. (In most nations, the tech is only available in English, but there are exceptions—in India, for example, it’s also available in Hindi.)

Students and parents can also access Khanmigo on their own with a $4 per month or $44 per year subscription. That subscription is currently the only way to access Khanmigo Writing Coach, but Khan told Freethink that Khan Academy expects to make the tool more available “by probably mid-February.”

Charging for a resource isn’t something Khan Academy usually does, but the AI models underpinning Khanmigo cost a lot of money to run, and Khan has said the nonprofit would’ve gone bankrupt if it tried to give the tool away out the gate. He believes they’ll be able to make it available for free soon, though, as the cost of running generative AI models is quickly falling.

Educated bravery

High computational cost isn’t the drawback to using generative AI in education. The models also do one of the last things you’d want a tutor to do: confidently lie to students.

This phenomenon of presenting false information as true is known as “hallucinating,” and in addition to making models more efficient, it’s another area that generative AI developers are working to improve, though progress is slow going.

“If we truly believe that it’s adding more value than not, then we should put it out there.”
Sal Khan

Some members of Khan Academy “didn’t want to have anything to do with” GPT-4 once they saw it making these errors, according to Khan, but he and others at the company believed the tech could still be hugely beneficial for students and their teachers.

“Any time there’s something that’s big and has potential downsides to it, I think there’s a temptation to say, ‘Let’s freeze’ or ‘Let’s not do it until we’ve figured out everything,’” he told Freethink. But “if you don’t get on that development curve and start learning and building fast, you’re just never going to be able to catch up eventually.”

So, instead of letting the limitations of GPT-4 scare them off, Khan encouraged his team to move forward with a mindset of “educated bravery”: acknowledge the risks, develop ways to minimize them, and then be brave enough to move forward despite any trepidation they might feel.

“Anything we do, there’s going to be some risks, including risks with our brand—people are going to say, ‘Wait, Khan Academy has math mistakes,’” says Khan. “Well, let’s just be honest with people when there’s math mistakes, and then let’s work like hell to minimize them, but also keep it very transparent.”

“A lot of the students are like, ‘I love Khanmigo. Yeah, every now and then it makes an error, but I don’t know what I would do without it,’” he adds. “Okay, so should we take it away? No, just make sure they know what they’re getting into…If we truly believe that it’s adding more value than not, then we should put it out there.”

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Kristin Houser is a staff writer at Freethink, where she covers science and tech.