My AI Teacher: Khan Academy and the Future of Education | Dr. Kristen Dicerbo (Chief Learning Officer)

CRAFTED. | The Tech Podcast for Founders, Makers, and Innovators

Dr. Kristen DiCerbo is Khan Academy’s Chief Learning Officer, where she sets the company's product, teaching, and learning strategy — with AI at the forefront.

Khanmigo is amazing. It’s the GenAI-powered product from Khan Academy that helps students learn and teachers teach — and could revolutionize education.

Khan Academy is used by 12 million students a month! And they’ve been an early adopter of GenAI.

Khanmigo coaches students in math and English, helps teachers prepare lesson plans, enables parents to get help as they help their children with their homework, and much more…

On this episode of CRAFTED., Kristen shares how they build with Generative AI — and how you can learn from their experiences to build your own AI experiences.

We dig into how Khan Academy:

• Builds with GenAI’s unpredictability in mind
• Helps GenAI get good at math (and also built a UX that masks the ways it is bad at it)
• Gave Khanmigo an “inner monologue” that helps it slow down and better tutor students
• Built a “prompt playground” where they can evaluate various prompts
• Built a “prompt library” where they can keep track of prompts
• Employ fine-tuning, red teaming, hackathons, and more…

Sal Khan’s new book is entitled “Brave New Words: How AI Will Revolutionize Education (and Why That's a Good Thing)” – On this episode we explore how and why!

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• (00:00) - Introduction
• (02:04) - Education + technology: Kristen early experiences
• (05:10) - Khan Academy primer: 12M students a month!
• (07:36) - Getting early access to GPT4
• (09:02) - GenAI: early experiments with tutoring
• (11:40) - GenAI is bad at math! How Khan Academy grappled with this
• (17:02) - Building an AI-powered writing tutor
• (21:09) - How AI can free teachers from grading homework and help students learn more quickly
• (22:40) - Prompt chaining: why you need to break up your prompts to get good results
• (24:08) - Preventing AI-powered plagiarism
• (27:50) - The role of teacher in an AI world
• (31:46) - Outro

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