Sal Khan believes that the impact of AI technologies like ChatGPT will be greatest in education and beyond the advent of search engines or smartphones.
“It’s a new era and it’s the greatest era of eras, I really believe that, and I wouldn’t have said that six months ago or a year ago,” says Khan. “This is a moment in which we are. I don’t think this is an exaggeration. And education is really at the center of this hurricane. It is the first field that is being shaken”.
In 2008, Khan founded the nonprofit Khan Academy, a free online resource for students with lessons in math, science, and the humanities. Today it has more than 145 million registered users.
Khan shares his thoughts on the ways AI and chatbot technology will change education, and how teachers can update their instructional practices to embrace it.
A potential advantage for teaching writing
Khan believes that ChatGPT and similar AI technology have enormous potential to help teach students to write better. Today, despite the best efforts of K-12 educators, many students still struggle to write well when they enter college.
“Most students can’t write a five paragraph essay. They can’t write a compelling paragraph with a thesis statement,” she says. AI could potentially help with this by providing students with an encouraging writing coach who provides more feedback, and in a much more timely manner, than even the most dedicated teacher.
“Writing, unfortunately, has a very slow feedback loop,” says Khan. “Even old school math, before Khan Academy, had a faster feedback loop. With things like Khan Academy, you get immediate feedback, which is one of the things we’ve always said: ‘Imagine shooting free throws and not knowing if you made them until the next morning.'”
AI has the potential to extend this immediate feedback from math to writing, reducing turnaround time for essays from a week or two to a few seconds. Feedback will also be more consistent, Khan says.
Other learning opportunities
Teachers can use artificial intelligence programs to create lesson plans, and ChatGPT is already used in this way. “That experience will only get better as people build apps around it,” says Khan.
Educators can already use AI to grade assignments and other work, and there are numerous applications that leverage AI to support teaching (opens in a new tab). Khan believes that any initial reluctance educators may have about using ChatGPT-like tools as a grading assistant will dissolve once they see how fast and good the AI tools will be. “If you’re a college professor teaching English 101 to 300 students with eight TAs, you’re not grading, those TAs are grading,” Khan says. “And now every teacher is going to have an army of TAs.”
Khan also believes that in the future almost all jobs will require working with AI technology in some way and there will be specific jobs geared towards writing AI prompts. So having students learn to interact with AI early on makes sense.
For example, Khan says a teacher might require students to use ChatGPT-style technology to write multiple chapters in a novel. “It is not easy to make a multi-chapter novel, you will have to think about how it fits together, etc. It will still take you a few hours to do that, or probably longer,” he says. “But it’s a lot of fun because you get a lot of results very quickly.”
What about those who use ChatGPT to cheat?
Khan acknowledges the challenges educators are facing this current school year adapt to ChatGPT (opens in a new tab) on the progress. One simple way that he suggests educators can avoid this misuse of ChatGPT is to have students work on shorter essays during class time. “In fact, I think this is a much better use of class time, definitely better than giving a lecture,” she says.
He also disagrees with school districts banning technology because such bans are unenforceable, and even if they could be enforced, they would take away the potential benefits of technology use for students.
And not all cases of alleged ChatGPT “cheating” are clear in Khan’s mind. For example, students have begun using ChatGPT to write their college admissions essays, and while it may be questionably ethical to do so, using technology in this way raises important questions about the college admissions process in general. .
“It’s really healthy because it highlights what’s already been going on,” he says. “If you’re a wealthy student, these people hire $5,000, $10,000 admissions coaches, they’re not AI, they’re ‘I’. That’s already happening and to some degree this levels the playing field and puts it in everyone’s face that this wasn’t really a fair way to assess who gets in and who doesn’t.”
Khan has told his employees to start experimenting with ways they can use ChatGPT and other AI technologies to improve their work.
Ultimately, he believes that AI technology will help teachers and students everywhere. “If I had to guess, I think this will be a huge accelerator and benefit to education, in the not too distant future,” he says.
