Khanmigo AI Tutorbot used at Khan Academy

We are in the early stages of the commentariat opinion-ating whether new AI tech will be a boon for learning, or a doom machine. Generally as this article from the NYTimes notes, EdTech has had a bumpy ride in school systems in the US, often because the tech isn’t fully developed and/or the school districts aren’t ready to handle/ achieve the needed competency for it’s use.

Presumably there will be more of the same as schools work to embed AI Ed Tech tools into their systems of learning MO, with some successes and some failures,. Hopefully both will show the way forward, and provide a basis that can be developed further to achieve the potentials present, or coming soon, in AI supported learning.

One current Ed Tech bleeding edge leader is Khan Academy, the flipped classroom par excellence people, who as this article discusses are currently at work experimenting with Generative AI tools such as ChatGPT. They call their “version” of this “Khanmigo”. There are currently additional startups galore trying to meld AI with learning MO.

One possible development is that tutoring services will proliferate to the point of a nearly parallel learning system in the US, based on the immense capabilities of AI to assist Jane and Jim in learning “outside the physical classroom”.

We might also look toward a time when a classroom is more a AR/VR goggle, than it is a room with 30 desks in a building with many such rooms. The current release of Apple’s Vision Pro goggles, which are very much a mix of Beta and 1.0 levels of capability, does demonstrate even more of the potentials than previous goggle tech.

Reviews may or may not really “get” what the Vision Pro can do, but of course everyone notes how expensive the first version is, and how only a few early adopters will be using them in this first version.

But the same has been said about other bleeding edge tech, so we won’t know for some years, if this Apple version of AR combined with VR is going to develop into a broadly adopted and affordable technology, or not. It certainly has its “Wow” elements that might drive a new platform of communication and learning.

One can imagine a tutorChatBot present in the AR/ VR goggle and virtual space with the student achieving learning in “new and powerful ways” which might create new job descriptions for teachers, and possibly make the educational administration positions beside the point.  Stay tuned: it may be a very exciting next few years in EdTech.