Powering virtual education for the classroom

“One of the things we and all educational technology companies struggle with is how to get students thinking deeply about the content that they’re learning,” DiCerbo says. “To think about questions like, ‘Why did you answer that way? Why do you think that's true? What would happen if—?’ So we’re making sure students aren't just understanding how to do the problem, but really understanding the concepts behind them.”

Early testing by Khan Academy indicates that GPT‑4 may soon be able to help students contextualize the greater relevance of what they’re studying or teach specific points of computer programming.

“These were all things we were thinking about deeply and then GPT‑4 showed up,” says director of engineering, Shawn Jansepar. “We see this technology as a potential way to accelerate our roadmap of building more tutor-like abilities into our platform within the next few years, while also providing capabilities we had only dreamed of before. Without a really powerful large-language model, these ideas weren’t feasible, but now we think we can make real progress.”

Adapting GPT‑4 for teachers is also top of mind for Khan Academy. The nonprofit is testing out ways teachers could use GPT‑4, such as writing classroom prompts or creating instructional materials for lessons. 

“What’s even more exciting is the potential to help teachers tailor learning for every student quickly and easily,” said director of program and product management, Ricky Chandarana. “We think teachers could use GPT‑4 to get a snapshot of how every student in their class is doing on Khan Academy on any given day. We’re going to test out that feature in the very near future.”