By Aviv Weiss
School district leaders are faced with the daunting task of understanding which AI tools are safe and beneficial for their teachers and students. Since we’re all building the plane as we’re flying it in this new field of AI for education, let’s get a little more grounded by reading some essential recommendations for choosing AI tools for school districts that were recently shared by Sal Khan, the founder and CEO of Khan Academy, over LinkedIn. These recommendations are split into must-haves and nice-to-haves.
Must-haves when employing AI tools in education
- Use high-quality underlying models that minimize errors and hallucinations (today, this is GPT-4, Gemini Pro 1.5, Anthropic Claude 3, or better). GPT3.5 is not acceptable for student/teacher use. Khanmigo runs on GPT-4.
- Have clear contracts with AI model creators, which stipulate that student data cannot be used for training of the general, public models.
- Be clear that student/educator data will not be sold to third parties in ANY circumstance (even in the event of bankruptcy or an acquisition).
- Have clean SOC-2 audits. This ensures that student and educator data is protected/secure. Khan Academy is proud of our year-over-year clean audits.
Nice-to-haves
- Make it a priority to prevent the use of AI for cheating.
- Add layers to the base model to minimize errors/hallucinations.
- Include evaluation/benchmarking mechanisms to measure the AI error rate.
- Have school-,district-, and system-level reporting so that AI use can be centrally monitored.
- Have professional development tools and teams for teachers to understand how to deploy the tools in their classrooms.
- Have training for students so they can understand how to use the AI tools and how to mitigate risks.
- Include support for multiple languages.
- Be a one-stop shop across grades and subject matters to avoid any fragmentation of the experience and to prevent the district from having to manage multiple solutions.
If you’re interested in bringing free AI to your teachers, please visit khanmigo.ai/teachers. If you’re interested in exploring Khanmigo, Khan Academy’s AI tutor, for your district, please visit districts.khanacademy.org
