Education / Online learning services
Khan Academy: AI tutoring for students and practice question authoring for teachers
- Company
- Khan Academy
- Country
- United States
- Adoption stage
- In operation
- Source published
- Date basis
- The date the source was published. It can differ from the date adoption started.
- How the source was checked
- Read the full source text
The work problem
Khan Academy said early use of Khanmigo, its AI tutor, had varied and that some chats helped students move forward more than others. The organization said only around 15% of students who have access to Khanmigo engage with it, and wrote that it still has more work to do. Khanmigo could previously respond only in text, so it could not show students what a hard maths or science concept looks like. On the teacher side, teachers could use Khanmigo to generate practice questions but had no way to curate or refine what was sent to students.
Technology and data
Through a Google.org fellowship, six Google engineers worked alongside Khan Academy's product and engineering organization for six months starting in March 2026, and that work put Gemini models into Khanmigo. Khanmigo now detects the moment a visual could help a student and uses Gemini to build interactive material such as charts, geometric shapes and parallel coordinate plots. When a student drags a vertex or a line segment, Khanmigo recognizes where it was placed and adjusts the lesson to match. The Google engineers first defined the metrics for what makes a high quality diagram, then evaluated the visuals for relevance, helpfulness and clarity so they appear only when students benefit most, and built a feedback widget into Khanmigo. Gemini was also wired directly into the Practice My Knowledge tool for teachers. A teacher can generate multiple choice questions in seconds and upload their own material for Gemini to reference. Questions go to students only after the teacher reviews, edits or rejects them, and the teacher decides whether the practice is scored and receives reporting on the results. Khan Academy stated the principle that Gemini drafts the materials while teachers have the final say on what students see.
Results
In its April 2026 material Khan Academy said it was seeing an average of 269,000 interactions with Khanmigo on weekdays and more than 108 million interactions in total since the 2023 launch. The same material said only around 15% of students with access to Khanmigo engage with it. For the new features, the organization said it is seeing preliminary signs of increased student engagement and improvement in next item correctness. Next item correctness measures whether a student correctly answers the very next problem on the same skill in the same session without help from Khanmigo, and Khan Academy described it as a measure of independent learning transfer rather than performance with AI assistance. In its material of 27 August 2026 Google said the tools had moved from early pilots into real classrooms and that districts using Khanmigo can use the new features immediately. Teachers and administrators told Khan Academy the changes let them pitch question difficulty at the right level for their students.
Limits and open questions
The increase in student engagement and the improvement in next item correctness are described only as preliminary signs, with no measured values in the sources. The sources also do not give the number of districts or students using the new features, nor how often teachers edit or reject the generated questions.
Sources
- New AI Tools Bring Interactive Diagrams and Targeted Practice Thanks to Khan Academy's Partnership with Google.orgKhan Academy, Accessed
- Learning in the Open: What AI Is (and Isn't) ChangingKhan Academy, Accessed
- Partnering with Khan Academy on building AI tools for classroomsGoogle, Accessed
Compiled from public sources. These are not results from ATF Works customers.