Khanmigo

Khanmigo is Khan Academy’s AI assistant that acts as both a personal tutor for learners and a teaching copilot for educators, running on GPT-4 and deeply integrated with Khan Academy’s content library. Instead of simply providing answers, Khanmigo uses a guided, Socratic approach—asking questions, offering hints, and breaking down complex ideas so students can construct their own understanding in subjects such as math, science, history, humanities, and coding. The system is designed with education-specific safeguards and pedagogical patterns to keep interactions on-topic, age-appropriate, and focused on learning rather than shortcutting work. For students and families, Khanmigo offers 24/7 conversational help tied to Khan Academy exercises and courses, so learners can get immediate support when they are stuck on homework or want to explore new topics. Parents can subscribe and then activate Khanmigo for up to ten children, see chat history, and receive safety alerts that help them monitor how their kids are using AI while preserving a focus on learning. This makes Khanmigo function as a persistent virtual tutor that complements existing Khan Academy practice, giving targeted scaffolding at the moment of need rather than generic explanations. For teachers, Khanmigo serves as a free AI-powered assistant that reduces prep time and supports instruction by generating lesson ideas, practice questions, explanations, and classroom activities aligned with Khan Academy material. Educators can use it to draft problems, differentiate tasks, or get alternate explanations for concepts, while also leveraging district-level implementations that integrate student-facing Khanmigo into classroom workflows when purchased by schools or districts. Khan Academy emphasizes that classroom access for students is handled through these institutional partnerships rather than individual teacher subscriptions, keeping student usage governed at the school or district level. What distinguishes Khanmigo from general-purpose chatbots is its alignment with Khan Academy’s structured curriculum, its explicit design for tutoring and teaching rather than open-ended conversation, and its education-centric safety model. It is positioned as a low-cost, nonprofit-backed alternative to generic AI tools, with free access for educators, low-cost family and learner plans, and integration into a learning environment that has been vetted and rated favorably by organizations such as Common Sense Media. By embedding AI directly into the Khan Academy platform, Khanmigo turns traditional video and exercise learning into an interactive dialogue where students and teachers can continuously ask questions, explore ideas, and co-create learning experiences with an AI partner.

• ✓Guiding students step-by-step through math and science problems with hints instead of direct answers
• ✓Helping learners brainstorm, outline, and revise essays or short answers while preserving their own voice
• ✓Giving students on-demand homework help in subjects like history, humanities, and coding aligned to Khan Academy courses
• ✓Enabling teachers to quickly generate lesson plans, practice questions, and alternative explanations for challenging concepts
• ✓Letting parents provide 24/7 AI tutoring to up to 10 children connected to their Khan Academy progress

Start by logging into Khan Academy and ensuring Khanmigo access is enabled on your account (via a parent subscription, teacher signup, or district implementation), then open a Khanmigo chat or activity from the menu when working on a course or exercise. For problem solving, type your question or paste the problem and ask Khanmigo to walk you through it step by step, explicitly requesting hints, checks of your reasoning, or alternative approaches rather than final answers to stay aligned with its tutoring design. When planning lessons or assignments as a teacher, prompt Khanmigo with your grade level, topic, and learning goals so it can generate questions, explanations, and activities that match both your standards and the Khan Academy content your students are using. Encourage students to interact with Khanmigo by explaining their thinking and asking follow-up questions, since the system is tuned to respond with probing questions and scaffolds that work best when learners share intermediate steps. Be mindful that classroom-wide student access must be enabled through a school or district implementation, so coordinate with your institution if you want students to use Khanmigo directly during instruction.

Khanmigo is currently limited to users in the United States for paid consumer access, requiring that the subscribing adult be 18 or older with a U.S. billing address, which restricts availability for international families and learners. Individual teachers cannot independently grant student access outside of supported school or district implementations, so classroom deployment depends on institutional agreements rather than teacher-only subscriptions. As it is built on GPT-4, Khanmigo can still occasionally make mistakes, misinterpret questions, or produce incomplete explanations, so learners and teachers must review its guidance critically and cross-check with core Khan Academy materials. The tool is tightly integrated into Khan Academy’s environment and does not function as a standalone API or general-purpose AI assistant, limiting its use for tasks outside of tutoring and educational workflows on the platform. Pricing and eligibility, such as free access for U.S. teachers and low-cost subscriptions for families, may change over time and are currently focused on specific regions and user categories, which can create inconsistency with older documentation or third-party descriptions.