Khanmigo AI tutor failed to spark revolution, creators admit
Khan Academy's AI chatbot launched with high hopes but became a non-event for most students, raising questions about why the edtech dream collapsed.
What to know
- Khanmigo, Khan Academy's AI tutoring chatbot launched three years ago with major backing (OpenAI access, Microsoft support, subsidies), has been widely abandoned by students and failed to spark the promised educational revolution.
- Khan and his Chief Learning Officer have now publicly acknowledged the product's failure, with students showing minimal voluntary adoption despite aggressive insertion into the platform.
- A structural critique argues the failure stems from contradiction: Khan's own learning involves active inquiry and making, while Khanmigo teaches passively through telling.
- The broader edtech industry faces questions about the viability of AI-tutor models, given that Khanmigo failed despite every conceivable advantage.
The dispute Whether the article fairly characterizes Khan Academy's pedagogy—defenders say the video-plus-exercises model already embodies active learning and scaffolding, making the critique uncharitable; critics argue there is a real pedagogical gulf between how Khan himself learns (by inquiry and making) and how Khanmigo teaches (by telling). · positions read across 27 posts and comments
Khan Academy's video-based model with exercises is sound pedagogy; the article mischaracterizes it as passive telling when it includes scaffolding and problem-solving.
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“I learned a lot of math at a young age from Sal Khan's early videos and served as an easy-to-digest scaffolding on top of which to build a deeper understanding.”
skulk · Hacker News ↗
Khan Academy's approach has genuinely inspired students and provided accessible education where traditional teaching failed, regardless of methodological critique.
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“I grew up in a small rural town where math teachers were rare and good ones were nonexistent. After I saw them I came back with a fire in me because for the first time he exposed me to the beauty of calculus.”
mindwok · Hacker News ↗
The article's characterization of Khan as lacking pedagogical knowledge is unfair; he understands how people learn and designed his product intentionally.
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“As anyone who's met Sal will attest, this characterization is incredibly off the mark. The author extrapolated from the product as opposed to understanding the person.”
dyarosla · Hacker News ↗
“So far I am not seeing the revolution in education.”
Kristen DiCerbo, Khan Academy Chief Learning Officer · Chalkbeat
Sal Khan Khan Academy founder and CEOKristen DiCerbo Khan Academy Chief Learning OfficerPunyamishtra Education researcher and authorDan Meyer Education commentator
The record 2 articles and posts · last 30 days
What people are saying 24 voices from 2 sites · best of 27 · verbatim
- Was Khanmigo's failure due to flawed pedagogy, or to adoption/integration issues unrelated to how it teaches?
- Does Khan Academy's original video-based platform actually implement the 'learning by making' principle the author advocates, or is it closer to passive consumption?
- Aug 24
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This article is a classic straw man. It supposes a simplified and trite intent of KA then goes on to explain why THAT intent is doomed from the start.I mostly used KA between 2010-2015, and received immense benefit. These were the years it was MOSTLY “just videos”. Having revisited more recently, I found the gamification, quizzes, etc. simply…
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Education is a very difficult problem. People like to learn and people want to learn. Mostly improve themselves over their friends and society, and they want to do it quickly and easily. This proven by the countless influencer videos and influencer culture present in youtube on topics such as finance, health and many others.However, true education…
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I watch Khan Academy videos because they explain topics like mathematics in an easy-to-understand way. But it's just one tool in a student's arsenal. Khan Academy is by no means the one-stop-shop for education and should not stop learners from inquiring, constructing, expressing, and communicating as part of their learning journey. I hoped that…
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What is with these personal attacks? I don’t understand the insistence that every educational tool must offer some perfect, complete learning experience.I grew up in India watching the early Sal Khan videos because I preferred them. They complemented school and helped me understand things I’d ignored in class or simply hadn’t been taught well.You…
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A comment I had made on Dan Meyer's article, also relevant here (Also, as others are pointing out here, there is a crucial difference between the videos and their chatbot; you can inspire with videos because your human interests are on display):This resonates so much with me. I am the co-founder of a microschool and also a neuroscientist. And…
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I think the core thesis - that videos aren't the full package - makes a lot of sense. But I don't see why Khanmigo couldn't in theory fill in some of the other pieces.I'm reminded o A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer from The Diamond Age - and how LLMs haven't been able to achieve anything similar. With the correct supervising AI agents that have…
- Aug 23
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This seems to be wrestling with the wrong opponent.> And this is what I think the edtech world keeps getting wrong. The assumption is that if you can deliver the right content, in the right way, at the right time, learning will follow. It won’t.I think it depends on the goals of the student and what you're trying to learn. Some things are…
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I have nothing to say on the merits of Khan Academy (I have never looked at it, nor have I known anyone taking a course), but from 35 years of teaching, I know that we mostly learn by doing. It's why university courses have labs, problem sets, and required essays. All else is memorization (not that memorization is inherently bad, part of learning…
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Khan Academy has a problem lately:Go visit a page like https://www.khanacademy.org/math/linear-algebra and count the number of: * cookie banners * donation panhandling modals * account signup widgets * gamification modals to tell you about leveling up * etc It does not communicate that their primary goal is to educate, it feels more like the…
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Not sure what actually killed it but Khanmigo seemed to have removed the state of being stuck. Wrestling with a problem you cannot immediately solve is where the learning happens at least for me in programming and math.Seeking help after a while is obviously fine but when the help is one keystroke away and always available, you take it before the…
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Some thoughts on Khanmigo, brought to mind when reading "Why Sal Khan’t: On Learning by Making but Teaching by Telling" https:// punyamishra.com/2026/04/16/why -sal-khant-on-learning-by-making-but-teaching-by-telling/ I looked at Khanmigo fairly early on. I tried it out and thought: this is ChatGPT with a system prompt. And not a good system…
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This articles core argument appears to be that a live instruction is better than a video because there can be feedback at the moment of confusion while a video can't. But that depends on student's impulse being triggered and I'm not sure if its any better or in some cases can be worse if the teachers content is not as thorough as Khan's or anyone…
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> What he has never had is pedagogical knowledge: an understanding of how people learnAs anyone who’s met Sal will attest, this characterization is incredibly off the mark.The author extrapolated from the product as opposed to understanding the person and how the product came to be the way it is.
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As someone who has earned over 3 million points on Khan Academy over a 3-4 year span about ten years ago, I am very appreciative of my experience. What I appreciated most is when Sal would derive formulas such as the quotient rule in Calculus from the power rule by using negative exponents. Deriving formulas rather than memorizing them opened up a…
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K.A. has always helped me immensely. Often I will add a video as a 2nd "I do" before our "we do." If there is extra time after small groups we typically answer the math unit questions as a class. Students are thrilled to come up in front of the class to defend thier reasoning before finally seeing if thier choice was correct.
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The attacks on Khan here personally irked me.I grew up in a small rural town where math teachers were rare and good ones were nonexistent. I still remember watching Sal Khan's videos on calculus after struggling to get any grip on it from my frustratingly uninterested teacher who was forced into the position after our actual teacher retired. After…
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From what I know of the Khan approach, it's akin to "flipping the classroom" [0], which has gained pretty wide acceptance.(I use the flipped classroom approach extensively. But the legal profession being the eager embracers of novelty that we are </sarcasm>, I refer to the approach as "enhanced Socratic method," given that Socratic method was…
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Yes, exactly. I have also learned a lot of math, grammar, science, and other subjects from Sal. In most videos, Sal explicitly states to pause the video and try out the problem before he works through it. I do think that KA's style of teaching needs some getting used to (this was never a problem for me as it was one of my first teaching…
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I have been using Khan Academy for over 7 years growing up. It has helped tremendously and taught me to be a critical thinker. There are exercises, quizzes, and unit tests to test a student's understanding and if they get something wrong, KA marks what videos or articles they should go back to and review. I agree with one of the commenters here…
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Whenever this topic comes up I feel the urge to point out that not enough people have read Audrey Watter's "Teaching Machines: The History of Personalized Learning", or her blog. We might stop repeating the same mistakes over and over again if we did.[0]
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Is the article about something else than how math on Khan Academy was thaught?I remember minimal videos (3-13 min, usually 5-8), and then exercises drilling the techniques until you understand it and don't make mistakes. If you got a perfect score (no mistakes whatsoever), you went a little faster.That's learning by doing, or am I wrong? Or are…
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I don't agree and the hype surrounding his efforts was something much greater than what KahnAcademy actually is (a very useful resource).He sold his vision in "The One World Schoolhouse" which was essentially global learning via all the best videos (and one unified curriculum) you can make and teachers effectively being technicians/teaching…
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Side note, but much as I like Khan Academy overall, I've always struggled with Sal's slow and repetitive speaking style in the videos."Now you add the five ... [pause] ... add the five ... add the five to the seven ... to the seven..."Running them at 1.5 - 2x helps a bit, but it's still annoying to the point that I find it very distracting.
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Overall, I do agree with the thesis but:> Now… how does Sal Khan want my kid to learn?> Watch a video.I find this a little uncharitable. I learned a lot of math at a young age from Sal Khan's early videos (back when he used to erase by switching to a black pen and scribbling across the entire screen) and, to put it in the author's terms, it served…