Latest news with #SalKhan
Yahoo
14-05-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Carnegie Mellon University announces partnership with Sal Khan's Schoolhouse.world
As part of his visit to Carnegie Mellon University to give the keynote address at commencement on Sunday, Sal Khan, founder of the renowned nonprofit educational platform Khan Academy, and CMU announced a new partnership between the school and one of Khan's other ventures. CMU and a digital platform that offers free educational services worldwide with a focus on high school-level curricula, are partnering, which will allow CMU students to have both expanded access to the platform and gain experience as tutors. 'Carnegie Mellon University is deeply committed to fostering access and opportunity, and we also applaud Sal Khan's record of creating innovative and high-quality educational experiences that are broadly available to learners around the world, including Khan Academy and CMU President Farnam Jahanian said in a statement. 'Our new collaboration seeks to unite our institutions around our shared commitment and further democratize learning, benefiting Carnegie Mellon students, high school students around the world and society at large.' Click here to read more from our partners at the Pittsburgh Business Times. Download the FREE WPXI News app for breaking news alerts. Follow Channel 11 News on Facebook and Twitter. | Watch WPXI NOW
Fast Company
13-05-2025
- Fast Company
Sal Khan's new Dialogues program teaches students how to have civil, thoughtful discussions
In recent years, Khan Academy founder Sal Khan has been most visible promoting the organization's AI learning assistant, Khanmigo. But a second nonprofit he founded, called Schoolhouse, focuses on connecting students with their peers for human-centered educational interactions. Since the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, Schoolhouse has connected students with trained and certified volunteer tutors, often around their own age, who help them understand a variety of academic subjects. Now, through a pilot with the College Board, these tutors also help students prepare for the SATs. 'It was a very utopian idea that frankly a lot of people were very skeptical of—that you could attract volunteers, and vet them, and train them, and give high-quality tutoring at scale for free to other folks,' says Khan, who is also CEO of Schoolhouse. 'But we built that first prototype, summer of 2020, right in the middle of the pandemic, and it worked.' As of Tuesday, Schoolhouse is publicly launching a new program called Dialogues, which connects students aged 14 to 18 via Zoom to respectfully discuss a variety of often-controversial cultural and political topics. Developed with experts in civil discourse, the program offers students discussion guides on subjects like immigration, gun control, climate change, universal basic income, and artificial intelligence. Ultimately, though, it relies on students to engage respectfully and learn from one another. 'It's not a debate,' Khan says. 'You don't have to convince the other person, but you do want to be able to give your point of view in a thoughtful way, and you want to be able to listen and be able to understand the other side's point of view.' During sessions, students are identified only by their first names and last initials. While video is optional, Schoolhouse reports that about 75% of students in the pilot opted to keep their cameras on. After each conversation, students complete surveys reflecting on their experiences. Dialogues offer not only insights into differing perspectives but also teach students how to maintain respectful, productive conversations. 'I often end up being the one who sort of leads the question, as in answers first,' says Claire, a participant in the program. (Schoolhouse requested that Fast Company only identify student participants by their first names, in keeping with Dialogues' privacy practices.) 'And I've learned how to do that in a way where I'm not running over the other people—where we really share our own different thoughts, and we dig a little bit deeper.' More than 600 students have participated in the pilot phase, holding over 2,000 Dialogue sessions. Participants can also start Dialogues clubs through Schoolhouse to help organize sessions. 'It's our dream that one day, Dialogue Clubs will be just as common as Debate Clubs,' Khan wrote in a blog post. Students can also receive official portfolios from Schoolhouse documenting their participation and peer feedback. By connecting students across geographic regions, Dialogues expose them to viewpoints and ideas they may not encounter in their everyday lives. 'In my daily life, I really thought I met a lot of different people, and I was kind of tapped in with a bunch of different areas of the community,' says David, a participant. 'But once you go into Dialogues, you realize that there's a lot more breadth to the world around you.' Zoom offers a more intimate, one-on-one setting than typical internet message boards—without the cost and complexity of travel. 'We had two American students talking to two Chinese students in China about free speech,' Khan says. 'I don't know how you pull that off in person without some super-expensive exchange program.' Several colleges—including the University of Chicago, Johns Hopkins University, MIT, Vanderbilt University, Columbia University, Colby College, Northwestern University, and Washington University in St. Louis—have said they will officially consider Dialogues portfolios as part of admissions applications. Students who volunteer to tutor through Schoolhouse can also build similar portfolios. Khan says his team has, with student permission, shared transcripts and recordings of Dialogues with school officials to help them understand the program, and the response has been positive. 'Their consensus is, this is incredible,' he says. 'Like, these are kids that we would want to accept.'
Associated Press
18-04-2025
- Business
- Associated Press
Squirrel Ai Co-Founder Joleen Liang Highlights the Role of AI in Critical Thinking at ASU+GSV Summit
SHANGHAI, April 18, 2025 /PRNewswire/ -- The ASU+GSV Summit, co-hosted by Arizona State University (ASU) and Global Silicon Valley (GSV), recently kicked off at the Manchester Grand Hyatt in San Diego, California. Themed 'Learning at the Speed of Light', the event drew over 7,000 educators, business owners, investors, and policymakers, including Khan Academy founder Sal Khan and Stanford University's Prof. Andrew Ng (co-founder of Coursera). Among the distinguished speakers was Dr. Joleen Liang, co-founder of Squirrel Ai Learning, who joined a high-profile panel with Khan Academy Chief Learning Officer Kristen DiCerbo and SchoolAI CEO Caleb Hicks to explore 'Cultivating Critical Thinking in the Age of AI Tutors'. Hailed as the 'Davos of EdTech', the ASU+GSV Summit is one of the most influential events in global education and workforce learning. It provides a platform for leading innovators across the 'PreK to Gray' (early childhood through lifelong learning) sector to exchange ideas, share best practices, and explore opportunities for collaboration. Dr. Liang opened the discussion with a compelling thesis: 'AI won't replace human thought—it's a tool to ignite deeper cognition'. She elaborated on this viewpoint by citing the company's proprietary large adaptive model (LAM) for multimodal education as an example. With the growing popularity of general-purpose AI led by LLMs and ChatGPT, Squirrel Ai Learning 's multimodal LAM remains laser-focused on the education sector. Leveraging 117 patented technologies, including fine-grained knowledge component decomposition and root-cause analysis, it dynamically tracks students' problem-solving processes to deliver truly personalized learning solutions. This ensures every learner discovers their optimal study method, accelerating the progress of adaptive education. Squirrel Ai's all-subject multimodal adaptive learning model enhances intelligent human-computer interaction, enabling seamless voice and text-based engagement with students. For instance, when a student solves a math problem, instead of just grading the answer, Squirrel Ai Learning's adaptive tutoring system guides them with Socratic questioning: 'Would the conclusion hold if the conditions change?' This approach encourages students to think independently and deepen their understanding by prompting them to verify their logic and re-evaluate problem-solving strategies. Squirrel Ai Learning's MCM (Model of thinking, Capacity, Method) model further helps students uncover latent strengths. Dr. Liang emphasized, 'We're nurturing adaptable thinkers—not training machine-dependent learners—and we believe it will benefit them for life.' Squirrel Ai Learning's innovations earned it a spot on the 2025 GSV 150 list, which evaluates over 2, 500 global companies backed by venture capital and private equity, and won the Most Transformational Growth Companies In Digital Learning and Workforce Skills award. During the summit, many international educators recognized and praised Squirrel Ai Learning 's LAM model. Michael Horn from the Harvard Graduate School of Education shared that he frequently cites the company's adaptive tutoring system as a case study in his courses, commending its decade-long technological evolution and continued innovation. According to publicly available data, the company allocates 30% of its annual revenue to R&D as part of its mission to make quality education more accessible. It has built a top-tier research team that brings together leading AI scientists and education professionals from around the globe, while collaborating with leading universities and research organizations worldwide. To date, Squirrel Ai Learning has opened over 3,000 physical learning centers across China and partnered with more than 60,000 public schools, collecting nearly 10 billion learning behavior data points from over 24 million students. As the deep integration of AI and education emerges as a central theme in education reform, Squirrel Ai Learning 's adaptive learning system offers the industry a tangible solution: AI should never replace student thinking but rather serve as a cognitive partner that cultivates critical thinking. The future of high-quality education requires both relentless innovation in technology and the commitment to preserve the human element that nurtures original thought. Contact: Li Huang [email protected] View original content to download multimedia: SOURCE Squirrel Ai Learning
