OpenAI envisions teachers using AI-powered tools to create lesson plans and interactive tutorials for students. But some educators are wary of the technology and its potential for failure.
Today, OpenAI released a free online course designed to help K-12 teachers learn how to bring ChatGPT, the company's AI chatbot platform, into the classroom. Created in collaboration with Common Sense Media, a nonprofit organization with which OpenAI has an active partnership, the one-hour, nine-module program covers the fundamentals of AI and its educational applications.
OpenAI says the course has already been implemented in “dozens” of schools, including the Agua Fria School District in Arizona, the San Bernardino School District in California, and the charter school system Challenger Schools. According to the company's internal survey, 98% of participants said the program provided them with new ideas and strategies they could apply to their jobs.
“As AI reshapes education, schools across the country are grappling with new opportunities and challenges,” Robbie Torney, senior director of AI programs at Common Sense Media, said in a statement. “With this course, we are taking a proactive approach to supporting and educating frontline teachers and preparing them for this transformation.”
However, some educators do not believe this program is helpful and believe it may actually be misleading.
Image credit: OpenAI
Lance Warwick, a sports instructor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, worries that resources like OpenAI will normalize the use of AI among educators who are unaware of the technology's ethical implications. There is. OpenAI's courses cover some of ChatGPT's limitations, such as not being able to fairly grade student assignments, but Warwick said the privacy and safety modules are “very limited” and inconsistent. I felt that.
“In the example prompt, [OpenAI gives]One instructs them to incorporate grades and feedback from past assignments, and the other instructs them to create activity prompts for teaching the Mexican Revolution,” Warwick said. Ta. “The next module on safety will instruct students to never enter their data and discuss bias and accuracy issues inherent in generative AI. We may or may not be compatible with your use case. yeah.”
Sin á Tres Souhaits, a visual artist and educator at the University of Arizona, says he has found AI tools useful when creating assignment guides and other supporting materials. But he also said he was concerned that OpenAI's program doesn't directly address how the company will manage the content teachers create using its services.
“If educators are creating courses and coursework in a program that gives companies the right to recreate and sell that data, that's going to be very unstable,” Tres Souhaits told TechCrunch. . “It is unclear to me how OpenAI will use, package, or sell anything produced by the model.”
OpenAI says in its ToS that it does not sell user data and that users of its services, including ChatGPT, own the output they generate “to the extent permitted by applicable law.” But without additional guarantees, Tres Souhaits is not confident that OpenAI won't quietly change its policies in the future.
Image credit: OpenAI
“For me, AI is like cryptocurrency,” says Tres Souhaits. “It's new, so it has a lot of potential. But it's so unregulated that I'm wondering how much we can trust the guarantees.”
Late last year, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) called on governments to regulate the use of AI in education, including introducing age limits for users and guardrails around data protection and user privacy. However, little progress has been made on these fronts since then, and the same is true for AI policy in general.
Tres Souhaits also takes issue with the fact that OpenAI's program, which OpenAI sells as a guide to “AI, Generative AI, ChatGPT,” makes no mention of any AI tools other than OpenAI's own. “I feel like this reinforces the idea that OpenAI is an AI company,” he said. “This is a smart idea for OpenAI as a business, but we already have these technology policies in place to put ourselves at the center of innovation as the technology is developed, to make ourselves synonymous with the thing itself. We have a problem with a company that has a lot of influence.”
Josh Prieur, a classroom teacher turned product director at educational gaming company Prodigy Education, has a more positive outlook on how OpenAI can help educators. Prieur argued there are “clear benefits” for teachers if school systems implement AI in a “thoughtful” and “responsible” way, and believes OpenAI's program is transparent about the risks. .
“Teachers' concerns about using AI to plagiarize content and dehumanize the learning experience remain, and there are also risks around relying too heavily on AI,” Preil said. “However, education is often the key to overcoming fears about implementing new technology in schools, as well as ensuring that appropriate safeguards are in place to ensure students are protected and teachers have full control. I guarantee it.”
OpenAI is active in the education market, which we see as an important growth area.
Image credit: OpenAI
In September, OpenAI hired former Coursera chief revenue officer Leah Belsky as its first director of education, tasking her with bringing OpenAI's products to more schools. And in the spring, the company launched ChatGPT Edu, a version of ChatGPT built for universities.
According to Allied Market Research, the value of the AI market in education could reach $88.2 billion within the next 10 years. But growth is off to a slow start, largely due to skeptical educators.
In a Pew Research Center survey this year, a quarter of K-12 public teachers said using AI tools in education does more harm than good. Another poll by the Rand Corporation and the Center for Reinventing Public Education found that only 18% of K-12 educators use AI in the classroom.
Educational leaders are similarly reluctant to try AI themselves or introduce the technology to the educators they supervise. Few district superintendents believe AI readiness is a “very urgent” need this year, especially given pressing issues like staffing shortages and chronic absenteeism, according to education consulting firm EAB. That's what it means.
Various studies on the impact of AI on education have not helped to convince non-believers. Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania found that Turkish high school students with access to ChatGPT performed worse on a math test than those without access. In another study, researchers found that German students using ChatGPT were able to find research materials more easily, but were also better at synthesizing those materials than students not using ChatGPT. I have observed that there is a tendency for this to not be possible.
As OpenAI writes in the guide, ChatGPT is not a replacement for student engagement. Some educators and schools may never believe that it can replace every step of the educational process.