OpenAI releases a teacher's guide to ChatGPT, but some educators...
OpenAI envisions teachers using its AI-powered tools to create lesson plans and interactive tutorials for students. But some educators are wary of the technology — and its potential to go awry. 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 their classrooms. Created in collaboration with the nonprofit organization Common Sense Media, with which OpenAI has an active partnership, the one-hour, nine-module program covers the basics of AI and its pedagogical applications.
Implementation in Schools
OpenAI says that it’s already deployed the course 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. Per the company’s internal research, 98% of participants said the program offered new ideas or strategies that they could apply to their work.
“Schools across the country are grappling with new opportunities and challenges as AI reshapes education,” 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 support and educate teachers on the front lines and prepare for this transformation.”
Educators' Concerns
But some educators don’t see the program as helpful — and think it could, in fact, mislead. Lance Warwick, a sports lecturer at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, is concerned that resources like OpenAI’s will normalize AI use among educators unaware of the tech’s ethical implications. While OpenAI’s course covers some of ChatGPT’s limitations, like that it can’t fairly grade students’ work, Warwick found the modules on privacy and safety to be “very limited” — and contradictory.
“In the example prompts [OpenAI gives], one tells you to incorporate grades and feedback from past assignments, while another tells you to create a prompt for an activity to teach the Mexican Revolution,” Warwick noted. “In the next module on safety, it tells you to never input student data, and then talks about the bias inherent in generative AI and the issues with accuracy. I’m not sure those are compatible with the use cases.”
Transparency and Control
Sin à Tes Souhaits, a visual artist and educator at the University of Arizona, says that he’s found AI tools to be helpful in writing assignment guides and other supplementary course materials. But he also says he’s concerned that OpenAI’s program doesn’t directly address how the company might exercise control over content that teachers create using its services.
“If educators are creating courses and coursework on a program that gives the company the right to re-create and sell that data, that would destabilize a lot,” Tes Souhaits told TechCrunch. “It’s unclear to me how OpenAI will use, package, or sell whatever is generated by their models.”
Educational Market Impact
Josh Prieur, a classroom teacher-turned-product director at educational games company Prodigy Education, had a more upbeat take on OpenAI’s educator outreach. Prieur argues that there are “clear upsides” for teachers if school systems adopt AI in a “thoughtful” and “responsible” way, and he believes that OpenAI’s program is transparent about the risks.
OpenAI is aggressively going after the education market, which it sees as a key area of growth. In September, OpenAI hired former Coursera chief revenue officer Leah Belsky as its first GM of education and charged 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.
Educational Challenges
Late last year, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) pushed for governments to regulate the use of AI in education, including implementing age limits for users and guardrails on data protection and user privacy. But little progress has been made on those fronts since — and on AI policy in general.
Mixed research on AI’s educational impact hasn’t helped convince the nonbelievers. University of Pennsylvania researchers found that Turkish high school students with access to ChatGPT did worse on a math test than students who didn’t have access. In a separate study, researchers observed that German students using ChatGPT were able to find research materials more easily but tended to synthesize those materials less skillfully than their non-ChatGPT-using peers.
