Schools warm to AI

Chalkboards, pencil sharpeners, decades-old gum under the desk — and ChatGPT? OpenAI wants generative artificial intelligence to become a staple of the classroom, announcing this week it hired an executive from the online learning platform Coursera to work with educators, from K-12 to college. 

If you remember when ChatGPT first came on the scene, the reaction from many teachers was fear and loathing, with school districts across the country banning the technology. But now schools are changing their tune, which means a lucrative market is there for the taking.

Rupak Gandhi’s inbox is increasingly full of solicitations from AI companies. He’s superintendent of Fargo Public Schools in Fargo, North Dakota, and is frequently getting asked whether the 11,000 students and 900 teachers in his school district might be interested in an AI tutor or an AI teaching assistant.

“It pretty much parallels other educational products that we get from vendors periodically,” Gandhi said. “So maybe three to four emails a week.”

Fargo Public Schools has not taken up any of those offers yet, but they’re not prohibiting teachers from using AI products either.

Gandhi said the conversations he’s having with other superintendents and educators are changing.

“I have seen and know individuals that were initially very resistant to any AI tool or large language model and they’ve kind of come around,” Gandhi said.

Classroom AI products can do things like generate lesson plans or quizzes or provide individualized feedback on the first draft of a history essay, according to Adeel Khan, founder of the startup Magic School AI.

“This was a historically intractable problem of educators being burnt out,” Khan said. “This technology is so practically useful for them.”

But the technology can also be expensive and sometimes ineffective. LA Unified spent nearly $3 million on an AI chatbot called Ed, and ultimately shelved it within three months.

Lisette Partelow at the Center for American Progress said she’s concerned about overreliance on AI.

“I am nervous that we’ll sort of like ignore some of the fundamentals of learning, for example that the student-teacher relationship is really, really important,” Partelow said.

Partelow said humans learn how to learn primarily by interacting with other humans.