Education organization OpenAI has released a new online course to teach K-12 teachers about the Company’s ChatGPT AI application. The one-credit course was created in collaboration with the nonprofit Common Sense Media and engages educators with the fundamentals of AI as well as its current and future uses in the classroom. The course is slowly making its way through schools across the United States, and experience has shown that 98% of participants have benefited from it. Nevertheless, these encouraging responses are not loved by many educators due to the raised concerns at large about endorsing AI in classes.
OpenAI’s effort is however in line with the series of attempts to incorporate AI tools in education which the company considers as a potential growth sector. The course will demonstrate to educators how the tool may be employed in generating lesson plans, designing engaging tutorials, and supporting students with their assignments. Robbie Torney, the senior director of AI programs at Common Sense Media said this has presented teachers with preventive training before the impacts of AI affects their learning methodologies.
The opinion of some educators is that AI technology can contribute to the improvement of the learning process in the class. To this, Josh Prieur, a former teacher turned product director at Prodigy Education, pointed out that if integrated and employed properly, AI holds the potential to reverse most of the problems ahead of modern education: Among other things, there is a deficit of resources and scarcity of time from teachers.
However, many educators still have a strong negative reaction to this approach. Issues may involve privacy to more sensitive executive problems such as the use of artificial intelligence in the classroom. One scholar, Lance Warwick, a University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign lecturer, drew attention to the failures of ChatGPT’s ethical scrubbing. The factors that Warwick explained included the Office’s series, where OpenAI focuses on revealing deficits of AI, including failure to calibrate fairly, but where the program talks of privacy and safety felt rather conflicting.
Educator Sin á Tres Souhaits from the University of Arizona also voiced concerns about the course’s lack of clarity around how OpenAI could potentially use or monetize the content generated by teachers. He fears that teachers might unknowingly give OpenAI the rights to their materials, thus jeopardizing content control and intellectual property.
Of all of the barriers to entry and growth of cloud computing, the question of data privacy has turned into a major concern. OpenAI claims that it doesn’t sell data and users actually own the data produced via the platform, however, some educators are not convinced. Tous Souhaits equated the use of AI technology with crypto currency to mean that they are both reckless and their future unknown. If necessary, to enhance clarity of their data use and privacy policies educators continue not to explore tools.
However, the continuous increasing investment in educational initiatives points to OpenAI as a key stakeholder in the educational application of Artificial Intelligence. In fact, the company recently hired Leah Belsky, former chief revenue officer at Coursera to lead its education initiatives.
However, a short survey conducted by the Pew Research Centre shows that one in four participants confirmed harmful impact of the use of AI tools in the teaching-learning process. Moreover, only 18% of all K-12 educators are currently using at least one AI application in education. These numbers show the extent to which education stakeholders differ in their perception of how, or whether, AI should be incorporated into the classroom.
As OpenAI works to integrate AI into education, its teacher’s guide is an important first step, but it remains to be seen whether educators will fully embrace AI or continue to push back against its integration in classrooms. Until more ethical, privacy, and control concerns are addressed, the path to AI’s widespread adoption in education is likely to remain slow and cautious.