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Terry underwood's avatar

The marketplace in education has always been bloody. ACT is partnering with university’s to create superscores for admission, incentivizing multiple retakes and prep.

I quibble with you a bit. Bots may help students better understand analysis at the linguistic level (I’ve not tried any statistical analysis, but I don’t see it capable of either doing or teaching critical thinking skills. CT in the wild is not a collection of skills. It’s a heightened form of metacognition which bots can’t do. You are offloading some of the fundamental properties of human teaching to the bot.

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Guy Wilson's avatar

This development caught me off guard yesterday. If OpenAI drops its pricing to a level most universities can afford, that would be good in many ways. I have not seen anything firm on that yet, and it may still be on the high side. That could create problems, including equity issues between better and less well funded institutions. That is nothing new, but this could exacerbate that. One option I wonder about is treating ChatGPT more like a textbook or class materials and offer it through Inclusive Access for when it is needed. Optimally, if a student needed it for more than one class, they would only be charged once. Not sure that is a good or realistic solution, just one of my first reactions.

I do think OpenAI is a very reckless company now and not easily trusted. I am not sure I trust any of the AI companies though. Some teachers and courses can use these tools effectively as they are, but they are not a panacea or fit all use cases. Their real uses may actually be niche, though it is unclear how big those niches are. I am less sanguine that you are about specialized educational AI tools. I've been working in instructional technology in some role since 1998. We will probably see some fairly good tools emerge eventually, but we will see a lot of bad ones, and a great many mediocre ones. I have not seen a really good one so far, but I'm literally from Missouri, so show me. Talking to people from the big three textbook/courseware publishers, I have the impression that they are conflicted (after all, they do not want their content consumed) and proceeding cautiously. We should start seeing more AI resources in their products this Fall, either tools from third parties that are bolted on to their courseware, or developed in-house for selected titles. Blackboard, of course is well ahead on AI in its tools. Canvas is moving more slowly. I have not been following Brightspace or Moodle closely. Another complicating factor for all of the players is going to be keeping everything modular, so permissions can be turned on and off as needed, by institutions, academic units, or individual professors. As long as AI policy remains decentralized, as it is in many places, conflicts between application feature sets and policies is going to be a problem. We are going to see a lot of trial and error before the major and minor players figure out what is useful and what is not.

The other announcement yesterday that caught my attention is Perplexity's Pages announcement. This effectively makes it an AI blog platform with posts readers can interact with. (https://www.perplexity.ai/hub/blog/perplexity-pages) This is partly aimed at educators. It will not have the impact that ChatGPT Edu will have, but it is a move I had not expected from that company. It makes me wonder about their long-term plans.

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