OpenAI, in partnership with the non-profit Common Sense Media, announced the launch of a free training course for teachers aimed at simplifying artificial intelligence and prompt engineering, the organizations shared on Wednesday. The one-hour course, called ChatGPT Foundations for K-12 Educators, is designed to help teachers effectively understand and utilize the technology in their classrooms. This initiative is part of OpenAI’s broader push to integrate its products into more schools, particularly those with limited resources. Earlier this year, the company also introduced ChatGPT Edu, a version of its flagship chatbot tailored for educational use, which has already been implemented in numerous schools.
The training course, available on the Common Sense Media website, targets kindergarten through 12th grade teachers. It demonstrates how to use the ChatGPT product for various educational use cases, from creating lesson content to streamlining department meetings. It is the first in a series of online courses the company plans to launch. It also hired a former Coursera executive, Leah Belsky, to lead its efforts to bring AI into more classrooms.
While generative AI has dramatically impacted many industries, it has been slower to enter the education sector. Some educators have been wary of it, fearing that a tool like ChatGPT could be used to cheat or plagiarize. But others have embraced it, seeing it as a chance to reduce their workloads and give students the tools they need to thrive.
Generative AI has the potential to ease a teacher’s burden, freeing them to spend more time planning lessons and grading assignments. It can also make it easier for them to find the correct information to teach their students. It can even automate tasks such as writing assignments and quizzes.
However, successfully using generative AI requires a lot of data. For example, the model that powers ChatGPT uses 45 terabytes of text data, which is about one million books worth of storage space or a quarter of the Library of Congress’s collection. This is different from the kind of dataset that a garden-variety start-up can access, and it has pushed some companies to raise millions of dollars in venture capital to get into the field.
The new training course was created with the help of the National Institute of Standards and Technology, which recently released a framework for helping companies use generative AI responsibly. It can help them identify and manage risks and ensure their systems are designed to avoid ethical problems.
Some educators, however, worry that the new course may mislead teachers about AI’s risks. Lance Warwick, a lecturer at the University of Illinois, says the course needs to focus more on AI’s ethical challenges. He also points to contradictions in the material, including advice on how to prepare for a lesson using an AI program while warning against inputting student data into the system due to privacy concerns.
