Julieta Longo & Digit / https://betterimagesofai.org / https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

On Wednesday, OpenAI and edtech company Instructure, the company which owns the Canvas Learning Management System, announced a partnership. Going forward, they say, AI models will be embedded within Canvas to help teachers create new types of classes, assess student performance in new ways, and take some of the drudgery out of administrative tasks.

They go on to explain that at the centre of the Canvas integration is a new kind of assignment called the LLM-Enabled Assignment which allows educators to design interactive, chat-based experiences inside Canvas using OpenAI's large language models, or LLMs. Teachers can describe their targeted learning goals and desired skills in plain language, and the platform will help craft an intelligent conversation tailored to each student's needs.

This follows on from the UK government announcement a strategic partnership with OpenAI including education. OpenAI also recently launched a teacher’s guide to ChatGPT, aiming to integrate this AI tool into K-12 education and are providing online trading materials although these have been seen as unimpressive.

But perhaps most significantly, in the last 48 hours, OpenAI has released its "study mode": intended to help students through step-by-step prompting and "Socratic questioning". Although they claim to have consulted widely with expert pedagogues, in reality this is a quick response to growing critique that AI, and in particular ChatGPT, reduces cognitive engagement and learning through just providing answers as core to its role as a chatbot. In particular criticism has been made of the personalised learning approach that all of the major tech companies have put forward as one of the big advances of AI in education. This relates to the lack of agency for the learner - and by extension for the teacher. As J. Owen Matson has said AI detects, diagnoses, and delivers, while the learner passively receives the appropriate intervention. AI adapts, the learner is adapted to.

But I wonder if study mode really is different. I suspect that it is still a chatbot deploying the same personalised learning but merely adopting a question based approach to introduce the learning content to the learner, thus providing an illusion of agency.

And while purporting to be developing new pedagogic learning approaches (although Socrates is not really a new approach) the real motivation from Open AI is to compete with the big players Google, Amazon and Microsoft etc in the Ed Tech market. All of them are basically aiming to lock educational institutions into long term contracts, especially based on Cloud Infrastructures. And of course a future aim of this strategy, as is to get their hands on data. In a recent short paper, “The Political Economy of Datafication and Platformization: Digital Transformation in Higher Education”, Janja Komljenovic and Ben Williamson say that platformization, datafication, and AI have profound effects on the core practices of Higher Education and its students. This dynamic, they say represents structural privatization of the sector, dominated by proprietary technology, and governed by contract and property law.

About the Image

The image shows the paradox of AI-driven work and spatial disconnection in contemporary employment. Even workers who perform their tasks in physical proximity are entirely isolated from each other; their work relationships are mediated by intangible algorithms and physical technology like laptops/mobile phones. It also highlights the emotional and social isolation that can accompany digitalised labour. The image was created using Procreate.