When ChatGPT took the world by storm in 2023, students frequently used the AI chatbot to cheat on homework assignments. Two years later, OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, is taking a more official role in education.
On Wednesday, OpenAI and edtech company Instructure announced a partnership that brings generative AI into the heart of classroom instruction.
Instructure is the company behind Canvas, a learning app that’s used by thousands of high schools and many colleges. If you’re a parent, like me, you’ve probably seen your kids checking for homework assignments and grades in this app on their phones.
Going forward, 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.
For students, this provides a way to use AI for school work without worrying about being accused of cheating, according to Melissa Loble, chief academic officer at Instructure.
“Students actually do want to learn something, but they want it to be meaningful and applicable to their lives,” she added in an interview. “What this does is it allows them to use AI in a class in an interesting way to help them be more engaged and learn more.”
The edtech market is crowded, and many players are integrating generative AI into workflows. Last year, Khan Academy, a pioneering online education provider, launched Khanmingo, an AI powered assistant for teachers and students that uses OpenAI technology.
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The LLM-enabled assignment
At the center of the Canvas transformation is a new kind of assignment. Instructure calls it the LLM-Enabled Assignment. This tool 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.
“With Instructure’s global reach with OpenAI’s advanced AI models, we’ll give educators a tool to deliver richer, more personalized, and more connected learning experiences for students, and also help them reclaim time for the human side of teaching,” said Leah Belsky, VP of Education at OpenAI.
Instructure and OpenAI are aiming for a learning experience that better fits how students interact with technology these days — one that mirrors conversations with ChatGPT, but grounded in academic rigor.
For instance, a teacher could conjure up an AI chatbot in the form of John Maynard Keynes, powered by OpenAI GPT models. Students can chat with this AI economics avatar and ask questions such as what might happen if more supply is added to a particular market.
AI in student assessment
As students work through these AI-powered experiences and prompts, their conversations are compared with the teacher’s defined objectives and funneled back into the Gradebook, offering real-time insights into student understanding. This gives educators more insight to evaluate the learning process, rather than just students’ final answers.
In Canvas, the Gradebook is a centralized tool that helps instructors track, manage, and assess student performance across assignments, quizzes, discussions, and other activities within a course.
Having OpenAI models involved in the assessment process may raise eyebrows among some educators and parents. However, there will always be a human in the loop, and teachers will have full control over assessments and grades, according to Loble.
Help with scheduling and parent questions
Instructure has also developed an AI agent that helps teachers tackle heavy admin tasks in Canvas. For instance, if Porsche broke her ankle riding her horse and she asks for more time to do homework, her teacher can ask the digital agent to go into the app and bump deadlines for Porsche and all her relevant classes.
This AI agent can even help teachers respond to parent questions. Why did Porsche get a B on her economics test? Her parents might want to know at 10 p.m. on a Tuesday. The Canvas agent can summarize parent questions like these for teachers, potentially spotting similarities and trends within the messages. The teacher can then ask the agent to write a response to the relevant parents.
Again, a human is always in the loop: In this case, the teacher would check the agent’s message and edit or re-write it before sending.
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