Join eCampus News for the 12 Days of Edtech with 2024’s most-read and most-loved stories. On the 10th Day of Edtech, our story focuses on ChatGPT for higher ed.
Key points:
- A new ChatGPT targets higher ed’s AI needs
- Innovative education: AI and AGI shaping tomorrow’s universities
- Enterprise use of AI tools skyrocketed nearly 600 percent
- For more on AI in education, visit eCN’s Teaching & Learning hub
AI’s influence on teaching and learning is constantly expanding, and a large motivation behind integrating AI into the classroom is the realization that students will need AI skills for workforce success.
This realization has led to the growing acceptance that AI belongs in classrooms. The biggest lingering question seems to focus on how to ethically and responsibly integrate AI into teaching and learning.
To that end, OpenAI recently announced ChatGPT Edu, a new version of ChatGPT designed for universities and intended to help them “responsibly deploy AI to students, faculty, researchers, and campus operations.” ChatGPT Edu is powered by GPT-4o, can reason across text and vision, and uses advanced tools including data analysis. It also includes enterprise-level security and controls, and is priced for affordability for educational institutions.
“We built ChatGPT Edu because we saw the success universities like the University of Oxford, Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, University of Texas at Austin, Arizona State University, and Columbia University in the City of New York were having with ChatGPT Enterprise,” according to the announcement on OpenAI’s site.
As AI tools like ChatGPT have become more common in classrooms, students and educators are realizing the myriad ways these tools can help with teaching and learning, including personalized tutoring, cutting down the time faculty spend on administrative tasks, and even assisting with admissions.
OpenAI highlighted a handful of university partners who have found innovative ways to make AI accessible to students, faculty, researchers, and campus operations:
- Professor Nabila El-Bassel at Columbia University is leading an initiative to integrate AI into community-based strategies to reduce overdose fatalities. Her team built a GPT that analyzes and synthesizes large datasets to inform interventions, reducing weeks of research work into seconds.
- Undergraduates and MBA students in Professor Ethan Mollick’s courses at Wharton completed their final reflection assignments through discussions with a GPT trained on course materials, reporting that ChatGPT got them to think more deeply about what they’ve learned.
- Christiane Reves, an assistant professor at Arizona State University, is developing a custom Language Buddies GPT for students to engage in German conversations suited to their language level while receiving tailored feedback. The GPT will help students build communication skills and save faculty time on assessments.
ChatGPT Edu includes:
- Access to GPT-4o, OpenAI’s flagship model, excelling in text interpretation, coding, and mathematics
- Advanced capabilities such as data analytics, web browsing, and document summarization
- The ability to build GPTs, custom versions of ChatGPT, and share them within university workspaces
- Significantly higher message limits than the free version of ChatGPT
- Improved language capabilities across quality and speed, with over 50 languages supported
- Robust security, data privacy, and administrative controls such as group permissions, SSO, SCIM (coming soon to ChatGPT Edu and ChatGPT Enterprise), and GPT management
- Conversations and data are not used to train OpenAI models
See previous 12 Days of Edtech:
1st Day of Edtech
2nd Day of Edtech
3rd Day of Edtech
4th Day of Edtech
5th Day of Edtech
6th Day of Edtech
7th Day of Edtech
8th Day of Edtech
9th Day of Edtech
- 3 reasons AI skills are essential for college grads - January 17, 2025
- Navigation and guidance in the age of AI: 5 trends to watch - January 14, 2025
- 4 areas poised to impact the future of higher education - January 13, 2025