Integrating AI Into Your Educational Institution: An Open Letter to School Administrators

The most important decision you will ever make for your community, your organisation, and your career is how to lead your institution into an AI world. Are you ready?

As Dr. Sabba Quidwai often says, the future of AI isn't something to fear, it's something to shape. Will you shape your institutions’ future in an AI world? Are you ready to lead institutional advancement? What are you waiting for?

In this essay, I will discuss why it is critical for educational leaders like yourself to begin the process of fully integrating your institution into the AI World (Gates), as well as practical steps you can take to make that a reality. If you want to talk more, simply reply to this email.

Why You Should Take Bold Action

AI has a lot to offer your institution. At a base level, AI is a lot intelligence that is available to you for free or at a low cost. Intentionally integrating this intelligence into your educational institution is likely to improve your institution. A simple thought experiment: If you have 1,000 students and you could pay 1,000 tutors who could help teach every subject to each student 24/7 for ten cents per day, would you do it? I started a LinkeIn poll on this and so far everyone has said, Yes. What if you could hire TAs for every classroom for 10 cents per day, would you do it? What if you could employ AIs for 10 cents a day that would save your faculty thousands of hours of labor on rote tasks, would you do it? These are just a few ways to think about how AI can be utilized to improve educational outcomes. Outside the simple, consider:

But you'll see - a few weeks from now, every major cloud, data and tech infrastructure provider is going to have some way for you to use your own version of Llama (me: Meta’s recently released LLM) in their tools….And most of them will even create ways for you to fine tune or customize these models too. Without needing to know how to code. So where does that leave us The data privacy barriers are disappearing The cost barriers are disappearing The technical barriers are disappearing…There's an undeniable opportunity in front of everyone who's paying attention. Rachel Woods

You can lead institutional advancement.

It is easier to get started now. You may feel behind the curve, but it is better to start learning and developing a strategy now than to wait until board members and parents start asking questions about your institution's strategy for preparing students for the AI World (Gates)? Is it better to wait until this fall when you will not know what work is produced by students or AIs, until you are impersonated with your own voice or image, or until students can speak to anyone in any language through an earpiece?

Managing those situations, as well as many others, will be easier if you begin now.

The AI you are currently using is the worst you will ever use; it is a "toy" in comparison to what you will have in a few years (Sam Altman), and continues to advance faster than even the most aggressive predictions. As long as the amount of training data, compute power, and parameters expand, advances occur (Rowman). And Sam Altman, the founder of OpenAI says we will start seeing  #3 – exponential gains as AIs create AIs. Emad Mostaque, the CEO of Stability.ai says machines will reach the average level of human intelligence in 3-5 years (minute 51ish) and argues that OpenAI is putting significant resources into alignment because they think AGI is five years out and explains Elon Musk thinks it will be 6 years.

The disruption to education could (I think, “will”) be massive. [Understanding the rapid advances and terminology].

What are you waiting for? Please don’t plan on retiring before education goes quantum.

At least one billion people will be using generative AI by this fall. ChatGPT will be part of the Microsoft Suite, while PalM2 (Google's AI language model) will be part of Google Docs. Before we get into what else people are using (ChatGPT directly, ChatGPT at perplexity.ai and SnapChat, Anthropic's Pi...), that gets us to at least a billion people (Google and Microsoft each have around one billion users) this fall. Meta, which just released its own large language model, Llama 2, for commercial use, intends to integrate it into all of its platforms. It’s literally “raining chatbots” and this will be the “most radical change of our lifetimes” (Mustafa Suleyman, Co-founder and CEO of Inflection AI).

Already, it can do great work. Your ideas about what it can’t do are probably dated.

Almost every assignment, at every level, can be done, at least in part, by AI. Whatever prejudices you have about the quality of AI work as a teacher based on what you saw least semester, they are probably now wrong. AI can do high-quality work. It can do math. It makes far fewer obvious mistakes. And it is capable of working with vast amounts of data. Mollick

AI is available to everyone, the questions are how to use it well and how to adapt educational practice to be relevant in that world.

Will you be one of them, or will it just be your students?

It is impossible to prevent the students from using it. Many educational institutions are relying on AI language detectors as their AI policymakers. The AI-writing detectors are  discriminatory and  fail. They fail so badly that people openly mock them; they can be defeated with two words. A new study that covered 12 publicly available tools and two commercial systems (Turnitin and PlagiarismCheck) found: 

Open AI recently (7/23/23) pulled their own detector because it just didn’t work and was discriminatory.

You can try to ban the last 50+ places students can use generative AI on your school networks and computers so the lowest SES students who don’t have other devices can’t have access, but that’s the extent of your power. Students with poor writing skills, poor English skills, and those who do not know how to fool the detectors can be caught and punished. We all know who those punishments will disproportionately fall on.

We should no longer be discussing AI-writing detectors. Can we talk about something else? But are you ready to help your teachers when their AI detectors fail?

Saying it’s cheating isn’t credible to students. Students are aware that they will use this at work, and they frequently perceive their teachers and school administrators to be out of touch. Many leaders outside of education reinforce this trend.

Relying on plagiarism detectors undermines your credibility with students.

A generative AI ban is not a policy or strategy. I read an article the other day that quoted a Superintendent that generative AI was still prohibited in schools. Beyond failing to see the benefits of the policy, I was wondering how he was planning to enforce it. As I read on, I saw he said they would continue using AI plagiarism detectors…If you don’t believe me, perhaps you’ll believe someone else: “In conversations with educational institutions and companies, I have seen leaders try desperately to ensure that AI doesn’t change anything. I believe that not only is this futile, but it also poses its own risks. So let’s talk about it.” Mollick.

Changes in assessment are required. Student output accounts for a large portion of assessment in schools today, and this output is frequently single-artifact output. AI is better at this than most students, and the detectors fail. Schools will have no idea if grades are earned based on output. As the influent Dr. Philippa Hardman notes, "If AI can be prompted to generate written assignments that score higher than average student assignments, where does that leave academic integrity?”

To ensure the integrity of assessments, new assessment measures must be developed quickly. When implemented with intention, quality project-based learning, experiential learning, service learning, work-based learning, and debate all work quite well. And there are less dramatic tasks, such as developing writing standards for when students copilots.

Are you ready to help your teachers adapt? Do you have a plan to provide them with the resources they need?

Content changes will be required in the future. What students must learn is evolving. It is impossible to predict what content students will need to know right now, but we will have better ideas soon. As the school year begins, you should be aware that some of what is taught in at least high school has little value other than teaching students how to learn and providing opportunities for overall human growth and development. As Jim Knight, a former Cabinet minister in the Labour Government and member of the Privy Council and the House of Lords, recently said in the House of Commons, we risk being little more than a vehicle to train children to be outperformed by machines (paraphrasing). Chris Deeds made a similar argument in February.

Have you started thinking about these things? If it’s not your job, whose job is it?

The technology needs to prove but it’s important to start now. I (and those I work with) recognize the current technology has limitations, but it’s improving rapidly, and it is already has widespread use by students on school assignments, often earning them As and “Bs.” Most of the limits you currently see are easy to substantially reduce. While it’s not yet at a stage where you can reliably deploy tutor bots all over your buildings, it can do a lot now and the quality tutor bots will be here soon. The sooner you engage the technology, the more prepared you will be.

What are you waiting for?

It’s going to get hard to keep the kids’ attention. We’ve all learned that social media companies are really good at keeping students’ attention, and bots such as Pi are being built with the sole intention of developing friendships with individuals and keeping their attention. As these technologies make their way into more and more other bots, it will become more and more difficult for teachers to capture students’ attention.

Do you want to leave teachers in this position?

Your next promotion may depend on it. I will try a selfish reason: If you want to get a job or a promotion in the next few years, you should spend some time learning about artificial intelligence in education, especially if your future position requires board approval. Why should you be hired if you do not understand how AI is affecting education? Would you hire yourself over another candidate who is knowledgeable about AI and its role in education?

Are you ready for the next step in your career?

You should help the kids with something they need. 90% of employers want people who understand how to use generative AI correctly. Because only half of high school students attend college and even fewer graduate, you should assist them in developing the most important job skills. 

Equality and equity are critical. Equality is the belief that everyone should be treated equally and have equal opportunities. Equity is based on the notion that many different people require various supports in order to experience equality. Over the last 5-10 years, a lot of time and energy has been invested in education to advance those goals. Failure to act to properly integrate AI into your institution risks undoing any progress made in these efforts, because those with less means have fewer opportunities to learn about AI and your students will live and work in an AI world. Who is taking my AI Literacy course this summer? Students of means. Who is studying prompt engineering? Students in private schools: “Many school systems decided to ban it,” Code.org CEO Hadi Partovi recently told CNN. “In New York City where the public school system has banned it, private schools are teaching AI prompt engineering.” Phillips.

As William Gibson shares, “The future is here. It just isn’t evenly distributed.” You can help evenly distribute it.

Colleges are struggling. Schools outside the top 50 are already facing declining enrollment and students who do not want to incur debt. Without tertiary education innovation, students must incur a lifetime of debt to obtain a job that requires time travel to a previous century. That obviously does not make sense, and the gig is over. A good friend of mine, who worked at a small liberal arts college and gave me my first job opportunity, lost his job due to a lack of enrollment. If necessary, students can learn from bots online (or will be able to do so soon). If necessary, students can learn from bots online (or will be able to do so soon). On the flip side, if your college is struggling and you embrace AI, you can lead it into the future and potentially boost your enrollment.

Will you lead your institution into the future?

Schools are being targeted by corporations. I have made this argument elsewhere, but basically, education is one of the largest sectors of the economy, student performance is struggling across the board (NAEP math and reading scores are declining), and many tech company leaders believe they can educate at least as many students as well or better for a fraction of the cost.

Do you want educational institutions to be controlled by for profit corporations?

This isn’t going away. I’ve made this point elsewhere as well: This isn’t going away, and the impact of these technologies on education will only grow.

Are you continuing to grow?

What Can You Do?

1. Develop your own literacy skills. As A. Benjamin Spencer, Dean of the William & Mary Law School, notes, we “need to understand that the technological side of AI can no longer be simply left to the information technology experts. Regardless of the professional domain, understanding what AI is, how it works, how the underlying code and algorithms are designed, and what assumptions lie behind the computer code are important components to being able to use and consume the products of AI tools appropriately.” AI Literacy is for everyone, and you should take at least a short course. I recommend the AI Bootcamp with me and Dr. Sabba Quidwai. We’ve worked with school CTOs, librarians, teachers and debate coaches to help them prepare for the upcoming academic year. Our next cohort includes principals and professors.

2. Develop faculty and staff skills. At this stage, you should make sure your faculty and staff at least have basic AI literacy and an understanding of how it is going to impact instruction, especially assessment. While their classroom planning and assessment will not change overnight, they can begin to make useful changes armed with knowledge: Teachers will need “pedagogical content knowledge specific to AI,” Daniela Ganelin, a Stanford researcher and doctoral student, told Education Week. They’ll need to understand the technology to fully grasp its potential and applications in the classroom. (Phillips). “(T)eacher training is critical to the success of such initiatives”(Trucano)

   And they might want to know about this Curriculum Learning bot for ESOL educators created by an educator, Aleksandra House.
   
   I tested it out with a simple prompt.

   

3. Encourage the development of long-term skills in the classroom. For decades, employers have emphasised the importance of durable skills, also known as "soft skills," especially as information has become more widely available. Opportunities to develop these skills are even more important in a world that is likely to face disruptions in employment and the increasing integration of AI learning bots into education (Hutson & Ceballos).  An intentional effort to incorporate these skills into instruction will also help reassure faculty of the importance of human teachers in the AI-world.

4. Provide opportunities for students to become AI-literate. I wrote about its importance here, and I’ve developed an AI Literacy course with Dr. Anand Rao that you can license and adapt to your school for immediate use.  

5. All faculty should be required to use AI.  Given the prevalence of AI, it should not be difficult to require all faculty to use it, even if only to get their feet wet. If you encounter strong opposition from some, request they have their students complete a project that highlights the limitations of current AI systems.

6. Hire an AI Director. I made a strong case for this with Dr. Jason Gulya here.

7. Be a leader. If you have read this far, there is a good chance you did so because you are a leader in education. There is no more important decision you will make in your career than how to lead your educational institution in an AI world. 

The future of AI is something we need to shape. Are we going to be the designers of how these systems are used in education, or are we merely the end products?

Again, if you are looking for general advice or help, simply reply to this email. We have programs for school leaders, teachers, and students. We have already started teaching students and working with large school districts on developing programs for integrating AI into their educational institutions, which focus on both the humans and tools :). Our online program is available for licensing, so you don’t have to reinvent the wheel.

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