One of the earliest concerns about ChatGPT is that it would be used by students to write their homework for them. Despite this, OpenAI has just announced the ChatGPT Edu for the new school year, which it says is both affordable and responsible and promises to work to the benefit of students, faculty, researchers, and campus operations.
ChatGPT Edu will be powered by the latest GPT-4o language model, which came out in May. This means users will be able to input images as well as text for the AI to work on. The Edu offering also includes enterprise-level security and controls.
Despite what you see on the news about universities being very hostile to ChatGPT, OpenAI says that many leading universities already use ChatGPT successfully with ChatGPT Enterprise; the universities include 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.
Some ways that universities are already using AI include personalised tutoring for students and reviewing their resumes to help them get job placements, helping researchers write grant applications, and helping faculty grade students" work and generate feedback.
One example OpenAI gave about how AI is used is how Professor Ethan Mollick’s courses taken by undergraduates and MBA students at Wharton utilise ChatGPT during the final reflection assignments. The students discuss with a GPT trained on course materials what they’ve learned, which helps them think more deeply.
Highlighting the features of ChatGPT Edu, OpenAI says it includes:
- Access to GPT-4o, our 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 1, and GPT management
- Conversations and data are not used to train OpenAI models
OpenAI didn’t mention the exact pricing for ChatGPT Edu. Instead, it said that learning centres that want to use it can contact its team to learn more.
While many readers will be familiar with use cases of ChatGPT where students use commands such as “write an essay about so and so,” which are detrimental to their education, generative AI tools can also help you learn. For example, you can say, “give me a lesson plan on such and such a topic that takes 20 minutes to complete,” then it will give you a plan to get started with for self-learning, and if you want it to elaborate on anything or have any questions, you just ask. Used like this, these tools are incredibly powerful educational tools.
Source: OpenAI