Parents are opting their children out of school-issued laptops and are asking teachers to return to pen and paper. In a recent report, families described a growing discomfort with this digital imperative in education. Importantly, this is less about the logistical aspects of technology and more about something universal: Control. These instincts seem reasonable. Screens distract, and artificial intelligence hovers over homework like an invisible, or worse, a co-conspirator in cheating.
Whenever I made my initial rounds at a school, a quick peek at its technological resources was often a reliable predictor of its ability to meet students' broad needs. The differences in the quality and volume of computing labs at a school like Lincoln Park High School on Chicago's wealthy north side, where the local population is 75% white, versus Raby High School, located in economically distressed East Garfield Park which is 83% Black, were stark.
Designed for a comparative literature course on medieval and Renaissance-era writing and announced by UCLA at the end of 2024, the digital textbook was immediately met with widespread mockery and derision from educators. Its AI-generated cover was riddled with incomprehensible text - "Of Nerniacular Latin To An Evoolitun On Nance Langusages," for example - and featured generic visuals that had little to do with the period it was supposedly covering. At the time, Elizabeth Landers, a grad student who helped put together the volume, said that the errors "aren't a failure of AI." Instead, she argued, "they're an intentional artistic choice that prompts students to question their assumptions about language, meaning and historical truth."
Each class begins with several minutes of journaling in notebooks, and nearly all assignments must be handwritten and physically turned in. "If you walk into almost any one of my classes today, you will see that all of my students are handwriting," Bond says, "and they are journaling, and they are constantly and consistently doing everything with a pen or a pencil."
When students began using ChatGPT for homework in late 2022, chatbots were widely seen as cheating tools to be banned or blocked. Now, across K-12 and higher education, that resistance is giving way to a broader acceptance that AI is here to stay - and that avoiding it could leave students unprepared for what comes next. That shift has created an opportunity the tech giants are racing to seize.
Done! Finished! One might expect to hear such exclamations from exultant college students, relieved or ready to rejoice upon polishing off their latest essay assignment. Instead, these are the words I hear with increasing frequency from fellow professors who have come to think that the out-of-class essay itself is now done. It's an antiquated assignment, some say. An outmoded form of pedagogy. A forlorn fossil of the Writing Age, a new coinage that seems all too ready to consign writing instruction to extinction.
To counter that, he revived oral exams and enlisted an AI agent to administer them at scale, in an attempt to "fight fire with fire." "We need assessments that evolve toward formats that reward understanding, decision-making, and real-time reasoning," Ipeirotis said. "Oral exams used to be standard until they could not scale," he added. "Now, AI is making them scalable again." In the blog post detailing the experiment, Ipeirotis said he and his colleague built the AI examiner using ElevenLabs' conversational speech technology.
In today's competitive higher education landscape, universities and academic publishers must uphold content credibility and trust. As the global eLearning market is projected to reach $840.11 billion by 2030, the demand for robust QA services in education is rapidly increasing. The rise of digital learning and AI tools has introduced new challenges to maintaining academic integrity. According to the International Center for Academic Integrity, 65-75% of undergraduates admit to cheating at least once, while 62% have cheated on written assignments.
Artificial intelligence is fundamentally reshaping countless industries; education is no exception. As AI tools rapidly enter classrooms, there are concerns about fair access, effective implementation, and the risk of widening the still persistent digital divide. Who are the players best positioned to guide this transition in a way that truly benefits every student? I recently spoke with Alix Guerrier, CEO of DonorsChoose, an education nonprofit where teachers submit funding requests based on classroom needs.
As AI becomes integral to modern learning, these platforms are now expected to deliver predictive insights, automated workflows, and highly personalized learning experiences. Yet many providers still operate legacy LMS systems, unable to support modern workloads or data-intensive features. These platforms are rigid, costly to maintain, and slow to update. Release cycles can often stretch into quarterly or annual updates, creating a widening gap between user expectations and the platform's capabilities.
It includes the potential for a new AI system, Gemini for Government, which the government hopes will cut bureaucracy, automate routine tasks and free up civil servants to focus on improving services for people. Through the partnership, Google DeepMind said its existing cutting-edge AI models will be made available to UK scientists. These include tools like AlphaGenome, which uses AI to sequence strands of DNA and spot potential weaknesses; and AI Co-scientist, supporting researchers to generate new theories and research proposals.
Ask any instructor what helps students learn, and it's unlikely any of them will answer "a really big wall of text". It's incredible to me, as both a university instructor and a UX designer, that the army of people working at OpenAI are not imagining better tools for our students. I want to walk you through a design pattern in ChatGPT that, despite its good intentions, might be creating unintended hurdles for students.
SAN FRANCISCO (KGO) -- Colin Kaepernick is launching a new AI platform to help boost student literacy. "It can help ask questions to get those ideas to come to life for you to explore areas that you don't know, to explore and one of the things that we often talk about is - we don't know what we don't know," Kaepernick said. The AI tool called "Lumi" is designed to help students create and publish stories while building reading skills.
The U.S. workforce is facing a pivotal challenge: A widening skills gap that threatens economic growth and innovation. While demographic trends-like declining birth rates and a shrinking pipeline of young workers-are real, the more actionable issue is the growing mismatch between the skills employers need and those available in the labor market.
Every student at the school has access to Perplexity Pro, and she's tapped ChatGPT as well, even creating a custom GPT for building negotiation skills that she continues to tweak and improve. "I want my students to think about how these tools can help them to prepare for a negotiation, how they can help them practice their negotiations, and how they can support them when they're stuck in negotiations," she said. "It could be for that bigger moment, but a lot of times, it's all the steps leading up to it."
When Steven Mintz, a history professor at the University of Texas at Austin, opened 400 essays from his students, he noticed something uncanny. The sentences were the same. The structure was the same. Even the conclusions matched. In a LinkedIn post, Mintz said this wasn't a cheating crisis but a pedagogy crisis. For years, he said, universities have operated like factories: mass lectures, standardized prompts, and rubric-driven grading handled by what he described as overworked teaching assistants.
While AI tutors can provide personalized feedback, they cannot yet replicate what human tutors do best: connect, empathize, and build trust. AI can simulate dialogue, but it lacks emotional understanding. Human tutors perceive tone, hesitation, and body language, nonverbal cues that reveal engagement and comprehension. They also navigate ethical and cultural complexities, exercising moral judgment that AI simply doesn't possess.
Gajilan, who has worked at Reuters for more than 14 years and was then digital news director, had been reading about artificial intelligence and custom GPTstailored AI models that users could configure for specific tasks. After confirming her data would be private, she fed one of the models Tobey's report cards, neuropsychological evaluations and individualized education programs for his dyslexia. She also gave it his interests: dragons from the book series Wings of Fire, battles with Nerf guns, a song or two from Hamilton.
Not long ago, the idea of computers understanding how students feel or think sounded like science fiction, but today, it is becoming a reality. This is called neuroadaptive learning, and it's basically a combination of education, neuroscience, and AI. This approach allows learning systems to adapt in real time based on what's happening in a student's brain, creating a personalized and responsive experience.
Research released this month suggests that AI has become fully embedded in how students respond to homework and other assignments. The percentage of high school students who report using generative AI for schoolwork is growing, increasing from an already high 79% to 84% between January and May of this year, according to surveys conducted by College Board, the nonprofit that manages much of the nation's standardized tests, including the SAT.
I'm pretty sure that two generations ago, they would have been more like I was: always with their nose in some volume, looking up only to cross the street or to guide a fork on their plates. But today, even in our book-crammed home, where their father is often in a cozy reading chair, their eyes are more likely to be glued to a screen.
Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) are the most useful technologies, which are reshaping online learning today. From course suggestions based on the learner's previous coursework to tutoring systems that use AI capabilities, these technologies can build a smarter, data-driven learning experience that adapts to the pace and learning approach of every student. AI in eLearning isn't just about automating actions; it's about providing personalized learning paths that foster engagement, improve the retention of content.
In the late 1990s, a group of commuters would board the early-morning Amtrak train from Philadelphia to Washington, D.C. They'd sit in the first car behind the locomotive, enjoying communal, consensual silence. Eventually and with the conductor's help, their car was officially designated as a noise-free zone. Soon after, Denise LaBencki-Fullmer, an Amtrak manager, recognized the value of a peaceful ride and institutionalized the program as the quiet car. At the request of passengers, it soon spread to a number of other commuter services.
Alpha School San Francisco, which opened its doors to K-8 students this fall, is the newest outpost of a network of 14 nationwide private schools. Its learning model entails just two hours of focused academic work per day, during which the school says students can learn twice as fast as their counterparts in traditional schools with the help of artificial intelligence.
With more than a decade of experience working as a design and tech analyst, Andrew Hogan is all in on the efficiency and ease that tech brings to our lives. But lately at home with his daughters (ages 4 and 18 months), Hogan is grappling with something unwieldy and undefined: how parents, kids, and technology interact, from smartphones to screen time to AI.
A new report from Oxford University Press, which surveyed 2,000 UK students ages 13 to 18 in August, found that eight in 10 of the teenagers interviewed use AI tools for their schoolwork, and nearly as many turn to them for homework help. Many students said these tools are helping them "think faster" and "solve difficult questions," but experts warn that this new fluency may come at a cost.
