Urge OPEN AI to develop a specific Education Department . .

Obviously, Open AI has sounded the alarms in education, demonstrating the creative power of this tool. NYC has already banned ChatGPT. The school systems are in danger of outlawing, rather than embracing the incredible use cases that could help our students learn at a much faster and more enjoyable rate than they do now. As a former national Educator Leader of Year, I left teaching because of the insane restrictions so many of the schools were putting on technology and the endless approvals you needed to get to do anything outside the box. Now, after being out of the field for 8 years and having become a entrepreneur and I feel I am being called back into education to make sure they don’t mess this tremendous opportunity up. I would think, in fact, I guess I just assumed that OpenAI had a whole division exclusively devoted to education and it’s use there-in, much like Apple embedded itself in education by putting their computers in so many schools.

Perhaps, OpenAI has a dedicated Education division, but if not, I would like this post to serve as a call to Sam Altman and the rest of the OpenAI leadership team, to immediately put together an education task force that will be the educators of the educators for how best to implement this tool in the classroom. The potential is limitless given the creativity that each teacher can bring to the table and the power of AI’s personalization.

Please comment if you think OpenAI should dedicate one division of it’s company or at least a few key team members solely devoted to educating the educators about the enormous potential of embedding this technology in the public school system to help bring a more equitable playing field for all students of every age.

I’ve decided to start my own micro-school called UrSchoolsFuture and am doing so to attempt to provide a pilot program that demonstrates the effectiveness of using OPEN AI for and with students in the classroom. That would be spectacular, but think of how much more impact just a few key members of an OpenAI Education team could have on all of education.

Let me know what you think.

Peace,

Brian

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I am a high school computer science teacher, and I get all of my learning resources from the software companies that we use. Unity, Microsoft, Adobe, Meta, Autodesk, etc., all have education departments that produce materials to help teachers build courses to teach students how to use their products. Not only is this normal for tech companies, but it is very difficult to build a course without these resources.

I attended GDC this year, and company executives lobbied me relentlessly once they learned I was an educator. All the big companies are trying to find educators to collaborate with because not enough people are getting the computer science education that these companies need. In the very near future, the need for people with skills in machine learning and AGI is going to grow exponentially. There is already a shortage of computer scientists, so there is not much to tap into from related industries.

This technology needs to be accessible to high school students now because it is going to be very important by the time they graduate. Even if Open AI does not have the talent to spare (maybe they are all super busy), they could put a call out for educators who would be willing to partner with them to build some educational materials. I would jump at the opportunity, and I am sure many other educators would as well.

I imagine this is even more essential in post-secondary institutions. If the CS students are not learning this stuff, their education will be obsolete when they get their degree.

Right now, chatGPT is very popular among young people and has the potential to get a lot more students interested in computer science while it is new and trendy. Wouldn’t it be great if OpenAI had resources available to us so we could start the next school year with this emerging and important technology written into our lesson plans?

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