Estonia Launches ‘AI Leap’ as Global AI Education Initiatives Surge With Major Tech Collaborations, ETEducation
In early November, Microsoft said it would supply artificial intelligence tools and training to more than 200,000 students and educators in the United Arab Emirates.
Days later, a financial services company in Kazakhstan announced an agreement with OpenAI to provide ChatGPT Edu, a service for schools and universities, for 165,000 educators in Kazakhstan. Last month, xAI, Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence company, announced an even bigger project with El Salvador: developing an AI tutoring system, using the company’s Grok chatbot, for more than 1 million students in thousands of schools there.
Fueled partly by American tech companies, governments around the globe are racing to deploy generative AI systems and training in schools and universities.
Some US tech leaders say AI chatbots — which can generate humanlike emails, create class quizzes, analyse data and produce computer code — can be a boon for learning. The tools, they argue, can save teachers time, customise student learning and help prepare young people for an “AI-driven” economy. But the rapid spread of the new AI products could also pose risks to young people’s development and well-being, some children’s and health groups warn.
A recent study from Microsoft and Carnegie Mellon University found that popular AI chatbots may diminish critical thinking. AI bots can produce authoritative-sounding errors and misinformation, and some teachers are grappling with widespread AI-assisted student cheating.
Silicon Valley for years has pushed tech tools like laptops and learning apps into classrooms, with promises of improving education access and revolutionising learning.
Still, a global effort to expand school computer access — a program known as “One Laptop per Child” — did not improve students’ cognitive skills or academic outcomes, according to studies by professors and economists of hundreds of schools in Peru. Now, as some tech boosters make similar education access and fairness arguments for AI, children’s agencies like UNICEF are urging caution and calling for more guidance for schools.
“With One Laptop per Child, the fallouts included wasted expenditure and poor learning outcomes,” Steven Vosloo, a digital policy specialist at UNICEF, wrote in a recent post. “Unguided use of AI systems may actively de-skill students and teachers.” Education systems across the globe are increasingly working with tech companies on AI tools and training programmes. In the United States, where states and school districts typically decide what to teach, some prominent school systems recently introduced popular chatbots for teaching and learning.
In Florida alone, Miami-Dade County Public Schools, the nation’s third-largest school system, rolled out Google’s Gemini chatbot for more than 100,000 high school students. And Broward County Public Schools, the nation’s sixth-biggest school district, introduced Microsoft’s Copilot chatbot for thousands of teachers and staff members.
Outside the United States, Microsoft in June announced a partnership with the Ministry of Education in Thailand to provide free online AI skills lessons for hundreds of thousands of students. Several months later, Microsoft said it would also provide AI training for 150,000 teachers in Thailand. OpenAI has pledged to make ChatGPT available to teachers in government schools across India.
The Baltic nation of Estonia is trying a different approach, with a broad new national AI education initiative called “AI Leap.”
The program was prompted partly by a recent poll showing that more than 90 per cent of the nation’s high schoolers were already using popular chatbots like ChatGPT for schoolwork, leading to worries that some students were beginning to delegate school assignments to AI.
Estonia then pressed US tech giants to adapt their AI to local educational needs and priorities. Researchers at the University of Tartu worked with OpenAI to modify the company’s Estonian-language service for schools so it would respond to students’ queries with questions rather than produce direct answers.
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