If a high-school student in NSW asked the education department’s new generative AI tool to write an essay on Shakespeare’s use of comedy, it would respond like a teacher and encourage the student to do the thinking. “Let’s work through that problem,” the tool might say, “who are the characters, what are the themes, how do you think they relate?” After months of worldwide hysteria about a potential surge in cheating following the November 2022 launch of the OpenAI’s generative AI chatbot ChatGPT, the NSW education department has rolled out a genAI tool – NSWEduChat – which can be used by teachers and students.
Martin Graham, the NSW education department’s deputy secretary of teaching, learning and student well-being, says NSW students from years 5 to 12 can use the student version of the NSWEduChat tool for feedback, for help with lessons, and to learn how genAI operates. But it won’t do their homework for them.
A finalist in the Productivity and Efficiency category of the Australian Financial Review’s AI Awards, the NSWEduChat tool was developed to assist teachers with both teaching and administrative work, as well as providing both teachers and students a safe way to learn about the massive scope and power of generative AI, a tool which is already making inroads in nearly every type of enterprise around the world.
Teachers appreciate the assistance offered by NSWEduChat: the reception has been “unbelievably positive”, Graham says. “We gave them a safe tool, but we didn’t tell them exactly what to do with it,” he says, adding the department wanted to give teachers’ agency in the use of the AI tool. “So we’re all exploring this together.”
NSWEduChat is a gateway for exploration of an important new frontier of artificial intelligence, he adds. As well as providing lesson assistance, the genAI tool can be used to help with the basic administrative tasks that absorb so much teacher time. “They’ve got master’s degrees,” he says. “We want them to use that knowledge in the classroom. But they are writing round robin competition formats, trying to work out how to get different sports teams to play each other the right number of times.”
When ChatGPT was launched, and rapidly followed by other genAI tools, there was no safe way for NSW teachers to use it as a professional tool without breaching privacy rules and possibly compromising student data, Graham says. “So we developed the EduChat tool so that teachers could use it, could explore it, and could get into the world of AI, but in a safe way that wasn’t risking any student data,” he adds.
To accompany the NSWEduChat tool, the education department has provided professional learning for teachers to assist with the basics of how AI works, its limitations and its biases, he says.
“Teachers might struggle with 30 kids, sometimes in multi-age classes,” he adds. “A small school out in the bush might have a class with kids from year 2 to year 6.” The EduChat tool can help frame a lesson for groups of students with differing ages and abilities so they can all learn at their own pace.
The AI tool was built in-house by the education department, with Microsoft providing the “back-end”, Graham says. It includes NSW education curricula and policies, it uses Australian spelling, and it has been crafted to ensure students can’t use it to do their work for them. The South Australian department of education has also developed a genAI tool in conjunction with Microsoft.
NSW teachers can also use the NSWEduChat tool for assistance with “rubrics”, Graham says, which are ways of assessing students’ skills at different levels. It’s easy for a teacher to ask the tool for, say, five different questions about the role of women in Shakespeare’s comedies. The teacher can then look through the suggestions and find one that relates to previous lessons. Or reframe the prompt and ask again.
Students can use the genAI tool for general information, for advice on how to structure an essay or suggestions for different ways to consider topic questions. It will provide them with an understanding of the power and limitations of AI.
“When students are using it, they’ve got to be aware that genAI may be providing a plausible answer, but that might not be actually right,” Graham says. “So it’s providing all those basics: it’s really giving them that kind of sandbox to work in.”