Since its launch May 15, aiEDU Studios has posted four episodes — two the first day, one last week and one today — covering philanthropy, data literacy, scientific innovation, AI at school and more. Kotran said in a public statement that these podcasts, which run between one and two hours, allow for necessary depth on these complex topics, contributing to aiEDU’s mission of advancing AI readiness in education.
“Our space has spent the last two years talking about AI, and after participating in literally hundreds of conferences and conventions on the topic we realized that discussion is mired in generalities and talking points,” Kotran said. “We launched aiEDU Studios to push for more opportunities to go deeper than a 40-minute panel or a 12-minute spark talk. We want experts in true long-form discussions that enable us to dig deep into the most important topics in AI and education.”
For example, Kumar Garg, president of Renaissance Philanthropy and a senior adviser in the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy from 2010 to 2017, said there is a lot of discussion around AI’s capabilities, but less focus on what implementation looks like.
“Who’s actually taking the capability and then running all the experiments that then use that capability on something that really matters?” Garg said in one of the first episodes of the podcast. “Are there ways you could build extensions of these tools that could actually allow hundreds of mathematicians to work together on the problem? Those are not necessarily commercial ideas … but from a public and social goods [standpoint], if you can make working mathematicians more productive and they could solve the underlying theorems that then power the Internet, it’d be a big deal.”
Other guests discussed the particulars of AI implementation at school. In an episode last week, aiEDU Director of Learning Khushali Narechania said an assignment asking students to critique AI-generated text using course concepts might not be as AI-proof as it seems. While such an assignment assumes students will use AI and gets ahead of it a bit, it misses that students can upload course materials and instruct AI models to do the critique as well. Instead, using an example of how ChatGPT might help students hone a marketing campaign, she recommended bringing in collaboration and discussion.
“Have ChatGPT write your campaign. Now, you actually have to take it out to three or four different people. Have them read it. ‘Did it resonate in the way that you thought it would?’ Have some sort of dialog or interaction with other people outside the class or even within the class. Or bring it to class live. 'We're going to look at it together. Where do we see it meeting the criteria that we've talked about in class?'" Narechania said in the podcast. “In both of those things, I think it's thinking about, what's the human connection back to this? How are we bringing other people in? How are we talking about this together instead of it continuing to be an individual assignment?”
According to a recent news release, the aim of the podcast is to support aiEDU’s work building AI readiness in education through curriculum, strategic guidance and professional development. The release said aiEDU has trained 10,000 teachers and reached approximately 230,000 students across all 50 states.
Full episodes of the podcast are available for free on major podcast platforms including YouTube, Spotify and Apple Podcasts. Shorter clips are on social platforms such as LinkedIn.
