Campus Technology Insider Podcast July 2024
Listen: New ED Guidelines for Designing Trustworthy AI Tools in Education
Rhea Kelly 00:08
Hello and welcome to the Campus Technology Insider podcast. I'm Rhea Kelly, editor in chief of Campus Technology, and your host.
The United States Department of Education recently released a new report called "Designing for Education with Artificial Intelligence: An Essential Guide for Developers." The guide seeks to inform ed tech developers as they create AI products and services for use in education — and help them work toward AI safety, security, and trust. For this episode of the podcast, I spoke with Kevin Johnstun, education program specialist in ED's Office of Educational Technology, about the ins and outs of the report and what it means for education institutions. Here's our chat.
Hi Kevin, welcome to the podcast.
Kevin Johnstun 01:00
Thanks for having me.
Rhea Kelly 01:02
So to start off, I thought the best thing to do would be to have you introduce yourself and your role at the Department of Education.
Kevin Johnstun 01:08
Yeah, happy to. So I'm Kevin Johnston. I have been with the department for about five years, and I work in our Office of Educational Technology, which is kind of a cool shop in the department because we get to write reports about the future of teaching and learning. And so right now, I am now co-leading our AI team, which means I get to spend all day, every day reading and writing about AI, which is a lot of fun.
Rhea Kelly 01:39
Yeah, I actually feel like I also spend all day reading and writing about AI. So the ED recently came out with a report called Designing for Education with Artificial Intelligence. Could you provide kind of a top-level overview of the guide, kind of what it's all about, what it's for, anything like that?
Kevin Johnstun 01:58
Yeah, very happy to. So we're very excited about this report. We think it really speaks to a core constituency and a core issue right now, which is, obviously a lot of people are really excited about AI. And they're trying to figure out how they can use it to improve their products, they're trying to figure out how they can use it to enhance education opportunity, right? And so we're obviously picking up on that, and we wanted to write a report that would help guide developers in: What does it mean to channel that excitement into responsible innovation, into edtech products that are, you know, embody the values that we have in an education system, and still use this cutting-edge technology? When we envisioned our kind of core audience here, we were really thinking about people who were managing product development teams. So that could be the CEO of a small business who has like one product that they're trying to bring to market, or it could be a product manager in a much larger firm who's working with a development team. We really wanted to write in a way that they could, like, see the recommendations and see them as kind of the big rocks that they needed to build into their design and development process and help their team kind of conceptualize around that.
Rhea Kelly 03:17
I know that a few years ago, the Department of Education had a first report that was sort of an overview of all things AI in education. So how does this build on that guide?
Kevin Johnstun 03:28
Yeah, thanks for asking. I mean, so that report, it was so funny. It came out May of 2023, and people were like, "Whoa, this is so timely. How did the department come up with this so quickly?" And the answer is, we started about four years earlier. And so the department had been tracking AI in education, you know, for a long time, and we had been, you know, thinking about it and writing about it. And what the, that report was, was really to think about all the, going back, you know, all the way back to, like, the 1960s, 1980s, of like seeing AI in terms of automated decision-making make its way into the classroom, and then tracing that all the way up to the present moment. Had several kind of core recommendations. And so what this is, is kind of saying, like, hey, we had that, and it's like, traces all this history and helps people really situate themselves. Now let's center ourselves in this moment and say, how do we move forward in a responsible way? So that AI report had a kind of central metaphor that was like, AI should be an electric bicycle and not a robot vacuum. Which is, this should help you do what you want to do faster and better, and, you know, more efficiently, but with you completely in the driver's seat all the way. And so with the tech developers guide, we're saying, not only should it be an electric bicycle, it should be a safe one, and one that people have insurance, assurances about the quality, and that, you know, applies for local road laws, and things like that. And so we're really trying to help push that metaphor a little further for people and say, how do we do this the right way?