Cengage describes its take on bringing AI to market while dealing with copyright questions. Also, new grants back statewide skills experiments, and a bipartisan bill on short-term Pell emerges, with one on WIOA possibly following.
Surveys from the Cengage Group, which offers educational content and technology, have found substantial interest in AI tools across higher education.
Many faculty members plan to use generative AI to automate administrative tasks, allowing them to focus more on teaching and engaging with students, says Jim Chilton, Cengage’s executive vice president and chief technology officer. Likewise, 85% of students were excited to test out the company’s AI student assistant.
But the two groups also have shared worries about the technology.
“Both students and faculty have concerns around privacy, plagiarism, ethical use, and accuracy,” Chilton says, “with students primarily focused on immediate privacy concerns and faculty most concerned about student data usage and access to conversation history.”
Cengage is focused on exploring ways that AI can enhance classroom instruction and help personalize the learning experience for students. Along with the wide range of efforts to make that happen, the company created an AI Center of Excellence to guide its strategy and product development.
Copyright Worries: AI poses serious challenges to copyright law, which is particularly important for the publishing and entertainment industries.
Chilton says Cengage is working to determine a holistic and long-term approach to the copyright issue, which includes:
Creating an architecture within its AI engine to ensure that the content Cengage uses is novel and unique to the company.
The development of a framework with six dimensions to determine if the content meets criteria for usage before feeding it to the AI engine.
Actively scanning the ecosystem to identify those who don’t respect copyright and determining how to handle those instances in the future.
The company also is pursuing several patents. “We believe that we have developed an organizational structure that is unique in the market,” Chilton says.
