Anthropic
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ZDNET’s key takeaways
- Students and teachers can now try Anthropic’s three new free AI courses.
- Anthropic also appointed a Higher Education Advisory Board.
- The industry at large is investing in making AI accessible to students.
This year’s back-to-school season nearly guarantees a new classmate: AI. Some form of the tech is now baked into most products — it’s more ubiquitous than ever. Anthropic’s new education initiative seeks to help people, students, and educators embrace it.
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Users can now access three new AI Fluency courses, co-created with educators, that help build “responsible AI skills” for teachers and students, Anthropic announced Thursday. The courses are free to access and available under a Creative Commons license, enabling any institution to adapt them.
This comes at a time when knowing how to use AI is becoming an increasingly in-demand skill. A LinkedIn study showed that employers would prefer to hire people who are comfortable using AI tools rather than someone with more years of relevant experience but less confidence using AI.
AI Fluency courses
The new courses — AI Fluency for Educators, AI Fluency for Students, and Teaching AI Fluency — build on Anthropic’s existing free AI Fluency course, but are geared toward university needs, which Anthropic identifies as “practical frameworks for thoughtful AI integration.”
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The AI Fluency for Educators course is meant to help teachers integrate AI into their teaching, whether that be helping create materials or enhancing in-class discussions, according to Anthropic. On the other hand, the AI Fluency for Students course helps students learn how to collaborate with AI on their coursework responsibly in a way that still develops their own skills — a similar framing to Anthropic’s tailored Claude for Education chatbot. Lastly, the Teaching AI Fluency course is meant to help educators learn how to teach their students AI literacy.
All of the courses are free to access, include a certificate of completion, and range from four to seven videos. The course lengths are meant to be digestible, too, lasting between 25 and 35 minutes. This release comes after Anthropic launched a new Learning Mode, available to everyone in its Claude.ai chatbot and Claude Code, also meant to encourage active collaboration with AI instead of having it just output answers.
In the Claude chatbot, the Learning Mode helps people in the chatbot arrive at the answer they are seeking through guided questions, mimicking the Socratic method. While in Claude Code, the Explanatory learning mode makes Claude explain how it arrived at the conclusion, while the Learning Mode leaves fill-in-the-blanks for a collaborative coding process.
An education-focused advisory board
Anthropic also appointed a Higher Education Advisory Board comprised of academic leaders to help shape how Claude serves higher education. The board is chaired by Rick Levin, whose experiences include leading Yale University for 20 years and spending ten years at Coursera, three as CEO.
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“Our role is to advise the company as it develops ethically sound policies and products that will enable learners, teachers, and administrators to benefit from AI’s transformative potential while upholding the highest standards of academic integrity and protecting student privacy,” said Levin in a blog post.
The advisory board, also comprised of five other experts, helped develop the three new courses above.
The bigger picture
Anthropic’s efforts in the education space are part of a wider industry push to make AI more helpful and readily accessible to students.
OpenAI just recently created its own Study Mode for ChatGPT, which, like Anthropic’s, pivots from providing answers to working with the user to arrive at a conclusion. Meanwhile, Google is encouraging students to try AI tools by making its $20 per month AI Pro plan, which includes all of the best of Google’s AI suite of tools, free to college students.
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Google also committed over $1 billion to funding more free Google AI Training programs in the next three years and launched a new Google AI for Education Accelerator, an initiative that Google said “will offer free AI training, Google Career Certificates, and Google’s most advanced AI tools to every college student in America for free.”
Despite these efforts, the ROI on using AI in education is yet to be seen. While some benefits, such as having access to a personalized tutor 24/7, are clear, the impacts of having tools readily accessible that facilitate cheating and diminish critical thinking skills are also being tracked.
