In just a short while, the Formative platform will debut its partnership with ChatGPT in the form of exciting new AI integrations. However, given the many controversies that have emerged over the role of artificial intelligence in education, we interviewed Formative’s Director of Product Carlo Schmidt for a far-ranging conversation on using AI, minimizing the risk of bias in AI Chat Bots, and making sure AIs always work to support educators.
This excerpt has been edited and condensed for length and clarity.
Formative Team: What are the first forward-facing AI Integrations that Formative users are going to see?
Carlo Schmidt: Our first foray into AI was doing AI-generated hints for questions. We did that because even without the AI, that’s a massive value-add for our teachers. Teachers have wanted to be able to provide hints to students so they can try to figure out the problem if they’re struggling. When we saw that AI existed, we were like, “Maybe we can deliver hints in a way that teachers can create them easily and use AI to generate them?”
The second foray we’ve taken is, how can we use AI to help the teachers to generate content for their classroom? A lot of teachers get their content from the curriculum, and a lot of times, they’re just coming up with stuff themselves on the fly to try to assess students on particular concepts. We thought the next logical step into AI and helping folks to save time would be letting them generate questions based off topics or standards or really whatever they want. Our teachers that use Formative spend an inordinate amount of time on that edit page. They’re creating from scratch or they’re transferring [content] from paper. This is one way that we can start to chip away at that time and give [it] back to teachers by using AI itself.
To read more from Carlo’s interview, visit Formative for an extended presentation of this exciting conversation.
