What “Licensing” AI Interactions for Students Means at Innovation

I think we are all still finding our way in using AI in education. Recent surveys show many students and teachers are using AI. Consistent with what we have seen in previous technological changes that become adopted into education, they must be adapted from their design origins in the adult workplace. That adaptation is what Innovation intends to enable. 

In earlier posts, I described the importance of “guardrails” in 21st century learning spaces for students. Adults who depend on a digital workspace are largely self-directed. They shut off notifications that distract. They focus their attention on completing the at hand. They manage digital resources and devices so as to keep them working smoothly (limit the number of tabs open in a browser and keep them working smoothly keyboard clean). Students, even older high school students, possess fewer of these self-disciplines. Youngsters are by nature more slaves to their impulses than many adults, so incorporating AI in the classroom should include the kinds of externally-imposed guardrails analogous to those we imposed in our classrooms in real space. 

There is a growing number of AI integrations at Innovation that allow students to interact with AI in their lessons here. For one, there is the chat feature where students can discuss a topic and even practice another language with the AI. This offers an opportunity for practice that includes important guardrails. The principal one is the “license”. 

At Innovation, any application where AI faces students is designed with limits selected by the teacher in advance. This is the license. 

Firstly, the license limits the number of interactions between the student and the AI on that particular task. This will pose an obstacle to wandering off topic or incurring unnecessary costs (since AI interactions are metered in subscriptions to the service). In the chat application and in the asynchronous discussion app, students are reminded at the start that there is a particular objective to be met within a certain number of turns at conversation. With practice, this should keep most students on task and avoid conversations to nowhere. 

Secondly, the teacher sets the AI’s reply style when creating licenses for students on an application. Settings include age level of the students, the attitude of the replies (scholarly debater? Challenging devil’s advocate? Chatty dialogue partner?) and for language learners the difficulty level of the chat on the CEFR scale (A1, B2, etc). The AI can help keep the student on track and offer suggestions for improved student contributions. 

Now, you could log in to ChatGPT and have students type all these guidelines into the prompt field and then engage in the educational exercise, but the impracticality of that is obvious. 

Besides the license configuration, two additional guardrails at Innovation are that all interactions are recorded and all are set up to be evaluated. This gives teachers important supervisory powers. They can see what the student said to AI and evaluate the effectiveness of the interaction. 

AI integrations at Innovation extend beyond synchronous chat and asynchronous discussion forums. The grammar application, for example, also offers AI licenses. 

The grammar application is designed to help students learn grammatical structures in another language. It presents cues of various kinds such as incomplete sentences or short structures to conjugate or decline. There is an AI integration that teachers can license such that the AI gives advice on the answers, such as hints at correcting mistakes or praise for correct responses. Like with chat and discussion, teachers set the number of interactions and the style of the reply in advance. Interactions are recorded; responses are set up for evaluation. 

Adopting AI in education means adapting the technology to the educational context. It must account for maturity level, for targeted skills, and work within boundaries of the current unit or module’s content objectives. The “licensing” concept at Innovation is an important part of that adaptation. If you are not a subscriber, why not sign up for our 60-day free trial?