- Anthropic has launched an AI assistant for colleges called Claude for Education.
- The new AI aims to help students, faculty and administrators with everything from guidance to political summary.
- The new state of learning offers socratic questioning instead of just answering questions.
Anthropic has a new version of his AI assistant Claude aimed at the world of higher education. The new Claude for Education Model offers universities a way to embed a less disturbing version of AI in classrooms and offices.
Claude for Education is designed to help students with their studies without just doing it for them and to help the faculty adapt their curricula. Although Claude, like any other AI -Chatbot, could write a paper that a student might be trying to get off as their own, Claude for Education is trying to tackle this problem with the new learning state. Claude switches from just answering questions to answering with his own questions in a nod to the Socratic teaching method.
Ask for the answer and Claude may instead ask for ways of thinking about the problem or what evidence can support a thesis. Presumably, it would answer a question about the air velocity of a nonsense swallow by asking which subspecies the swallow belongs to. It can also make a study guide based on materials you upload. It is essentially also a feature of Google’s notebooklm, but has obvious utility in college. You can see how it works below.
Claude College
Anthropic wants students to consider AI less of a homework machine and more of a thoughtful TA. Since more than a quarter of Teensuse Chatgpt alone for homework, it is a problem that needs to be solved. No one wants to create a generation of students who just copy AI output to their essays.
And some schools react. Northastern University has signed as Anthropics first official “Design Partner”, offering Claude access to 50,000 students, faculties and staff across its 13 campuses. Champlain College and London School of Economics and Political Science are also among the first adopters.
Openai has his own educational -focused tools, and CEO Sam Altman even announced that Chatgpt Plus would be free for college students through May. Claude’s approach is more focused, as is the agreement Openai made with Arizona State University to incorporate its AI at school.
Anthropic is looking to expand Claude’s adoption in schools through his new Claude Campus Ambassadors program, which makes students work with the company in rolling out educational initiatives. They also offer API credits to students who want to build cool projects using Claude.
Of course, the real test is not how many students use Claude, but how they use it. Because as much as I love the idea that AI makes life easier for students and professors, there is a line between using tech to learn and using it to dodge learning completely. And that line is, yes, the blur. It will be necessary to continue to see how these tools are used and whether they actually help students learn in meaningful, human ways.
