California State University on Tuesday unveiled what is believed to be among the largest and most ambitious efforts in higher education to champion artificial intelligence with an initiative to provide tools and training in the groundbreaking technology across the system's 23 campuses. With generative AI's ability to create new content learned from training data, CSU is working to ensure students in the nation's largest and most diverse public university system have equitable access to the technology. Nearly half of CSU's 450,000 students are low-income and about 30% are the first in their families to attend college. The university has enlisted Gov. Gavin Newsom's office and nearly a dozen leading tech companies -- including Microsoft, Meta, Nvidia, OpenAI, Intel, LinkedIn, Amazon Web Services and Alphabet -- to join academics on an advisory board to help identify AI skills needed in the California workforce and provide advice on how best to teach them. Industry partners will also provide internships and apprenticeships to give students real-world experience with AI on the job.

As artificial intelligence systems play a bigger role in everyday life, they're changing the world of education, too. Here are four ways I believe these kinds of systems can be used to help students learn. Teachers are taught to identify the learning goals of all students in a class and adapt instruction for the specific needs of individual students. An AI system can observe how a student proceeds through an assigned task, how much time they take and whether they are successful. If the student is struggling, the system can offer help; if the student is succeeding, the system can present more difficult tasks to keep the activity challenging.

This series is about the future of testing in America's schools. Part one of the series presents a theory of action that assessments should play in schools. Part two--this issue brief--reviews advancements in technology, with a focus on artificial intelligence that can powerfully drive learning in real time. And the third part looks at assessment designs that can improve large-scale standardized tests. Despite the often-negative discussion about testing in schools, assessments are a necessary and useful tool in the teaching and learning process.1

My current research trajectory centers on what I call learning programming at scale. Decades of prior research have worked to improve how computer programming is taught in traditional K–12 and university classrooms, but the vast majority of people around the world--children in low-income areas, working adults with full-time jobs, the fast-growing population of older adults, and millions in developing countries--do not have access to high-quality classroom learning environments. Thus, the central question that drives my research is: How can we better understand the millions of people from diverse backgrounds who are now learning programming online and then design scalable software to support their learning goals? One critical prerequisite for improving how programming is taught is to understand why and how people are currently learning and what obstacles they face. To work toward this goal, I have been studying traditionally under-represented learner populations and non-traditional learning environments.

Pokémon Go is a very popular game with kids and now it could become a learning tool. The game, which incentivizes players to get up and about by letting them capture and battle virtual pocket monsters, might be used as a classroom learning tool, in accordance with common core learning standards, as per Emily Howell, an assistant professor at the Iowa State University School of Education. "It is important to give students authentic choices that really have meaning in their lives. We need to encourage them to develop questions, research the answers and then share that information in writing," Howell said in the press release. Howell is working with school teachers on the use of Pokémon Go as a digital tool to help students learn.