Sage Lazzaro for Forbes reported on this transition by speaking with textbook giant Pearson, which is leading the charge with integrating its digital materials with generative AI and chatbots.
Lazzaro wrote in her article:
Leading textbook company Pearson has outfitted its digital textbooks—specifically 50 science titles, such as Intro to Biology and Intro to Chemistry—with generative AI study tools.
As of this summer, 70,000 students in over 1,000 institutions are already using these AI textbooks, according to Pearson. This fall will mark the first full semester where AI textbooks are the norm at schools and colleges, from Ohio State University to the University of Miami, University of Colorado Boulder, and many more in between.
The generative AI capabilities within the Pearson textbooks come in two forms. First, there’s a general chatbot students can query with any questions they might have about the subject and contents of the book. Next, Pearson incorporated generative AI into the practice questions within the digital textbooks. When students get a question wrong, they’re now taken through a brief set of additional questions—powered by generative AI—meant to lead them to the correct answer without telling it to them outright.
The process was inspired by and intended to mimic how a professor would help a student understand a concept during a one-on-one conversation during office hours, explained Chris Hess, a former professor and director of AI product management, Higher Ed at Pearson.
Hess said in a statement: “We know what problem they’re working on. We already know the answer to that problem. Think about it—if Sage came in and was struggling on this problem, I wouldn’t just give you the answer. I would ask you a series of leading questions that would try to diagnose your misconceptions and help you overcome those.”
Lazzaro said that after she trialed she it called it “effective.”
But after going through the additional gen-AI-created questions, I was not only able to determine the correct answer to the initial questions, but I also felt I had a pretty solid understanding of the concepts. I felt myself understanding more and more as I progressed through them as if I was being led to the answer with just enough help, exactly just as Hess and the team who created the feature intended.
Pearson says they’ve compared engagement with eTextbooks that have AI versus those that do not, and found that students who use the AI tools are almost doubling their time spent with textbooks. ‘The company plans to expand the technology to more and more titles and has decided that every Pearson textbook will be AI-equipped,’ Forbes noted.
These new innovative textbooks are built with ChatGPT and Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG-based), which refers to a large-language model (LLM) to retrieve the information. However, these types of models are well-known for having “hallucinations” – completely false or unrelated information that is generated by mistake. The company swears they have worked hard to minimize these lapses in judgment.
It isn’t a walled garden around the book completely. It’s a walled garden around the problem, and so it knows the problem.
Sure you can go to ChatGPT, but it’s better for the student to have the benefit in the actual product right there in line and in context. You don’t need to leave, and you’re going to get a certain synergy of language from the book, and that is a really powerful experience,” he said. “We know the context of the student, and in the longer term, we will know more about that student’s learning journey overall.
Hess added
AUTHOR COMMENTARY
Last year I reported on how a Georgia school district was embracing a whole new sweeping AI curriculum, teaching students to use, rely, depend and get used to living with and using AI in their everyday lives – from core skills such as reading and arithmetic, to arts and design. SEE: Georgia School District Embraces AI Curriculum Starting As Early As Kindergarten
In that article I wrote:
AI, at the pace that it is growing and intruding into everything, will replace the necessity to have any real skill and knowledge in anything. That is the fever dream of these elites and technocratic fools, in their little satanic utopia, where “You’ll own nothing and be happy.”
But thou, O Daniel, shut up the words, and seal the book, even to the time of the end: many shall run to and fro, and knowledge shall be increased.
Daniel 12:4
These AI textbooks are just the beginning. Key motor and memory skills, comprehension, retention, critical thinking, “random access memory,” and much more will again be thrown into the trash in favor of dependency on technology and AI acting as the all-knowing shining light to guide the masses to the promised land.
[7] Who goeth a warfare any time at his own charges? who planteth a vineyard, and eateth not of the fruit thereof? or who feedeth a flock, and eateth not of the milk of the flock? [8] Say I these things as a man? or saith not the law the same also? [9] For it is written in the law of Moses, Thou shalt not muzzle the mouth of the ox that treadeth out the corn. Doth God take care for oxen? [10] Or saith he it altogether for our sakes? For our sakes, no doubt, this is written: that he that ploweth should plow in hope; and that he that thresheth in hope should be partaker of his hope. (1 Corinthians 9:7-10).
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and . . . someone, back in the day, pondered . . . ‘what if we could make Chatty Cathy (a talking doll for those that don’t know) be able to talk intelligently to little children to teach them what we want them to think’?
I recall when I was in 3rd grade in the late ’60’s that one day, you’ll ‘see’ the person you are talking to on the phone! It didn’t happen as soon as they predicted, but it did occur.
And let’s make Chatty Cathy a technological advancement with AI, essentially what was predicted in the Terminator before the machines turned on man.
This will be used for the mark of the beast system no doubt!