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The RegisterNew plugins for K-12 teachers, university instructors, and college kids? Read the room, guys
In the face of an epidemic of AI-enabled cheating and research suggesting its products hamper learning,
OpenAIis doing the sensible thing and pushing more AI on students and teachers. Wait, did I say sensible? My mistake. The House of Altman announced a trio of new education-focused offerings on Tuesday: one for K-12 teachers, another for college educators, and a third for college students. The new plugins, the company explained, will help students and educators make more use ofChatGPT’s agentic capabilities for both studying and teaching. The new features are available through ChatGPT Edu, an institutionally licensed suite for higher education, and ChatGPT for Teachers, a free resource available to verified US K–12 educators and school districts. The new offerings, says OpenAI, build on its educational AI philosophy that “AI should support learning, not shortcut it, and the best learning experiences keep educators and students in control.” Plenty of educators might disagree. Cheating with AI has become a sad norm in schools around the world, and the US is no exception. Many young people admit to using AI to cheat on school assignments, and college students have been caught doing it, too. Mexico's largest university, the National Autonomous University of Mexico, last week suspended enrollment for incoming students after suspected widespread cheating in its admissions exams. The university also decided this week to require about 58,000 applicants who qualified in the remote entrance exam to take an in-person proctored control exam after scores surged during its first remotely administered admissions test. As for how teachers relate to AI in the classroom, a 2025 study from the Center for Democracy and Technology suggests it’s going to take more than some new OpenAI software to help teachers feel more comfortable. CDT said last year that K-12 teachers widely complained of not being given the necessary resources to understand how to integrate AI into schools, or how to tackle the potential harms AI may be causing to their students' ability to learn and personal development alike. Rather than helping teachers and professors regain control of the academic process or better understand how AI is affecting their students, however, OpenAI wants to simply let them foist off more of their work to ChatGPT, too. “The K–12 Educator plugin is designed to help teachers plan and create for their classrooms,” OpenAI explained. The tool can use materials teachers already have on hand “to create differentiated resources, design interactive visuals, and surface actionable insights.” Integration with educational AI infrastructure outfit Learning Commons allows ChatGPT to automatically consider local educational standards for anything it creates for teachers, the company explained, while educators get to remain “in control of pedagogical decisions, grading, and agentic actions.” The plugin for college professors is largely the same. “The College Educator plugin enables course design, teaching, and academic planning,” OpenAI said in its announcement. “Faculty can update syllabi, create interactive websites or multimedia assessments, adapt materials for diverse learners, or package content for their Learning Management System.” For college students, the plugin is designed to bring ChatGPT further into students' study routines, the latest expansion of AI tools that have already complicated essay writing and take-home testing. “The College Student plugin helps students turn what they are already studying into more personalized learning experiences,” said the ChatGPT maker. AI tutors are available (sorry, grad students), as are AI-generated quizzes, study guides, flashcards, and AI-generated visual explanations. “The plugin draws on learning science to prioritize deeper understanding and build stronger study habits,” OpenAI claims. You’d be right to doubt that. Aside from being used to cheat on exams, AI also has a demonstrable effect on harming learning outcomes. MIT researchers last year hooked a group of students up to EEGs to study their brain activity while writing essays. Some of them were allowed to use the internet to conduct research, while others were told to use AI. Not only did the AI cohort have far less ability to recall what they wrote when asked about it later, but they also showed far less brain activity, suggesting that relying on AI simply doesn’t lead to better learning. It’s not much of a leap to go from AI lowering brain activity while doing essay research to figuring that relying on AI tools to help one study, create flashcards, or receive tutoring will likely lead to similar outcomes. Real learning still takes legwork, and other studies suggest overreliance on tools like ChatGPT can undermine deeper learning. Why teachers and professors would want to embrace an expansion of AI into their workflow when they’ve seen what it can do to their students is a question for OpenAI. The AI giant didn't initially respond to our questions for this story, but we'll update if that changes. ®Get AI news in your inbox
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