The Dept. of Education Really Has Only 1 AI Use-Case?!

In the Government Accountability Office’s December 12, 2023 report “Artificial Intelligence: Agencies Have Begun Implementation but Need to Complete Key Requirements,” US Federal government agencies report how many AI use cases that they expect to figure in their work. (Here is the report: https://www.gao.gov/products/gao-24-105980.)

While I am not surprised to find NASA at the top of the list with 390 AI use cases, I was very surprised to see that the Department of Education (ED) has only 1 AI use case that they reported to the GAO.

How is this possible?

Digging deeper into the full text of the GAO report, I saw that some agencies had incomplete or missing reports of AI use cases, so my initial thought was that ED might not be reporting all of their AI use cases. But then I saw that ED’s own inventory (https://www2.ed.gov/about/offices/list/ocio/technology/ai-inventory/index.html) of AI use cases has only 2 use cases that they will deploy or have deployed: Aidan (a virtual assistant for the Federal Student Aid program that answers users’ financial aid questions) and IPAC (a bot that downloads spreadsheets from the Treasury’s databases, adjusts them to fit the systems of the Department of Education, and uploads them). This is from their most up-to-date inventory, post-GAO report.

Yet again, I ask: that’s all?! Yikes!

You might think that I am being unfair. After all, ED’s Office of Educational Technology has engaged seriously with AI, even releasing a report on AI and the “Future of Teaching and Learning” with some excellent insights and recommendations back in May 2023 (https://www2.ed.gov/documents/ai-report/ai-report.pdf).

Given ED’s mission, you would think that there would be more potential AI use cases that they would be reporting on. In fact, you might think that ED should be incorporating AI heavily in their work.

For instance, I immediately can think of three broad kinds (and there are countless others):

• Data analytics AI use cases, where ED teams use AI tools to better analyze and represent the copious data they have at their fingertips;
• Research analysis AI use cases, where ED teams use analogs or implementations of BERT (like the famed SciBERT) to develop education-specific language models of the educational research in their role influencing curricular recommendations; and
• Distance education pedagogy AI use cases, where ED teams analyze ways that AI tools can improve outcomes of students in distance education programs by simulating some of the benefits of in-person education (e.g., personalization).

But maybe I am mistaken or maybe I have an incomplete picture of ED’s engagement with AI. So, I have reached out to the aforementioned Office of Educational Technology to see if they have any insight into this surprising report, and I will report back as soon as I get more information.

In the meantime, do you all have any insight into this issue? Why would ED be so far behind on AI use case exploration, even taking into account COVID-related delays and obstacles?

[This post is modified from a newsletter piece of mine: https://automated.beehiiv.com/p/us-dept-education-ai-use-case.]

Submitted January 05, 2024 at 07:09AM by professorgc https://ift.tt/GfNBOmr