Guiding Education’s AI Revolution

In the Zoom classroom of “Large Language Model Applications in Education,” Penn GSE Lecturer Haiying Li, GED’21, is sharing a demo of a hypothetical app she made using ChatGPT. The program could help high schoolers hone their SAT skills by producing personalized questions, from easier to harder, based on the generative artificial intelligence’s analysis of their performance on a practice test.

“You can see, this isn’t [necessarily] bad,” she said to the 11 graduate students from around the country and as far away as China and South Korea, inviting them to think critically about how AI can inform the design of technologies that meaningfully support students. They’re among the 50 students enrolled in the new Learning Analytics and Artificial Intelligence master’s program launched this year—the Ivy League’s first education degree in the much-ballyhooed field of artificial intelligence (AI), said Li, the program manager.

Known formerly as Learning Analytics, the program’s 16-month revamped curriculum is weighted heavily toward generative AI and its promises and perils for education. Besides large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT, the online program dives into AI-integrated feature engineering, data visualization, machine learning methodologies, deep learning models, and ethical considerations. Applications have doubled this academic year, she added, and a new dual degree with Penn Engineering, which launches in spring 2026, will further bolster GSE’s offerings.

In the last year, Dean Katharine Strunk has set a bold goal for Penn GSE to lead globally in AI and education, arguing the school is uniquely positioned to take on this fast-moving field. Since then, a variety of leading-edge initiatives have taken shape.

“We are thinking about AI in so many ways,” Dean Strunk said. “There is no shortage of ‘new, shiny’ innovations in the world of AI. But at Penn GSE, innovation isn’t about doing what is new. It is about what is needed and what works in practice, about strengthening teaching, expanding opportunity, and sustaining a healthy democracy.”

Besides the analytics degree, the school has leaned into AI and education through multiple initiatives that include hiring new faculty, collaborating with school districts on professional development, and conducting novel AI-focused research. Professors are creating AI tools that annotate readings or design lesson plans without dated views of education and are developing hands-on ways to expose students to AI’s pros and cons. One researcher is reimagining high-tech AI to advance more equitable access; another is analyzing in real time how teens are using—or not using—AI technology to write. There’s even JeepyTA, a virtual teaching assistant developed by the Penn Center for Learning Analytics and trained on course content, examples of responses, and prompts that can serve as digital, first-line teaching support.

“There’s a lot going on,” said Senior Fellow L. Michael Golden, GRD’07, the School’s vice dean of innovative programs and partnerships who leads Catalyst @ Penn GSE. The global education innovation center designs and scales solutions to education’s most pressing problems. Top of the list, he said, is AI in education. “We put together an ambitious agenda.”

Time is of the essence. While AI has been around since the 1940s, when the programmable digital computer was invented, it was ChatGPT’s debut in November 2022 that grabbed the attention and imagination of the public. Long before ChatGPT’s arrival, however, GSE researchers were already leading the way in AI in education. With each iteration, generative AI has improved its ability to give human-like responses, and as a result, interest in leveraging the technology to improve teaching and learning has exploded. At the same time, the risks generative AI poses are top of mind, whether that’s the environmental impact, the lack of regulation, the use of copyrighted content, the hallucinations and misinformation, the outsourcing of learning, and more.

“Penn GSE is in the frontier of thinking about AI,” said Seiji Isotani, one of two new hires this year, an associate professor who is faculty director of the Learning Analytics and Artificial Intelligence program, and a pioneer in gamified intelligent tutoring systems. “Here at Penn, we’re not just applying AI to education, we’re co-constructing it with educators and learners to address the systemic challenges that affect teaching and learning worldwide.”

In his own research, Isotani redesigns AI tech to bring its benefits to classrooms with limited access to computers or the internet, guided by a human-centered AI design approach that aligns technological innovation with the real needs of teachers and learners. The goal? To effectively integrate AI technologies in classrooms and ensure more equitable educational outcomes.

In one of his projects, Brazilian teachers photographed students’ essays with low-cost cell phones, widely available devices even in the most under-resourced areas, and uploaded the images (when the internet was available) to an AI platform co-created with educators. The AI provided feedback and pedagogical suggestions, equipping teachers with insights into students’ strengths and weaknesses and offering strategies to tailor classroom activities to promote deeper, more meaningful learning experiences.

“We saw a significant improvement in writing skills in our experiment, which tracked 500,000 students over the course of a year,” said Isotani. Building on that experience, he pioneered the concept of Artificial Intelligence in Education Unplugged (AIED Unplugged), an innovative approach that focuses on creating AI-based educational technologies that operate seamlessly within existing school environments, without requiring infrastructure changes, consistent internet access, or high levels of digital proficiency from users. “Even in rural schools, students were able to gain a lot,” said Isotani, who also serves as president of the International Artificial Intelligence in Education Society.

His colleague, Associate Professor Shiyan Jiang, GSE’s other new hire, leads in AI literacy—a skill, she argued, in low supply and yet essential as the technology permeates every aspect of life. With two National Science Foundation (NSF) grants totaling $3 million, she developed StoryQ, a web-based machine learning platform that finds patterns in text.

In one study, high school journalism students learned about machine modeling by using StoryQ to analyze Yelp reviews about ice cream shops and predict whether reviews were positive or negative by classifying certain words, Jiang said. That led to discussions about fundamental AI concepts and how the model made its decisions. A new project underway will target elementary students.

Six years ago, AI literacy barely existed, Jiang said, adding that she struggled to find a journal to publish her findings. Now, it’s the opposite. “The hype is, ‘AI can do this, AI can do that,’” she said. “I open the black box on AI, help stakeholders understand the promises and limitations, and am really transparent about how AI makes decisions.”

Educators also need AI literacy, of course. Earlier this year, GSE piloted the Pioneering AI in School Systems (PASS) program with the Philadelphia School District. The first-of-its-kind K–12 professional development project, designed with the district and supported by the Marrazzo Family Foundation, guides educators on AI usage policy and trains them on innovative ways to bring the tool into the classroom, while also addressing ethical considerations.

Often, GSE found that teachers who earned certificates in its Virtual Online Teaching (VOLT) and Experiences in Applied Computational Thinking (EXACT) programs returned to their classrooms enthusiastic to try out new ideas only to meet resistance from higher-ups, said Betty Chandy, GED’05, GRD’13, director for AI and technology-enhanced learning initiatives at Catalyst and the pilot’s co-leader with Golden. PASS aims to solve that problem and serve as a template for districts around the country. Rather than focus only on teachers, as AI workshops typically do, PASS takes a systems-level approach by also holding targeted sessions for district- and building-level leaders, she said.

“When teachers go back into their schools, there’s a vertical alignment,” Chandy said. “The district’s aware, the principal’s aware, and teachers have the space to be cutting-edge.” With a just-awarded $1 million from Google.org, PASS will expand to five more districts, including a rural one, she said.

Initial feedback has been positive, Chandy said. Some skeptics have shown enthusiasm to try out generative AI with a “focus on the process of thinking, the process of building an argument, the process of research,” she said, “as opposed to the product of learning.”

For example, Chandy said educators can redesign assessments. For a paper, she suggests, let students use ChatGPT as one more tool in their toolkit and then probe them on the prompts they tried and the results elicited, which in turn could lead to discussions on the accuracy of the LLM’s outputs and the ethics of scraping other people’s content. “This is a way to build critical literacy around AI,” Chandy said. 

Teachers also could produce worksheets personalized to learners’ interests (like a recent Eagles’ game or cupcakes) within seconds with LLMs. “There are ways teachers can bring authenticity to the classroom by connecting to their students’ lived experience. Historically, that has been very hard. I believe ChatGPT allows teachers to bridge that gap.”

Read the full feature in the fall/winter 2025 issue of Penn GSE Magazine.