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Generative AI has taken nearly every sector by storm, and one area where it caused an immediate panic is education. Since the moment ChatGPT dropped in late 2022, educators have been scrambling just to figure out whether to ban or embrace the technology in schools, let alone how to structure learning in a world where students can outsource their writing and even much of their thinking to chatbots. As someone who’s been writing about AI since it was only a fascination of a small group of academic researchers and technologists, it was the moment last year when I overheard a table of teachers next to me at a restaurant grappling over what to do about it in their classrooms that I knew AI had really hit the mainstream.
The questions around generative AI’s role in education are far from answered, but the technology is currently making a big entrance into colleges in the form of textbooks. 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.
