Join two former teachers - Libby Hills from the Jacobs Foundation and AI researcher Owen Henkel - for the Ed-Technical podcast series about AI in education. Each episode, Libby and Owen will ask experts to help educators sift the useful insights from the AI hype. They’ll be asking questions like - how does this actually help students and teachers? What do we actually know about this technology, and what’s just speculation? And (importantly!) when we say AI, what are we actually talking about? 

In this episode, Libby and Owen talk to Dr. Dora Demszky, Assistant Professor in Education Data Science at Stanford University. Dora’s background is in linguistics and natural language processing. Her work focuses on using natural language processing tools to support educators. 

Dora has been working with large language models for a whole, before the recent explosion of interest. So she shares what it’s been like to move from having to explain what a large language model is, to having the world obsess about them! She also talks about the potential and limitations of using large language models to support educators with activities like teacher coaching and writing feedback to students. 

Next episode Libby and Owen speak to Dr. Paul Atherton, founder of Fab Inc and Fab Data. Like Dora, Paul is also interested in building AI driven tools for teachers, but he focuses on doing so for teachers in highly resource constrained places like Sierra Leone.

Guests and resources

• Dr. Dora Demszky
• Dora’s paper on using chatGPT for teacher coaching
• Coverage of Dora’s research showing positive benefits of providing automated feedback to instructors

Join us on social media:

• BOLD (@BOLD_insights), Libby Hills (@Libbylhhills) and Owen Henkel (@owen_henkel)
• Listen to all episodes of Ed-Technical here: https://bold.expert/ed-technical
• Subscribe to BOLD’s newsletter: https://bold.expert/newsletter
• Stay up to date with all the latest research on child development and learning: https://bold.expert

Credits: Sarah Myles for production support; Josie Hills for graphic design