By a 4-3 margin, the Arizona State Board for Charter Schools on Monday approved an application from Unbound Academy to open a fully online school serving grades four through eight. Unbound already operates a private school that uses its AI-dependent “2hr Learning” model in Texas and is currently applying to open similar schools in Arkansas and Utah.
Under the 2hr Learning model, students spend just two hours a day using personalized learning programs from companies like IXL and Khan Academy. “As students work through lessons on subjects like math, reading, and science, the AI system will analyze their responses, time spent on tasks, and even emotional cues to optimize the difficulty and presentation of content,” according to Unbound’s charter school application in Arizona. “This ensures that each student is consistently challenged at their optimal level, preventing boredom or frustration.”
Spending less time on traditional curriculum frees up the rest of students’ days for life-skill workshops that cover “financial literacy, public speaking, goal setting, entrepreneurship, critical thinking, and creative problem-solving,” according to the Arizona application.
🤦♀️
The annoying part is that some time of self paced computerized curriculum is genuinely a good idea that I’ve been supporting for ages. But the whole premise is that this allows the teacher to spend more time in one on one instruction to get students over the hump when they have questions.
It doesn’t work as an excuse to throw out the teacher.
Depends if this is an AI designed specifically for education, or just ChatGPT wearing a mortarboard.
It doesn’t.
Using various AI techniques for things like pacing classes might be useful (though I’m guessing you could do just as well algorithmically). But you can’t replace human instruction in the process.
It’s bad in either scenario.
What the clown car fuck?
The most humane thing about this is there isn’t a teacher getting abused by paying them an insultingly low salary.
Or a student being abused by their teacher. Just a computer.
Online charter schools are horrifying. There is no expectation that the teacher know or understand the material they are teaching your child. High school is basically working through an online work book by yourself. Teachers use AI to “look up” answers they don’t know yourself.
It’s hell.
Keep kids dumb so they turn into dumb voting citizens and a big fuck you to teachers too! Whomever came up with this really deserves to get rich. This embraces so many modern American ideals all at once. If they haven’t thought about helping to lower the cost by placing ads into the platform, I would like to take credit for this idea.
Seems short sighted when they will ultimately just do away with voting.
My suspicion is students who understand the situation will try to game the system. Like they do with organic teachers, too.
They already do with online charters. Teachers don’t know the material, they just spam AI generated essays and answers. Teacher work loads are so much that they don’t check the responses.
I work in education. Grading is always a burden, yeah. Homework/activities often need to be designed for the students AND for grading load.
No johnny, strawberry has two r’s
I don’t get the panic. It worked great for 50% of Venture brothers.
Frees them up for more time cleaning the butcher room floor
I guess kids in Arizona won’t know how many R’s are in strawberry then…
Dude. It’s been over two hours. How many R’s ARE THERE? Dont leave us hanging.
Okay but did you fall?
Yes. But not before cheating. Asked my boss as he was passing by. “How many R’s in ‘strawberry’”, I says to him. He almost answered but caught himself. Then he sort of peered upward, thinking. Then he grinned and said, “nice one, rhsjj.” And then went about his day.
I still don’t know the damned answer.
Can’t wait to watch our own federal government cannibalize itself to the detriment of hundreds of millions of people. Good stuff.
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From what I’ve heard, they were basically allowing anything with a pulse to teach in AZ, so who knows, being taught by an occasionally hallucinating wiki engine might be an improvement over the wife of some national guard dude.
El oh fucking el. Can’t wait to see how AI handles a classroom of rowdy pre-pubescent teens
That’s the neat part: It doesn’t!
How long until the AI starts trying to sext the children, that seems to be a common theme across every article I read about AI and chikdren after its been running for a few months.
AI has it’s usecases, but it’s not currently at a place where students can be left alone with an AI. This is dumb.
