CIDDL contributes to new report on AI from the U.S. Department of Education’s Office of Educational Technology

LAWRENCE — James Basham and Eleazar Vasquez from the Achievement & Assessment Institute’s Center for Innovation, Design, and Digital Learning (CIDDL) served as advisers on a new report on artificial intelligence integration in education from the U.S. Department of Education’s Office of Educational Technology (OET). The report, titled “Empowering Education Leaders: A Toolkit for Safe, Ethical, and Equitable AI Integration,” supports education leaders in adopting AI in the classroom to protect all students.

CIDDL, founded in 2020, supports the appropriate use of educational technology in early childhood special education and K-12 learning environments to improve outcomes for students, especially those with disabilities. The center conducts research and provides technical assistance in supporting the adoption of new technology. Individuals from CIDDL have worked closely with higher education faculty and local, state and national education leaders on multiple projects since its founding.

The AI Toolkit was created in response to former President Joe Biden’s Executive Order on the Safe, Secure, and Trustworthy Development and Use of Artificial Intelligence. The executive order specifically called for an AI toolkit to support education leaders. 

“The rapid growth of AI has led to the need for more guidance and structure around technology use,” said Basham, CIDDL director.

“AI has been around for a long time, since the 1950s and even before that. But when ChatGPT was released from OpenAI in 2022, the world realized this artificial intelligence thing is real,” he said. “Since then, our center has been called upon quite a bit to support the field's understanding of AI.”

Trey Vasquez, professor and the director of the Toni Jennings Exceptional Education Institute at the University of Central Florida, worked closely with Basham on the toolkit and several other papers and funded projects, including CIDDL’s report, “Inclusive Intelligence: The Impact of AI on Education for All Learners.” The report helped provide insight into what should be included in the toolkit, especially around the topic of equity in AI use in education.

“This toolkit is supporting a vision forward with AI, and it considers both the risks associated with it as well as the benefits associated with it,” Vasquez said. “I think one of the major things that school districts, states and institutions of higher education are dealing with right now are questions like ‘What do we do with AI? How do we effectively integrate it? What are the things we should be concerned about?’ The toolkit provides guidance as education leaders think about how to use it effectively in their institutions.”

The toolkit was developed in collaboration with educators, community members and technology leaders across the country to address challenges of AI adoption in schools. Guidance is broken up into different educational issues such as data security, federal policies and digital equity. Basham and Vasquez contributed to a section titled “AI Accessibility for Individuals with Disabilities.”

“Most of our work was on advising around individuals with disabilities and ensuring that the schools using AI consider things like accessibility and the ability for all students to engage in the learning process,” Basham said.

Previously, there was a lack of national guidelines on AI use in education, which led to complications and confusion across states. The goal of the toolkit is to develop a unified vision forward to advance everyone together at the same time.

“It's kind of the Wild West right now. We don't have a lot of policies in place, so some states are coming up with their own policies and they don't necessarily align with other states. Not every state has policies, and the ones that do don't always consider individuals with disabilities,” Vasquez said. “This is an attempt for us to also spread some information that hopefully hits the right target so that teams putting together their own policies use can use our toolkit.”

As AI grows and evolves, Basham said, “The toolkit should be used to encourage people across the United States and beyond to think about how we move forward with AI as tool in human learning.

“Unfortunately, a lot of what we're witnessing right now is either a full embrace of AI without actually thinking about the risks or just the opposite, which is kind of a shutting down and a total refusal to engage with AI, but the reality is it's not as black and white as that,” Basham said. “We need to actually have a nuanced perspective on how to use this thing appropriately and how to use AI appropriately so that we can come together and focus on supporting all students.”