Advances in generative AI happen so often these days that even if you do your best to keep up with what’s out there, you still might find yourself in the dark when it comes to a new offering. Some of this is due to the fact that there are just so many changes happening all the time, and some of this is because the AI platforms make it very difficult to tell what’s new. Naming conventions are all over the place, for example, with numbers and decimal points and names like Sonnet or Haiku or pro/max/ultra. Gemini has pictures, but you have to remember to click the banana icon to activate it. (I’m not making this up.)
I do my best to read about all the developments, and I think I do a relatively good job staying current. Imagine my surprise, then, when I came across news of a “learning” mode that’s available in all the main platforms. I’m an academic librarian: this new mode is core to what I’d be interested in, and yet somehow I had no clue it even existed until today. (I had read all about Khan Academy’s foray into this area a while ago, but didn’t know anything had developed further than that.)
So if you’re like me, let me bring you up to speed. Back in April(!), Claude announced “Claude for Education,” a specific package available for educational institutions that would let users scale back some of what Claude would do, instead acting more as a tutor, leading users to answers instead of just taking them straight there. Essentially, this is the same offering as Khan Academy’s Khanmigo. However, it was primarily limited to the educational institutions that subscribe to it.
On July 29, ChatGPT announced “Study and Learn” mode, which would be available to all its users. A week later, Gemini followed suit with its “Guided Learning” option. So for the last 2.5 months, these options have been available, hanging out in the settings menus. (For GPT, you need to press the + next to the search box, then select “…More”, and click “Study and Learn” to turn it on. For Gemini, you click “tools” below the search box and then click “Guided learning.” Claude’s remains clunky for now. You can turn on learning, but it seems to default to autofilling a prompt to do it.)
Setting aside my complaints about how buried these options are, I think they’re actually a pretty powerful tool for education. They offer a middle ground between “do all the work for me” and “don’t touch AI at all.” Yes, they were available all along if you set up a custom prompt, but having the feature available through a click of a button (even if it’s hidden) is a big step forward. Yes, AI still hallucinates from time to time, but when it’s acting as a tutor, guiding you to an answer, there’s much less danger of this happening. You understand what’s going on, and you have more control over guiding it.
I’ll be toying around with it more now, and I’ll also be paying much closer attention to those menu options beneath the search boxes. I encourage you to do the same.