Axios Boston has an article about Northeastern University and Champlain College in Vermont testing an “artificial intelligence” program from Anthropic, a California startup. It’s called Claude for Education and there are lots of sweeping but not-very-concrete examples of what it can help people do, such as:

• Students can draft literature reviews with proper citations, work through calculus problems with step-by-step guidance, and get feedback on thesis statements before final submission
• Faculty can create rubrics aligned to specific learning outcomes, provide individualized feedback on student essays efficiently, and generate chemistry equations with varying difficulty levels
• Administrative staff can analyze enrollment trends across departments, automate repetitive email responses to common inquiries, and convert dense policy documents into FAQ formats

This seems to be the sort of thing that I wrote about a couple of weeks ago, concerning the possibility of using A.I. software in public schools. That column is here.

I remain dubious that this technology will help education any more than all the other past technologies have. Change it, yes; help it, not so much. But it’s very early days.

The London school of Economics is also participating in testing Claude.