US Dept. of Ed AI Guidelines are coming - will they go far enough?

By Andrew and Zoe

The White House recently released an AI Bill of Rights and announced that within the next few weeks the Department of Education (ED) will follow up with recommendations that will “give educators, parents and caregivers, students, and communities tools to leverage AI to advance universal design for learning; define specifications for the safety, fairness, and efficacy of AI models used within education; and introduce guidelines and guardrails that build on existing education data privacy regulations as well as introduce new policies to support schools in protecting students when using AI.” The U.S. The Department of Education Office of Technology has also echoed the importance of governing AI.

While the forthcoming AI recommendations from ED are desperately needed, we fear that 1) they will be so watered down as to not be helpful (see: federal COVID-19 guidance); and 2) they  will not go far enough unless they also comprehensively address augmented reality/virtual reality (AR/VR). 

AI and AR/VR differ in their origin and primary objectives. However, their combination is emerging as a powerful tool to address prominent challenges and opportunities for cross-development. 

Experiences driven by this cross-development are already creating new education paradigms of teaching and learning. While there are many potential benefits of these technologies, most notably the enhancement of classroom experience, there are also many risks that are not completely understood - and maybe, at this point, impossible to understand.

For schools to reap the benefits of emerging immersive technologies and mitigate the associated risk, we must have the following pillars in place:

• A flexible, federal regulatory approach - An evolving framework that informs “when to regulate” and “how to regulate” emerging digital technologies in education settings. 

• Adequate Resource and Infrastructure Capacity at the local level – Not all K-12 schools have the infrastructure or resources to leverage emerging technologies, which will present serious equity challenges that could exacerbate the achievement gap. 

• Substantial evidence base – We don’t yet understand the potential impacts of immersive technologies on youth mental health and social emotional wellbeing.

• Instructional standards, professional learning strategies, and product development policies – As it pertains to immersive technologies in particular, it will be challenging to create the appropriate instructional and product development standards as well as school-based policies - including comprehensive professional learning strategies for educators - based on the emerging evidence of the risks and opportunities of immersive media, unless we start thinking about the student experience now. 

The challenges in pivoting to high-quality remote and hybrid instruction during the COVID-19 pandemic highlighted the difficult truth that education researchers, entrepreneurs, practitioners, and policymakers often lack the evidence, capacity, and tools that allow them to be proactive and intentional with implementation of new technologies. 

The Center for Democracy and Technology recently released a landscape review of 43 local education agencies’ (LEAs) commitment to protecting students' privacy in their schools that underscores this issue, finding that most LEAs offer only superficial nods to privacy and don't provide substantive investments in staffing, training, communications to prioritize student privacy even as investments in edtech continue to grow. 

The use of new, immersive technologies in the education space couldn’t be higher stakes. The promise of Federal guidance is a critical first step – but will it be enough? We’re skeptical.