December 20, 2024

2024 in Review: AI & Education

Artificial intelligence (AI) continues to reshape education by enhancing teaching practices through intelligent tutoring systems and data-driven insights, while simultaneously personalizing learning. Over the last year, the education sector has experienced unprecedented AI product innovation and remarkable progress in AI adoption, as educators and students begin to realize AI’s potential to create more adaptive, personalized learning environments.

At Cengage Group, we’ve been part of this transformative period, launching our GenAI-powered Student Assistant to enhance the learning experience for students and educators in higher ed, and we remain committed to looking ahead to new innovation and AI applications across the business.  As we look forward to new advancements in 2025, let's reflect on some of the most important AI innovations and trends that have shaped education this year.

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AI Adoption Increased

This year, both educators and students have increasingly embraced AI in education, using AI to personalize and support varied learning paths. Industry reports, such as Cengage Group’s 2024 GenAI Report and the Digital Education Council’s 2024 Global AI Student Survey, show strong AI adoption and positive perception of AI’s potential among educators. Key takeaways from these reports:

  • AI usage surged: According to our 2024 GenAI Report, AI usage in classrooms surged with 45% of higher education (HED) faculty and 51% of K12 teachers using AI tools, up from just 24% in 2023. For both HED and K12, the five most common use cases among educators include lesson planning, completing administrative tasks, supporting lectures, facilitating student activities and creating assessments. The Digital Education Council found:
    • Most HED students (86%) use AI in their studies and 54% use AI tools weekly to support learning.
    • K12 student usage jumped significantly from 37% to 75% since last year.
  • Perceptions shifted (especially among educators): Positive perceptions about AI nearly doubled among HED faculty, rising from 28% in 2023 to 49% in 2024, according to our report. This reflects educators’ belief that AI will become a pillar of education (90% HED instructors, 84% K12 teachers), and has the potential to support lifelong learning (71% HED instructors, 65% K12 teachers) and improve student engagement (63% HED instructors, 62% K12 teachers). Additionally, Digital Education Council’s report found most students held positive views on AI chatbots (75% HED students, 70% K12 students).

AI Literacy Became Essential

Throughout 2024, as AI permeated every industry and became a facet of powering our global economy, AI literacy and developing AI skills became paramount to our future. The entire education ecosystem – from educators, to policymakers, to business leaders and more – understands the critical need to help students (our future workers) acquire and develop AI skills throughout their entire learning journey. States, global entities and educational institutions stepped up to power an AI literacy movement that will continue in 2025:

  • California took legislative action: In October, California passed a bill mandating the integration of AI literacy into K12 curricula across math, science and social studies. This initiative aims to prepare students to use AI safely, ethically and effectively.
  • UNESCO developed an AI framework for educators: Understanding the importance of introducing AI to students safely and ethically, UNESCO developed an AI competency framework that helps educators integrate AI into curricula.
  • Wharton School and Common Sense Media trained educators: In collaboration with OpenAI, the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School and Common Sense Media developed comprehensive AI training courses for educators. These partnerships address the growing demand for guidance on teaching AI.

Edtech Innovation Flourished

Across all educational levels, AI significantly advanced edtech capabilities and we saw groundbreaking developments like:

  • The launch of GPT-4o & o1: OpenAI introduced GPT-4o, a multimodal AI model that enables seamless interaction through text, audio, video and images. This technology was debuted in an educational setting by showing the power of personal assistance in solving math problems – demonstrating how AI can guide students to answer math problems correctly without providing direct answers. Rounding out the year, OpenAI launched its o1 model, a significant advancement in reasoning model capabilities. It can handle more complex tasks, has enhanced accuracy and offers image-based reasoning.
  • The introduction of ChatGPT Edu: Kicking off 2024, OpenAI partnered with institutions, like ASU & Columbia, prompting the launch of ChatGPT Edu. This specialized version is designed for universities to responsibly integrate AI into student life and campus operations. It offers diverse applications such as personalized tutoring, resume-building support for students and grading assistance for faculty.

AI Gaps Were Exposed

AI has the power to democratize education only if there is equitable access for every learner. As AI was introduced to educational settings, often in settings with higher funding or greater access to technology, inequities emerged threatening to widen educational gaps in communities and institutions with limited access to educational technology. Technology companies saw the importance of closing these gaps early on and made significant commitments to increase accessibility to both students and workers, including:

  • Amazon’s AWS Education Equity Initiative, which committed $100 million to provide digital learning opportunities for underserved communities. This initiative will expand access to its AI teaching assistant and is centered around providing equitable access to AI skilling opportunities.
  • Google’s AI Opportunity Fund, which allocated $75 million in grants to workforce development and education organizations to teach Americans how to use AI. The fund later announced an additional $25 million to educational organizations to support students and educators in developing AI skills.

AI Policy Will Challenge Future Progress

Despite increased adoption, positive perception and significant advancements in AI innovation, there’s still a need to collectively define policies and guidelines on using AI in educational environments. AI tools, processes and parameters vary in every setting, which is a key challenge that we must continue addressing to further progress AI adoption and usage in the coming year. To address these challenges, the Education Department, Education Commission of the States and TeachAI have released AI guidelines and toolkits, which is a good start to creating strategies for integrating AI into school districts while developing robust policies to mitigate associated risks. Moving forward, the education ecosystem must find ways to define and set standards for AI use to ensure academic integrity is maintained.

As our CEO Michael Hansen said in our recent LinkedIn Live, ‘there are challenges with AI, but it has tremendous opportunity to improve the existing education system.” The progress made thus far offers a promising glimpse into an educational future that offers more personalized, inclusive and equitable access to learning. However, the system must work collectively to continue this progress in the new year.

Today, we celebrate the work done this year and look forward to greater AI innovation in 2025.