OpenAI Academy & Claude for Education Debut

OpenAI and Anthropic are making big moves in education with the recent launch of OpenAI's new AI literacy trainings and the release of "Claude for Education."

While OpenAI Academy's "first phase" targeted developers and technical users, they now provide access to a range of events and resources for a wider community, including those specifically for K12 and higher education.

But the bigger news is Claude for Education, a specialized version of Claude tailored for higher education institutions - their terms of service still state users must be 18+.

Claude's learning mode is designed to guide students' reasoning process rather than providing direct answers, using Socratic questioning to develop critical thinking skills – but still providing templates for research papers, study guides, and outlines.

Among other use cases, they also highlight that students can use it to "work through calculus problems."

While we love to see an investment in supporting students in testing the tool for higher-level math tutoring, we ran into the same problems we have with every other foundation model. Claude made mistakes both in step-by-step problem-solving and final answers.

This is consistent with what we have found when developing our upcoming Integrating AI for Deeper Math Learning guide with Student Achievement Partners and in a new paper by MathArena. This is something to consider when using it on your own or sharing it with students, as these capabilities are overstated.