Microsoft is seeding its pre-generative artificially intelligent platform to educational markets in less than a month with expanded features and services to supplement evolving faculty and student needs.
At the Reimagine Education 2024 conference opening yesterday, Microsoft announced its plans to bring Copilot to an educational audience with some ‘free’ AI features designed to save tune for faculty while allowing educators to craft their own personalized AI experiences via a new AI toolkit.
Microsoft Copilot in schools is not a radically new concept as a handful of organizations have already been running the AI platform for some time now that include Indiana University or O’Dea Highschool in Seattle, Washington.
However, yesterday’s announcement does bring new commercial data protection for Microsoft 365 Education ‘zero-cost’ licenses at no additional cost.
However, Copilot for Microsoft 365 will be available April 1, 2025 for educational institutes as a purchased add-on for students aged 18 and above. Copilot for Microsoft 365 is aimed at educators and students with Microsoft 365 or Office 365 A3/A5 licenses and will automatically integrate with other M365 applications when activated. As part of the service package for Copilot for M365 licenses, customers will also gain support for Customer Copyright Commitment, which is designed to protect students and educators from potential copyright claims while generating content with Copilot.
More specifically, educators will also gain access to AI-led updates to Microsoft’s Learning Accelerators and Teams for Education that include the following:
- New features in Reading Progress and Microsoft Teams for Education are coming to all educators starting later this month at no additional cost. They leverage AI to draft content like rubrics, assignment instructions, personalized reading passages, and learning objectives, all while keeping the educator in control.
- Reading Coach now comes with enhanced AI features so students can create their stories and pick their own path as the story progresses: increasing student agency and motivation. It’s going to be available on the web, as a dedicated Windows app, and as an LMS integration. Customers interested in signing up for the preview of the LMS integrations for Reading Coaches and other Learning Tool integrations can go to aka.ms/LMSIntegrations
- Microsoft’s teacher tool, Math Progress is now entering private preview, and Math Coach, our student tool, will follow soon. These tools leverage AI to help students identify where they’re struggling and provide real-time step-by-step coaching on mathematical problem solving.
In addition to AI assitance with math and reading, educators will also be aided with access to the Microsoft Education AI Toolkit which is a free resource aimed at case studies, templates and starting guides to build out and implement AI solutions for specialized educational goals. Microsoft also introduced the Minecraft AI Prompt Lab to help educators create AI-led Minecraft releated teaching tools for students.
Security remains a concern for Microsoft as it seeds increased control of data and content to pre-generative models and the company plans to implement alongside its educational focused Copilot service the following to secure faculty and student privacy.
- A new Microsoft Defender for endpoint offering designed to protect student devices will be available soon to any Microsoft 365 A5 customer at a discounted price.
- Microsoft Copilot for Security, the first and only generative AI solution that helps security and IT professionals amplify their skillsets, collaborate more, see more, and respond faster. Tune into Microsoft Secure event on March 13, 2024, to get the latest updates on Microsoft Copilot for Security.
- Free security trainings so that school leaders, educators, students, and even families can learn how to make smart decisions when they are in an educational environment.
Some K-12 institutes have already had access to variants of Microsoft’s proposed safeguards such Microsoft Defender, but in combination with Defender and Microsoft Sentinel each of its newly propsed educational securty platforms should help keep more classrooms safe.
