“We are trying to be everything for every student before Iger,” said Nathan Schultz, CEO of Joger.
Several generation AI platforms including chatgpt have free plans. Chegg hopes to attract students who pay $19.99 per month to encourage long-term use and goal setting tools.
“If you think about the fitness world, these apps and these services tend to be more instructive to you to achieve your goals,” Schultz said. “They will give you, ‘We do a lot of miles or so many rides every week or so much work,’ that’s how we’ve been designing services.”
Chegg also packages AI models into its platform. A new feature to subscribers side-by-side panels with Chegg’s answers to other platforms, including Chatgpt, Google Gemini and Claude.
Macmillan Learning sells textbooks and e-books and provides quizzes and study guides. Like Chegg, it also incorporates AI tools into paid plans and launched late last year.
Macmillan’s tools do not provide students with direct answers; instead, it directs them to solutions (also known as the Socrates approach) by exposing open-ended questions with flawed thinking.
“It supports them socially so that they have the learning experience they can use … when they have to do it themselves in the exam,” said Tim Flem, chief product officer at Macmillan Learning.
Flem claims Macmillan’s AI tutor is more accurate than AI chatbots because it draws from company textbooks. He said the platform also reduced “content switching.”
“If you switch between that tab and that tab, you’ll notice how you look, ‘Wait for a minute, what does it say here?’” “So our AI tutors are right next to the problem that students are working on.”
How students adapt
Some students are mixing and matching AI and traditional tools. Bryan Wheatley combines Chatgpt with Quizlet and Socratic (another AI tool). He recently graduated from Prairie View A&M University in Texas and was initially scared of Chatgpt.
“In a sense, the real adaptable thing is a little crazy,” he said, although he continues to use it to outline papers and other tasks. He said Chatgpt is right half the time and he has to do a lot of cross-references.
According to the Digital Education Board’s research, he is one of 66% of students in bachelor’s, master’s and doctoral programs that regularly use CHATGPT.
The survey also found that more than 50% of students believe that excessive dependence on AI will have a negative impact on their academic performance.
Sally Simpson is trying to hold the line. A student at Georgetown University is pursuing a Ph.D. In German literature, generative AI is not used. During her undergraduate years, she used sites like Quizlet and SparkNotes to enhance the information she processed.
Now, she believes undergraduates use generated AI to complete their homework and summarize the work organization they do not have to read. “It’s cheaper for people to educate,” she said. “I think being able to read an article or read a text is an important skill to not only sum up it, but also to think about it critically.”
Dontrell, a senior social worker at Kentucky State University, is an avid Quizlet user who still uses it to learn tests. Together with Quizlet, he must seek answers. He said the generated AI didn’t bring much challenges.
“You just put something in the computer and you have to turn it on, like ‘you’re gone’,” he said. “Do you just typed it in and remember it? You’re not.”
How to adapt
Amy Lawyer, the department chair of the horse management department of the University of Louisville Business School, said some students are still using online learning guides such as Chegg and Sparknotes. “Students will use any resources available,” she said.
Of these resources, Chatgpt has the biggest impact on her class. She edited it herself and encouraged her students to do the same. But to stop them from stealing or overusing AI chatbots, she is now posting more assignments that must be handwritten or completed in class.
Ayelet Fishbach, a professor of marketing and behavioral sciences at the University of Chicago Business School, said that no matter how technology develops, students always find shortcuts. “Cheating has not been invented yet,” she said.
