I recently listened to a talk from Dartmouth’s president, Sian Beilock, about the current state of affairs at US colleges. While discouraging, I was not surprised to learn that Dartmouth and many schools across the country are seeing more and more students academically unprepared for college - specifically in areas of reading, writing, and mathematics. However, she goes on to say that her biggest concern regarding incoming first-year students isn’t academics-related, but is actually their inability to have difficult conversations. 

While OpenAI made headlines last week with their newest GPT-5 model, the company also released a new tool that has the potential to greatly support the education community. The Study and Learn tool available to both ChatGPT Plus and Free users is designed to guide users to developing new skills or knowledge instead of directly providing answers. The tool utilizes scaffolding approaches and Socratic questioning to build foundational understanding and create meaningful learning experiences.

The first Alpha School was founded in 2014 by MacKenzie Price and her husband, Andrew Price, with the philosophy of rethinking traditional education. Their website tells the story of the 2-Hour Workday, where students work with a personalized AI lesson plan specifically designed to match their needs. I met with Anna Dalvantes, a member of Alpha’s press team, to dig deeper into MacKenzie’s vision for the future of education.

While new technologies provide unprecedented potential to build, explore, and create, they also create unprecedented temptation to consume endless streams of content. I believe that recognizing this paradigm and pledging to create more and consume less will ultimately help empower people to unlock untapped potential.

The four lesson ideas below showcase how tools like ChatGPT can support this goal. Think of them as guiding stars; they are starting points that can be flexibly integrated into your own lesson plans. More importantly, I hope they inspire you to discover your own creative use cases for GenAI and uncover your own unique “lesson lifts.”

We've reached a tipping point where narrow expertise isn’t the edge anymore. The real differentiator is judgment. And not just in one area, but the kind of judgment that draws on strategy, technology, psychology, economics, and ethics all at once.

I want to give a quick word of appreciation for the positive influence video games have had on my life. While many video games serve simply as an effective source of entertainment and escape, some games can truly blur the lines between fun and learning.

When I talk to teachers on the topic of AI in the classroom, the fear of students using the tools as a shortcut to completing assignments without putting in the work to achieve meaningful learning outcomes is almost always front of mind. So how do we stop this? The initial reaction I’ve seen in schools across the US is to limit the usability of and access to the tool, but what if I told you there might be a better way?

While it’s easy to sit back and complain that “AI is stealing my job”, it is more constructive to reframe this fear as an opportunity. Learning to work alongside AI will be the foundation of a successful career in the second half of 2020’s and beyond. I credit IMD for recognizing this fact ahead of most other business schools and creating projects that transformed my understanding of the intersection of AI and business.