The AI Education Project

The AI Education Project helps prepare high students – especially those disproportionately impacted by AI and automation – to better understand and interact with an AI-powered world by building an engaging, culturally relevant curriculum that teachers can use with their students remotely or in the classroom. We focus on helping students understand the ubiquitous – and often invisible – AI systems at work in their everyday lives, positioning our students to make better decisions about their future.

AI literacy is an essential part of civics for the new digital citizen. Learning, communication, career, healthcare, homeownership, access to reliable voting information – everything will be impacted by AI. The disadvantaged communities that stand to be hardest-hit by the negative economic and social impacts of the technology are especially unlikely to have access to AI education. To gain the tools they need to navigate an increasingly automated future, every student needs culturally relevant education around AI systems, how they work, and their impacts – no matter what field they decide to go into.

However, the majority of schools and programs currently engaging in AI literacy education don't sufficiently include students from communities disproportionately impacted by AI and automation.

We are committed to prioritizing the education of students who belong to communities that will be disproportionately impacted by automation and AI systems. These communities include racial minorities, low income communities, and communities in geographies whose primary industries (like manufacturing and transportation) are highly susceptible by automation.

For example, only 8 percent of the computer science workforce in 2019 was Black, while only 6.8% of the nearly 100,000 students who took the AP Computer Science Principles exam in 2019 are Black.

Our core product is an ‘Introduction to AI’ curriculum that consists of two main components: 1) self-guided online lessons and 2) a final video pitch assessment. Our learning objectives focus on the social, political, cultural, and ethical aspects of AI that impact everyone, especially those who will be disproportionately impacted including students who are Black, Hispanic, women, and those from poorer communities.

Students learn about AI through four interactive modules: “What is AI?”, “What can AI do?”, “What are AI’s impacts?”, and “How does AI affect me?” Each module includes ‘Explore’, ‘Learn’ and ‘Show’ activities/assessments. The lessons are designed using a culturally relevant pedagogical framework that ensures students see themselves and their communities reflected and valued in the content taught. All content is pre-built out in both Google Classroom and Canvas learning platforms.

Our long-term vision is to provide curricula for all of the 15 million high school students in the United States in any given year.

We are especially committed to prioritizing the education of students who belong to communities that will be disproportionately impacted by automation and AI systems. These communities include racial minorities, low income communities, and communities in geographies whose primary industries (like manufacturing and transportation) are highly susceptible by automation.

We built a 15-hour curriculum tested with nearly 350 students in Ohio and Florida between May and July 2020. We’ve revamped the curriculum with their feedback and are testing a beta with over 2,000 students in schools in 5 states (Ohio, Florida, Arkansas, Kentucky, and Michigan). Currently, the majority of students we reach are from low-income communities/Title I schools, while nearly half of our students are African-American.

Despite numerous K-12 career readiness programs, we haven’t seen any that also take into consideration the role AI will play in work skills development and training. We take a complementary approach to technical skills by focusing on the knowledge, skills, and mindsets needed for an automated workforce by using AI literacy as a means to help students think about the social implications of AI technologies they will be using and creating. We provide a conceptual understanding about AI while exposing them to diverse role models, relevant media, and interactive instructional materials that help them develop a positive occupational identity.

Full-Time: 3

Part-Time staff/volunteers 3

Contract: 2

We recognize the importance of having staff and leadership who have shared lived experiences with the student populations and communities that we serve. As an organization, we focus on reaching students who belong to communities that will be disproportionately impacted by automation and AI systems. These communities include racial minorities, low income communities, or communities in geographies whose primary industries (like manufacturing or transportation) are highly susceptible to automation. We reflect these communities in our current staff makeup and in our hiring determinations.

The focus of many of today's AI education programs is addressing the talent gap that industries face. While we think it’s incredibly important to make sure that we cultivate a workforce of engineers and researchers to build and design AI systems (especially from underrepresented communities), we also need to be focusing on the AI literacy gap that impacts all people – even those who won’t go on to technical careers.

Broad AI literacy means everyday consumers can have more awareness, confidence, and trust towards the AI products they use; everyday citizens can actively engage in informed policy discussions about the technology; everyday workers can make more informed choices about the jobs they take or skills they acquire as automation and algorithmic decision making becomes more prevalent in the workforce.

There are a handful of organizations developing content about AI for the classroom, but nearly all of them are computer-based and focused on coding/CS:

1) CS programs adding an AI/AI impacts component

2) Tech companies who are focused on building a pipeline of the specific talent/labor

3) Organizations training future AI engineers 

4) University/Academic Institution Programs

We're one of the first organizations developing curricula that can be integrated into and taught by teachers in core subjects like history and english, and non-CS career/technical education classes.

We use existing learning manage systems like Google Classroom and Canvas to deliver our curriculum. We plan to build our own learning platform to facilitate lessons and activities, but do not yet have the resources.

Activities: Digital curriculum, lesson plans, and teacher training to facilitate AI literacy curriculum to students.

Outputs: Activities completed, course completions, engaged learning (evidence measured through student and teacher surveys)

Outcomes: Increased student understanding of AI and its impacts on daily lives and potential careers, increased student comfort in exploring a career in AI/CS, inspire students to pursue new careers they had not considered or see how AI will impact their desired careers.

Impact: Students don't select a job likely to be displaced by automation, Students pursue careers or further programs of study related to AI.

Within the next year, we hope to expand our curriculum to 10,000 students; largely in the states we are operating in (especially Ohio and Florida), while identifying partner educators in California, Texas, and Massachusetts. In the next five years, we hope to expand our reach to 1 million students across the United States.

Our primary barrier has been the use of Google Classroom and Canvas LMS to host our class content (including Google forms, pdfs, videos, google docs, links to games). We found many pain points for us as content creators, our teachers, and student users–especially around data collection, content management, content integration, progress tracking, and interface design.

We have partnered with volunteers from design schools and industry to help us design and scope out a learning platform that meets the needs of our students, teachers, and us as content administrators. However, we have not yet secured funding or engineering resources to build out this platform once the initial design and scoping has been completed.

We'd like to perform a longitudinal study with our students to see what academic and career choices they pursue after taking our course.

We would like to use a learning platform to better track how students interact with our curriculum (e.g. which activities they spend the most time on, what activities might students try to skip through, what videos or reading passages need to be replayed, etc.)

Ora D. Tanner (Chief Learning Officer) oversees instructional design and development of the AI Education Project’s curricula including AI-related lesson plans, projects, activities, and training materials for classroom implementation by teachers. She conducts pedagogical and design research, teacher professional development, educator community building, vetting and curation of AI resources, and is currently strategizing implementation of AI curriculum in the southeast United States. Ora has 12 years classroom experience as a science educator and is wrapping up her PhD in Instructional Technology and Educational Measurement at the University of South Florida. She recently completed a fellowship at the Aspen Institute Tech Policy Hub in San Francisco.

Alex Kotran (President) Alex oversees strategy, partnerships, fundraising, and external relations for the AI Education Project. Prior to founding the AI Education Project, Alex helped launch The Future Society, a 501(c)(3) AI governance think tank, spun out of the Harvard Kennedy School of Government. As Interim Head of Partnerships, Alex developed and advanced relationships with organizations including the IEEE, UN, European Commission, OECD, Council of Europe, UNESCO, NYU Law, Stanford Law, Microsoft, Google, and EY, among others.

Ehrik Aldana (Head of Programs) manages and coordinates the AI Education Project’s programmatic work, focusing primarily on K-12. In his role, he liaises directly with education partners on the ground, surveys classrooms, and engages with the AI Education Project’s broader network of advisors to collate feedback and guide both content and strategy. He graduated with a B.A. in Political Science from Yale.

Our largest education partner is Akron Public Schools in Akron Ohio, who have committed to using our curriculum with their entire Freshmen class (~1,200 students), in addition to a number of schools, districts, and education service agencies around the country.