OpenAI Adds ‘Study Mode’ To ChatGPT
OpenAI this week announced a new pedagogical feature to ChatGPT: Study Mode.
“ChatGPT is becoming one of the most widely used learning tools in the world. Students turn to it to work through challenging homework problems, prepare for exams, and explore new concepts. But its use in education has also raised an important question: how do we ensure it is used to support real learning, and doesn’t just offer solutions without helping students make sense of them?” OpenAI wrote of Study Mode. “We’ve built Study Mode to help answer this question. When students engage with Study Mode, they’re met with guiding questions that calibrate responses to their objective and skill level to help them build deeper understanding. Study Mode is designed to be engaging and interactive, and to help students learn something—not just finish something.”
As to technical details, OpenI says Study Mode was built using “custom system instructions we’ve written in collaboration with teachers, scientists, and pedagogy experts to reflect a core set of behaviors that support deeper learning including: encouraging active participation, managing cognitive load, proactively developing metacognition and self reflection, fostering curiosity, and providing actionable and supportive feedback.” The behaviors, the company added, “are based on longstanding research in learning science and shape how Study Mode responds to students.”
Study Mode was “built with college students in mind,” according to OpenAI.
Study Mode is, as ever, pertinent to accessibility as a de-facto assistive technology. While teachers and university professors are apt to loathe software like ChatGPT and its ilk because of the ways in which they ostensibly stunt the learning process by giving students an instant—and virtually infinite—answer key, the truth is such criticism goes only so far. In a disability context, ChatGPT’s new Study Mode could plausibly be a boon to, say, neurodivergent people with unique learning styles. Having ChatGPT help with prompting, et al, and coalescing information into a single space can be worth its weight in gold; it may be far more accessible for someone to keep track of the subject matter using ChatGPT than a bunch of flashcards or strewn about in various places. Likewise, someone with cognitive/motor/visual disabilities (or some combination thereof) may find Study Mode a more accessible methodology than juggling a trillion browser tabs. This scenario reminds me of an anecdote I’ve shared before, wherein Jenny Lay-Flurrie, chief accessibility officer at Microsoft, shared with me in an interview last year her neurodivergent teenage daughter found using the ChatGPT-powered Bing Search a more accessible tool for doing research when writing essays for her English classes.
As I’ve said, chatbots have utility. They’re not sheer conduits for lazy people to cheat.
Study Mode is available now to users on the Free, Plus, Pro, or Team plans. Those who are ChatGPT Edu users will get the feature “in the next few weeks,” OpenAI said.
