IBL News | New York
OpenAI issued fifteen impactful GPT templates — specialized versions of ChatGPT — for faculty, students, and staff.
These interactive tutors can be deployed across ChatGPT Edu campuses and OpenAI-hosted GPTs.
They are AI assistants for building lecture slides, auto-generating student feedback, summarizing complex datasets, and instantly answering HR questions.
Each one comes with detailed, ready-to-use instructions that are available for personalization, allowing users to upload relevant files and select the desired tools. Each template is plug-and-play.
1. Class Companion – Acts as a 24/7 course assistant, turning course files into an interactive tutor that provides explanations, examples, and guided practice based solely on approved materials.
2. Quiz & Exam Creator – Designs quizzes and exam questions in multiple formats, ready to use and tailored to learning objectives.
3. Lesson Planner – Builds structured lesson plans and teaching materials in minutes, aligned to curriculum goals.
4. Research Simplified – Breaks down academic papers and highlights key insights for faster review.
5. Feedback Helper – Drafts constructive, personalized comments on student work to speed up grading.
1. Personal Tutor – Explains complex concepts step by step and provides guided practice.
2. Smart Quiz Partner – Creates unlimited practice quizzes that adapt to skill level and topic mastery.
3. Career Coach – Crafts strong resumes, cover letters, and tailored interview prep strategies for target companies.
4. Code Helper – Reviews, debugs, and explains code with clear examples and solutions.
5. Writing Coach – Guides brainstorming, outlining, and refining essays or projects with actionable feedback.
Top 5 GPTs for Staff and Administrators
1. HR & Policy Assistant – Provides instant answers to HR questions and campus policies.
2. Tech Support Bot – Troubleshoots IT issues and checks accessibility of digital content.
3. Prompt Coach – Helps staff craft better prompts to save time on daily tasks.
4. Data Reporter – Turns raw data into concise summaries and simple charts.
5. Email Assistant – Drafts polished emails and announcements that match institutional tone.
Inside each template, these are the fields to be completed:
- Purpose & Impact – Why the GPT exists and the value it delivers.
- Who Uses It – Intended audience.
- Build Checklist – Name, description, conversation starters, knowledge files, and tool toggles.
- Core Instructions (System Prompt) – Step-by-step guidance for the GPT’s behavior.
- Safety & Guardrails – How to maintain compliance, academic integrity, and privacy.
- Starter User Prompts – Examples to help users get started quickly.
- Metrics – Suggestions for measuring success.
- Maintenance – Tips for keeping the GPT relevant.
- Extensions – Optional upgrades and advanced uses.
An example is Class Companion GPT:
Purpose & Impact: Acts as a 24/7 course assistant, turning course files into an interactive tutor that provides explanations, examples, and guided practice based solely on approved materials. Increases engagement, supports independent learning, and reinforces concepts outside class time.
Who Uses It: Faculty (builders), students (users), TAs (moderators).
- Name: [Insert Course Code] Class Companion for [Insert Course Name].
- Description: “Interactive tutor for [Insert Course Name] that explains concepts, gives step-by-step reasoning, and asks reflective follow-up questions—using only the uploaded course materials.”
- Conversation Starters:
- “Explain today’s lecture topic in simple terms for [Insert Course Name].”
- “Summarize key points from Week [Insert Number].”
- “Create a practice problem on [Insert Topic].”
- Knowledge: Upload syllabus, slides (PDF), lecture notes, readings, lab manuals—no answer keys.
- Toggles: • Browsing: OFF • Code Interpreter: ON if quantitative • Image Generation: Optional • File Uploads: ON • Conversation History: ON
Core Instructions (System Prompt)
- Clarify the student’s goal before answering.
- Provide layered explanations: (a) Overview, (b) Key Steps, (c) Worked Example.
- After each answer, offer one: (a) Comprehension Check, (b) Reflection Question, or (c) Practice Problem.
- Cite source (file name + page/section). If unsure, acknowledge uncertainty and request the relevant file.
- If asked to solve active graded work, refuse and switch to hints or study pathway.
- For quantitative questions, show concise reasoning, then the final answer. Tone: Encouraging, concise, academically rigorous.
- No external sources unless browsing is explicitly enabled.
- Never provide solutions to active graded assessments.
- “Explain how [Insert Concept] works using our Week [Insert Number] slides.”
- “Give me a mini-quiz on [Insert Topic].”
- “Walk me through the lab setup from the [Insert File Name] PDF.”
- Weekly active students
- % answers with proper citations
- Student satisfaction (1–5).
- Upload new PDFs weekly
- Bi-weekly quality spot checks.
- Create a separate browsing-enabled variant for “real-world context” connections.
Google Added AI Avatars and the Image-to-Video Veo 3 to Its ‘Vids’ Video Editor
IBL News | New York
Google added AI avatars, the image-to-video Veo 3 tool, and automatic transcript trimming capabilities to its video editor, Vids, in the Workspace productivity suite this month.
Another feature automatically detects and removes long pausers and filler words, such as “um” or “ah.”
These new AI-powered features will be available to Workspace Business or Enterprise Starter users, a Google AI Pro or Ultra subscriber, or a Workspace for Education customer.
In competition with startups like Synthesia and D-ID, Google also released a free-to-use version with basic controls, access to Google’s template, font collection, and stock media libraries, but no AI features at this time.
In this segment, where users post a script, select an avatar from a range of voices and personas, and create a video, the core pitch is “use our AI tools to create videos if you don’t have enough budget.”
OpenAI Releases Realtime API for Building Voice Agents
IBL News | New York
OpenAI made its Realtime API generally available this week, enabling developers to build voice agents. This API supports remote MCP servers, image inputs, and phone calling through Session Initiation Protocol (SIP), making voice agents more capable through access to additional tools and context.
The company also released its most advanced speech-to-speech model yet—gpt-realtime.
The new model follows complex instructions, shows stronger reasoning, produces speech that sounds more natural and expressive, and it’s better at interpreting system messages and developer prompts.
“The new speech-to-speech model in OpenAI’s Realtime API could make searching for a home on Zillow or exploring financing options feel as natural as a conversation with a friend, helping simplify decisions like buying, selling, and renting a home.”
AI companies are in the race to offer voice agents that speak with the intonation, emotion, and pace of a human.
An Anthropic and Northeastern Show How Faculty Use AI to Automate Tasks
Mikel Amigot, IBL News | New York
Anthropic released new research, in collaboration with Northeastern University, this week on how educators utilize AI. The company analyzed 74,000 anonymized conversations from higher education professionals on Claude.ai in May and June of this year.
Survey’s findings reveal how AI adoption is expanding and driving a pedagogical shift as educators utilize these tools to create tangible educational resources.
A recent Gallup survey noted that AI tools save teachers an average of 5.9 hours per week.
• The report found that educators use AI for designing lessons and developing course materials, writing grant proposals, advising students, and managing administrative tasks such as admissions and financial planning.
• The most prominent use is curriculum development, followed by conducting academic research and assessing student performance, as the second and third most common uses. Educators find AI useful for providing students and me with individualized, interactive learning experiences that go beyond what one instructor could offer.
Grading
However, AI for grading and evaluation is less frequently used, as it is perceived as the least effective, and it remains an ethically contentious issue. “Students are not paying tuition for the LLM’s time; they’re paying for my time. It’s my moral obligation to do a good job (with the assistance, perhaps, of LLMs),” said an instructor.
Anyway, some educators are heavily using it for automating assessment tasks, and it emerges as the second most automation-heavy task.
This includes subtasks such as providing feedback on student assignments and grading their work using rubrics.
Claude Artifacts
Faculty is using Claude Artifacts to create interactive and engaging educational materials for student development, such as chemistry simulations, data visualization dashboards, grading rubrics, podcasts, and videos.
The report shows the following creations:
> Data visualization: interactive displays to help students visualize everything from historical timelines to scientific concepts
> Assessment and evaluation tools: HTML-based quizzes with automatic feedback systems, CSV data processors for analyzing student performance, and comprehensive grading rubrics
> Subject-specific learning tools: specialized resources like chemistry stoichiometry games, genetics quizzes with automatic feedback, and computational physics models
> Interactive educational games: web-based games, including escape rooms, platform games, and simulations that teach concepts through gamification across various subjects and levels
> Academic calendars and scheduling tools: interactive calendars that can be automatically populated, downloaded as images, or exported as PDFs for displaying class periods, exam times, professional development sessions, and institutional events
> Budget planning and analysis tools: budget documents for educational institutions with specific expense categories, cost allocations, and budgetary management tools
> Academic documents: meeting minutes, emails for grade-related communications and academic integrity issues, recommendation letters for faculty awards, tenure appeals, grant applications, interview invitations, and committee appointments
Other Uses
Other interesting uses discovered in the Claude.ai data include:
- Create mock legal scenarios for educational simulations.
- Develop vocational education and workforce training content;
- Draft recommendation letters for academic or professional applications;
- Create meeting agendas and related administrative documents.
Trends
Claude.ai data note tasks that will augment along the way, such as creating educational and practice materials, writing grant proposals to secure external funding, academic advising and student organization mentorship, and supervising student academic work.
In addition, educators will likely delegate tasks to AI, including managing institutional finances and fundraising, maintaining student records, evaluating academic performance, advising on doctoral-level academic research, and managing academic admissions and enrollment.
Many AI interactions will often require significant context and thus collaboration between the AI and the professor.
Many educators recognize that AI is putting pressure on them to change the way, what, and how they teach and how they conduct assessments.
In coding, for example, according to one professor, “AI-based coding has completely revolutionized the analytics teaching/learning experience. Instead of debugging commas and semicolons, we can spend our time talking about the concepts around the application of analytics in business.”
In one particular Northeastern professor’s case, they shared that they “will never again assign a traditional research paper” after struggling with too many students submitting AI-written assignments. Instead, they shared: “I will redesign the assignment so it can’t be done with AI next time.”
Campus Technology: Top 3 Faculty Uses of Gen AI
- Developing curricula (57%). Common requests included designing educational games, creating interactive tools, and creating multiple-choice assessment questions.
- Conducting academic research (13%). Common requests included supporting bibliometric analysis and academic database operations, implementing and interpreting statistical models, and revising academic papers in response to reviewer feedback.
- Assessing student performance (7%). Common requests included providing detailed feedback on student assignments, evaluating academic work against assessment criteria, and summarizing student evaluation reports.
Elon Musk’s xAI Releases Its First Coding Assistant “Grok Code Fast 1”
IBL News | New York
Elon Musk’s xAI released its first coding assistant model, Grok Code Fast 1, this week, marking the company’s entry into the competitive software development market segment. It is available for free use for a limited time, with select launch partners, including GitHub Copilot and Windsurf.
Grok Code Fast 1 is one of the fastest coding models currently available.
• It shows an impressive processing speed of up to 92 tokens per second.
• It features a 256,000-token context window.
• It is powered by a mixture-of-experts architecture with 314 billion parameters, designed specifically for agentic coding workflows with visible reasoning traces.
xAI positioned it also as an alternative to existing solutions.
This release aligns with xAI’s broader strategy of open-sourcing various versions of its Grok models, including the base models of Grok-1 and Grok 2.5.
Anthropic Creates a Higher Ed Advisory Board and AI Fluency Courses
IBL News | New York
Anthropic, the company behind the AI chatbot Claude, announced the creation of a Higher Education Advisory Board made up of academic leaders, along with three new AI Fluency courses.
This Higher Education Advisory Board will be chaired by Rick Levin, who previously led Yale University and Coursera. He said, “Our role is to advise the company as it develops ethically sound policies and products that will enable learners, teachers, and administrators to benefit from AI’s transformative potential while upholding the highest standards of academic integrity and protecting student privacy.”
Other Board members come from academia as well:
- David Leebron, Former President of Rice University.
- James DeVaney, Special Advisor to the President, Associate Vice Provost for Academic Innovation, and Founding Executive Director of the Center for Academic Innovation at the University of Michigan.
- Julie Schell, Assistant Vice Provost of Academic Technology at the University of Texas, Austin.
- Matthew Rascoff, Vice Provost for Digital Education at Stanford University.
- Yolanda Watson Spiva, President of Complete College America.
Anthropic has also developed three new courses that build on its existing AI Fluency course. These classes are designed to address the need for practical frameworks for thoughtful AI integration.
Each course, co-developed with Professor Rick Dakan of Ringling College of Art and Design and Professor Joseph Feller of University College Cork, is available under a Creative Commons license, so any institution can adapt them.
• AI Fluency for Educators helps faculty integrate AI into their teaching practice, from creating materials and assessments to enhancing classroom discussions. Built on experience from early adopters, it shows what works in real classrooms.
• AI Fluency for Students teaches responsible AI collaboration for coursework and career planning. Students learn to work with AI while developing their own critical thinking skills, and write their own personal commitment to responsible AI use
• Teaching AI Fluency supports educators who want to bring AI literacy to their campuses and classrooms. It includes frameworks for instruction and assessment, plus curriculum considerations for preparing students for a more AI-enhanced world.
Anthropic is not alone in targeting higher education. OpenAI launched ChatGPT Edu, a version of its chatbot customized for universities. It includes administrative controls, enterprise-grade authentication, and features like “Study Mode,” which walks students through problems step by step.
Highlighting its “commercial data protection” framework, Microsoft embedded Copilot for Education into Office 365.
Google doubled down on its education footprint with Gemini in Classroom and Gemini for Education, designed to help teachers generate differentiated materials and give students tutoring experiences.
Grok 4 Was Made Freely Accessible to All Users
IBL News | New York
Elon Musk-owned xAI made Grok 4 freely accessible to all users worldwide this month, in an attempt to compete with rival platforms OpenAI’s GPT-5.
However, the company said that access to Grok 4 Heavy, its most advanced model, remains exclusive to SuperGrok Heavy subscribers.
Grok 4 features a dual system: Auto Mode and Expert Mode. In Auto Mode, the AI automatically decides if a user prompt requires deeper reasoning or a simple response. Expert Mode allows users to manually trigger a more in-depth answer if the initial response isn’t satisfactory.
In addition to Grok 4, xAI also rolled out Grok Imagine, a free AI video generation tool, with a limited number of queries and currently available only in the United States.
However, it presents challenges such as AI misuse. In this regard, the BBC highlighted Grok 4 misuse in creating explicit deepfake videos of celebrities like Taylor Swift and Sydney Sweeney, raising concerns about content moderation and responsible AI use.
Grok 4 is now free for all users.
The free tier allows a small number of queries per day. Beyond that requires subscription. https://t.co/mdtpamAQ3p
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) August 11, 2025
Google Teams Up with University System of Maryland to Train Students
IBL News | New York
Google announced that it is bringing Career Certificates and AI training to the twelve campuses of the University System of Maryland (USM) in partnership with the institution.
The initiative offers:
- Job-ready training in cybersecurity, data analytics, project management, and other subjects in under six months.
- AI Essentials course, with a practical approach.
- Google.org’s funding for USM’s new AI in Education Center to research how AI can improve learning for all students.
- Academic credit for completing Google Career Certificates.
- Access for faculty and students to Google’s latest AI tools, Gemini.
- Skills-based training for Maryland’s military community.
- UMGC already serves over 60,000 military-connected learners.
Globally, over one million people have completed a Google Career Certificate, and 70% report a positive career outcome, such as a new job, raise, or promotion, within six months, according to the search giant.
Currently, graduates of the Google Career Certificate program gain access to a job search platform featuring an employer consortium of more than 150 companies—including Booz Allen Hamilton, Siemens, and Google—that are seeking skilled talent.
China’s Leadership In Open-Source AI Technology Raises Alarm in the U.S.
IBL News | New York
China’s adoption and leadership in open-source AI technology is worrying U.S. policymakers and Silicon Valley companies, who are keeping the models proprietary.
Chinese advances in open source are coming one after another this year, with DeepSeek, Alibaba’s Qween, Moonshot, Z.ai, and MiniMax.
The open source or open weight models all have versions that are free for users to download and modify.
In the past, Microsoft’s Windows operating system for desktops, Google’s search engine, and the iOS and Android operating systems for smartphones were a few of the examples of proprietary models’ dominance.
In its AI action plan released in July, the Trump administration acknowledged that open-source models “could become global standards in some areas of business and in academic research.”
The report called on the U.S. to build “leading open models founded on American values.”
For now, open-source initiatives have had slim gains. Proprietary models have spent hundreds of millions of dollars developing free access to models.
• Many businesses like open-source AI because they can freely adapt it and put it on their computer systems, keeping sensitive information in-house. Moreover, they can avoid being locked into any one model.
• Researchers have long embraced open source as a way of accelerating the development of emerging technology, since it allows every user to see the code and suggest improvements.
• Fearing being cut off from American technologies, the Chinese government has encouraged open-source research and development not only in AI but also in operating systems, semiconductor architecture, and engineering software.
• Meanwhile, the Trump administration worries that if Chinese AI models dominate the globe, Beijing will figure out a way to exploit it for geopolitical advantage.
• Engineers in Asia said Chinese models were often more sophisticated in understanding their local languages and catching cultural nuances, as they are trained with more data in Chinese, which shares similarities with some other Asian languages.
WSJ: China’s Lead in Open-Source AI Jolts Washington and Silicon Valley
Instructure Launched ‘Canvas Career’, a Platform for Non-Credit, Continuing Education and Workforce Development Programs
IBL News | New York
Instructure announced last month the launch in beta for select customers of its workforce-aligned, employee-centric, skills-first LMS named Canvas Career. General availability of the platform is expected in January 2026.
This platform is oriented toward upskilling and reskilling adult learners, helping them build in-demand skills, advance in their careers, and stay competitive in a rapidly changing job market.
A recent survey conducted by The Harris Poll, commissioned by Instructure, stated that 73% of U.S. workers reported feeling unprepared to adapt to changes or disruptions in their careers over the next five years.
Additionally, about 50% expressed uncertainty about which skills, certifications, or credentials employers value.
Canvas Career is explicitly built for non-credit, continuing education, career switchers, and training for internal workforces and external customers, including short courses and skills-based learning programs.
With built-in AI tools, credentialing, video content, and enterprise integrations, Canvas Career focuses on what to teach and how to deliver it effectively.
The antecedent of this platform was Bridge, which Instructure finally sold.