AI Companies Roll out Educational Tools
Fall semesters are just beginning and the companies offering three leading AI models: Gemini by Google, Claude by Anthropic and ChatGPT by OpenAI have rolled out tools to facilitate AI-enhanced learning. Here’s a comparison and how to get them.
Each of the three leading AI providers has taken a somewhat different approach to providing an array of education tools and support for students, faculty and administrators. We can expect these tools to improve, proliferate and become a competitive battleground among the three. At stake is, at least in part, the future marketplace for their products. To the extent educators utilize, administrators support, and students become comfortable with one of the proprietary products, that provider will be at an advantage when those students rise to positions that allow them to specify use of a provider in educational institutions, companies and corporations across the country.
Anthropic, the company that makes the series of Claude applications, announced on August 21st “two initiatives for AI in education to help navigate these critical decisions: a Higher Education Advisory Board to guide Claude’s development for education, and three AI Fluency courses co-created with educators that can help teachers and students build practical, responsible AI skills.” The board is chaired by Rick Levin, former president of Yale and more recently at Coursera. Anthropic notes in the announcement, that “at Coursera, he built one of the world’s largest platforms for online learning, bringing high-quality education to millions worldwide.” The board, itself, is populated with former and current leading administrators at Rice University, University of Michigan, University of Texas-Austin, Stanford, and Yolanda Watson Spiva who is president of Complete College America. Anthropic says the board will “help guide how Claude serves teaching, learning, and research in higher education.”
The three AI Fluency Courses that Anthropic co-created with educators are designed to help create thoughtful practical frameworks for AI integration:
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.
The courses and more are freely available at the Anthropic Learning Academy.
Earlier last month, Google unveiled Guided Learning in Gemini: From Answers to Understanding. “Guided Learning encourages participation through probing and open-ended questions that spark a discussion and provide an opportunity to dive deeper into a subject. The aim is to help you build a deep understanding instead of just getting answers. Guided Learning breaks down problems step-by-step and adapts explanations to your needs — all to help you build knowledge and skills.”
The Google Guided Learning project offers additional support to faculty. “We worked with educators to design Guided Learning to be a partner in their teaching, built on the core principle that real learning is an active, constructive process. It encourages students to move beyond answers and develop their own thinking by guiding them with questions that foster critical thought. To make it simple to bring this approach into their classrooms, we created a dedicated link that educators can post directly in Google Classroom or share with students.”
Google announced an array of additional tools for the coming year:
– We’re offering students in the U.S. as well as Japan, Indonesia, Korea and Brazil a free one-year subscription to Google’s AI Pro plan to help make the most of AI’s power for their studies. Sign-up for the free AI Pro Plan offer.
– Try new learning features in Gemini including Guided Learning, Flashcards and Study Guides. And students and universities around the world can get a free one-year subscription to a Google AI Pro plan.
– AI Mode in Google Search now features tools like Canvas, Search Live with video and PDF uploads.
– NotebookLM is introducing Featured Notebooks, Video Overviews and a new study panel; it’s also now available to users under 18.
– And to help students get the most out of all these new features, we’ve announced Google AI for Education Accelerator, an initiative to offer free AI training and Google Career Certificates to every college student in America. Over 100 public universities have already signed up. We’re also committing $1 billion in new funding to education in the United States over the next three years.
That brings us to OpenAI which announced “ChatGPT Study Mode” on July 29, 2025. Noting ChatGPT’s overall leadership and success, Open AI added, “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? 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.”
The “Study Mode” function is available now in the Free, Plus, Pro and Team versions GPT products providing an array of features:
Interactive prompts: Combines Socratic questioning, hints, and self-reflection prompts to guide understanding and promote active learning, instead of providing answers outright.
Scaffolded responses: Information is organized into easy-to-follow sections that highlight the key connections between topics, keeping information engaging with just the right amount of context and reducing overwhelm for complex topics.
Personalized support: Lessons are tailored to the right level for the user, based on questions that assess skill level and memory from previous chats.
Knowledge checks: Quizzes and open-ended questions, along with personalized feedback to track progress, support knowledge retention and the ability to apply that knowledge in new contexts.
Flexibility: Easily toggle study mode on and off during a conversation, giving you the flexibility to adapt to your learning goals in each conversation.
I encourage readers to visit each of the sites linked above to become familiar with the three different ways in which Anthropic, Google and OpenAI are approaching providing support to educational institutions and individual instructors and learners. This is an opportunity to become more familiar with each of the leading AI providers and their apps. Now is the time to become experienced in using these tools that collectively have become the foundation of innovation and efficiency in 2025.
This column was originally published in Inside Higher Ed.
Ray Schroeder is Professor Emeritus, Associate Vice Chancellor for Online Learning at the University of Illinois Springfield (UIS) and Senior Fellow at UPCEA. Each year, Ray publishes and presents nationally on emerging topics in online and technology-enhanced learning. Ray’s social media publications daily reach more than 12,000 professionals. He is the inaugural recipient of the A. Frank Mayadas Online Leadership Award, recipient of the University of Illinois Distinguished Service Award, the United States Distance Learning Association Hall of Fame Award, and the American Journal of Distance Education/University of Wisconsin Wedemeyer Excellence in Distance Education Award 2016.
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