Chico State will make OpenAI’s large language model, ChatGPT Edu, which focuses on education, available to all students, faculty and staff with a csuchico email beginning Tuesday. This follows a deal made between OpenAI and the Chancellor’s Office to bring ChatGPT Edu to all 23 CSU campuses.
ChatGPT Edu will launch Tuesday. The university is limited to sending 1,000 emails every hour. Some community members may receive the email on Wednesday, which is the Division of Information Technology’s desired day to send all of the emails out.
On Feb. 2, the Chancellor’s Office announced they had come to an agreement to bring ChatGPT Edu to the 430,000 students and 63,000 faculty and staff. This comes at no cost to the individual campuses, rather, the Chancellor’s Office is paying nearly $17 million over the 36-month contract term.
While some campuses have already begun rolling out ChatGPT Edu, each university may choose how and when it is implemented.
What is ChatGPT Edu?
On May 30, 2024 OpenAI announced ChatGPT Edu, a large language model specialized for academia, according to OpenAI’s blog post. ChatGPT Edu will include:
- Access to GPT-4o – OpenAI’s flagship model
- Data analytics, web browsing and document summarization
- The ability to build GPTs, custom version of ChatGPT and share them within university workspaces
- Over 50 languages supported
- DALL-E image generator
Individuals will be allowed 10 messages every five hours when using GPT-4.5, after which users can have unlimited messages with the GPT-4o model and GPT-4o mini, according to the Chico State ChatGPT Edu Frequently Asked Questions site.
This model is geared specifically toward education, bringing in capabilities for students, faculty and administration.
OpenAI is not allowed to train its models on content given to ChatGPT Edu per the contract between CSU and OpenAI. However, the data will be stored on OpenAI’s cloud storage. OpenAI uses Microsoft’s Azure, a cloud computing platform for their cloud storage.
“When the California State University Chancellor’s Office acquired licensing for ChatGPT, Chico State performed additional internal checks to verify that it complies with industry standards and that Student, Faculty, and Staff data is protected,” According to an email from DoIT. “Using Chico State’s ChatGPT ensures its usage is protected by regulatory requirements for our sensitive data, including the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act.“
The university, nor the Chancellor’s Office, will have access to individual prompts or responses, but they will be tracking usage and active users along with other analytics, according to DoIT.
In the faculty forum for ChatGPT Edu last Thursday, Director of Faculty Development Zach Justus emphasized that faculty needed to be transparent about the use of AI with their students.
Justus explained that the role that faculty and staff play is being experts in their field, as ChatGPT Edu is prone to issues such as hallucinating – giving false information confidently – and bias, therefore being experts they are equipped to decipher what is useful from what is not.
From the same forum faculty members were given suggestions on how they could use ChatGPT Edu. Some examples were using this tool to help guide them through curriculum, creating lesson plans, help grading and planning for the future by creating artificial scenarios.
Faculty are already using artificial intelligence in their classes. Jessica Toombs, an assistant professor in the College of Agriculture, encourages her students to use AI to gather background information. But when it comes to higher level thinking, writing or applying concepts she doesn’t allow for the use of AI.
Toombs thinks that it is “… a powerful tool but we need to make sure we are using it in the right ways.”
Some staff are worried that the community won’t be using it in the right ways, including Megan Mann, a field placement coordinator in the School of Education, who is worried about already overworked staff not getting their workload decreased by hiring more staff, and rather the university will just tell them to use AI to reduce their workload.
Students are faced with different challenges, understanding the limits of what they can do with AI. Tyler Duck, a freshman studying advanced manufacturing and robotics shared that he wasn’t aware ChatGPT Edu was coming to campus but he has heard of ChatGPT. Duck said he has previously used the system to create study guides but thinks the university bringing this system to campus will encourage cheating.
“People will abuse it and not do their work,” Duck said.
Elias Hidalgo, a graduate student, was initially happy about the announcement of ChatGPT Edu coming to campus. However he felt that the university hasn’t done enough to educate students or supply the community with enough training on how to ethically use the model.
Another student that was unaware of ChatGPT Edu’s rollout is Franchesca Cortez, a freshman studying business marketing. She shared that she would find it useful for summarizing information, but wouldn’t be using it to cheat.
From the freshmen that The Orion interviewed, none were aware of the ChatGPT Edu rollout. Some said they just don’t check their emails.
There was a feeling from many students, faculty and staff that it was unclear how this would change the campus culture. Some faculty are already implementing it into their classes and some staff are using it to aid in work that they don’t want to do.
Students on the other hand have been using AI in classes for some time, whether to complete work they don’t want to do or to aid them for an upcoming test.
Matthew Meuter, a faculty member in the marketing department, shared that he believes it’s a good thing the university is making it available to everyone. But he was unsure what this would mean for the campus community.
“We have to sit back and watch how this settles out,” Meuter said.
How to use ChatGPT Edu
From Tuesday to Thursday the campus community will receive an email from OpenAI on how to set up your account. If you are already paying for ChatGPT then you can transfer your data over to the new account.
ITSS will be hosting a drop-in Zoom session to support community members with the new model. ITSS has been given a pilot program to get ahead of any of the questions that community members may encounter, according to Director of ITSS Amandeep Grewal.
ITSS is also hosting an immersion day on Tuesday for an all-day event at Sylvesters 100. It will feature panels from OpenAI representatives, EAB and DoIT.
Students are also encouraged to be transparent about their use of ChatGPT Edu. While this system is something that is being promoted by the university, the instructional faculty have the final say on how students are allowed to engage with these systems in their coursework for the class.
The university has been pushing ChatGPT Edu into the campus conversation with emails, webinars, forums and a parody of “Not like us” by Kendrick Lamar called AI Unlocked.
But, not everyone is happy about how this was handled.
The California Faculty Association, representing over 29,000 tenured and tenure-track faculty across the 23 CSU campuses according to their NFO pamphlet from 2024-2025, filed an unfair practice charge against the California Public Employees Board on March 13, voicing frustrations that faculty was not informed or consulted on ChatGPT Edu’s procurement.
“…we argue that the CSU has violated the law by failing to meet and confer with CFA prior to implementing the A.I. Initiative,” the CFA press release from March 20 stated.
This has not seemed to impede ChatGPT Edu’s roll out onto campus.
Share your thoughts with The Orion on this Google form on ChatGPT Edu.
Chris Hutton can be reached at orionmanagingeditor@gmail.com or cshutton@csuchico.edu
