By Microsoft Education Team
Over the last year, we have seen incredible innovation, resiliency, and adaptability around the intersection of AI technology and education. Through deep collaboration with education institutions and thoughtful consideration we can leverage AI to improve efficiency, bring time and joy back to teaching, and help students prepare for an AI driven future. It is increasingly important that we create opportunities to partner and learn with our education community. We’re energized by early research demonstrating the ability for generative AI to positively impact learning.
Today, we’re thrilled to announce several expansions for education audiences. Microsoft Copilot with commercial data protection will be available to all faculty and higher education students ages 18 and above. And, Copilot for Microsoft 365 eligibility will now include education faculty and staff.
Our efforts are guided by our AI principles and Responsible AI Standard and build on decades of research on grounding and privacy-preserving machine learning. Additionally, our Customer Copyright Commitment means education customers can be confident using our services and the output they generate without worrying about copyright claims. We look forward to exploring the potential for these offers in education, iterating and improving, and supporting all education organizations in the era of AI.
Since launching Microsoft Copilot with commercial data protection (formerly Bing Chat Enterprise) to faculty and staff in August, we’ve heard about powerful uses around the world. Wichita Public Schools is an inspiring example where their educators have already leveraged it to personalize learning, resulting in saving time and energy to reinvest back into their students.
Today, we’re happy to share that we are expanding eligibility for commercial data protection to all faculty users and to higher education students ages 18 and above. Copilot provides AI chat for the web with access to models like GPT-4 and DALL-E 3 at no additional cost. Commercial data protection will be enabled when eligible users are signed in with their school account starting in early 2024. This means user and organizational data are protected, chat prompts and responses in Copilot are not saved, Microsoft has no eyes-on access to them, and they aren’t used to train the underlying large language models.
“Artificial intelligence has the power to revolutionize higher education. Our partnership with Microsoft has allowed us to improve learning for students and support innovative research across Florida State University through an automated, safe, and reliable platform. I am excited to see what our next generation of leaders can achieve with tools such as Copilot.” – Jonathan Fozard, Associate Vice President and Chief Information Officer, Florida State University 
Microsoft Copilot with commercial data protection is being expanded to all faculty users and to higher education students ages 18 and above.
Over the last 10 months, Copilot has continued to bring advanced capabilities and unlock new scenarios. Features rolling out soon include GPT-4 Turbo to tackle longer tasks, the new DALL-E 3 model with higher quality images, Multi-Modal with Search Grounding for better image understanding, and Code Interpreter for more accurate calculations and analysis. Students can leverage these innovations and more from Copilot to:
“We’re excited to offer Copilot to our students to help them build important skills, provide personalised feedback and innovative solutions, and ensure their privacy and protection. Free access promotes equality and enables economically disadvantaged students to use these powerful tools that would be otherwise inaccessible.” – Mrs. Aune Valk, Vice Rector for Academic Affairs at the University of Tartu, Estonia
If you’re an IT administrator, you can find more information about managing Copilot from the overview on Microsoft Learn and adoption resources. Administrators have the ability to manage and control user access by validating their school type, leveraging the Copilot service plan, updating age group classifications, and even creating their own terms of use. We encourage all customers to learn more and prepare their student population for AI through the recommendations in our Tech Community blog.
Copilot’s earliest users have already seen productivity and creativity gains in organizations across industries. We are excited to bring this opportunity to education by extending the availability of the enterprise offer for Copilot for Microsoft 365 at $30 per user per month for faculty and staff on January 1st, 2024. Copilot for Microsoft 365 combines the power of large language models (LLMs) with your organization’s data—all in the flow of work—to turn your words into one of the most powerful productivity tools on the planet. It brings a whole new way to work for everyone from faculty and researchers to IT pros and administrators.
“Microsoft Copilot offers a transformative solution for higher education, significantly optimizing time for faculty. This multifaceted tool is already expediting Hoosiers’ workflows but also serves as an invaluable resource for cultivating specialized skill sets in AI and technology among our IU community.” – Anne Leftwich, Associate Vice President for Learning Technologies at Indiana University
Outside of the classroom, we see opportunities to shift how staff spend their time to their most impactful work across research, communications, marketing, data analysis, fundraising, and management. We’ve also heard from Academic Medical Centers who are experiencing improved efficiency and discovering new use cases to harness the potential of generative AI.
“AI is a powerful differentiator, and our unique partnership with Microsoft accelerates our mutual focus on redefining conventional approaches for how we work and deliver care. Solutions like Copilot for Microsoft 365 bring us one step closer to realizing our vision for the future through the responsible, secure, and ethical use of AI.” – Jeffrey Ferranti, M.D., Senior Vice President and Chief Digital Officer at Duke Health
Copilot for Microsoft 365 is your AI assistant at work, and it goes far beyond simple questions and answers. It combs across your entire universe of data—all your emails, meetings, chats, documents, and more, plus the web—to solve your most complex work problems. And it’s integrated into the Microsoft 365 Apps millions of people use every day—Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, Teams, and more. Plus, it includes enterprise-grade security, privacy, compliance, and responsible AI to ensure all data processing happens in your tenant. Microsoft 365 A3 and A5 faculty will be eligible, and you can learn more from our documentation, adoption resources, and Tech Community blog.
“As early adopters of AI and leveraging our recent partnership with Microsoft to develop our AI tutor, we are excited to realise the productivity gains of Copilot for M365 in the Ministry of Education.” – Dr Hassan AlSayegh, Advisor to the Minister of Education UAE
As we bring the latest AI technology into education, we will also continue developing training material and opportunities for learners to build AI literacy. Today, we are releasing a new resource, an AI Classroom Toolkit to help teach and support students in using generative AI safely. It’s a creative resource that blends narrative stories with instructional information to create immersive and effective learning experiences for educators and their students. We also recently launched the Minecraft Hour of Code: Generation AI which is helping make responsible AI more accessible for a wide range of K12 students. And for higher education students and educators, we just created a new Microsoft Learn module to help them learn about and practice with the capabilities of Microsoft Copilot.
Last month, LinkedIn released their Future of Work Report and found that new AI tools have the potential to lighten workloads and help professionals, like educators, focus on the most critical parts of their job.
In the last of a series of four whitepapers created by The Economist and sponsored by Microsoft, the authors note the correlation between knowledge work and higher education. In the whitepaper, called “Leveraging technology to humanise the learning experience: Key lessons higher education can learn from ‘knowledge worker’ companies,” the authors also suggest best practices that education institutions can implement from knowledge work to better engage and connect with students.
As higher education institutions continue to adapt their program offerings and instruction to the changing needs of students, they are also facing the dual challenges of addressing equity issues exacerbated by the pandemic and attracting and engaging learners spanning different lifestyles, life-stages, and learning styles.
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