In today’s digital landscape, where information literacy is crucial, educational tools that integrate artificial intelligence can be game-changers for productivity. Microsoft is taking significant strides in this arena, making Bing Chat Enterprise available in preview for Microsoft 365 A3 and A5 faculty users at no additional cost. Furthermore, they have announced the general availability of their latest Learning Accelerator, Search Progress.
Bing Chat Enterprise: Your Virtual Assistant for Higher Education
Originally unveiled at Microsoft Inspire, Bing Chat Enterprise has stirred quite an interest among education professionals and institutions. The overarching promise of Bing Chat Enterprise is simple but profound: it aims to alleviate administrative burdens for educators, staff, and researchers using generative AI technology, allowing them to focus on what truly matters—teaching and learning.
Microsoft is promising data security and a comprehensive user experience with various features to support faculty. Data security is a paramount concern for educational institutions. Bing Chat Enterprise offers commercial-level data protection, meaning all user and chat data remain confined within the organisation. Microsoft has outlined that this ensures there is no unauthorised data leakage; Microsoft itself cannot access this data and is not used for training AI models.
Bing Chat Enterprise offers comprehensive answers, including links to source material, visual aids like graphs and charts, and more. If you are an IT admin with a Microsoft 365 A3 or A5 license, you can review the documentation to manage Bing Chat Enterprise and enable or opt out of it for your faculty. Once activated, the chat feature is accessible from bing.com/chat or via the Microsoft Edge sidebar when logged in with a work account.
As an example, here are just some of the things that Bing Chat Enterprise can do for you:
- Draft content, such as lesson plans for specific subjects and classes.
- Personalise learning materials based on different Lexile levels.
- Brainstorm unique project ideas for various courses.
- Summarise PDF documents.
- Improve efficiency by evaluating and suggesting changes to educational schedules.
Introducing Search Progress: Empowering Information Literacy
As we navigate the AI age, teaching students to evaluate the credibility of the content becomes increasingly important. Search Progress is a new Learning Accelerator that allows educators to design, customise, and assign research projects, fostering lifelong information literacy skills in students.
Educators can monitor their students’ research patterns, offering valuable insights into their search habits and queries. For students, the tool is designed to improve information literacy by providing a structured environment to collect and reflect on sources.
The Search Progress learning accelerator also provides NewsGuard ratings to help students understand news sites’ credibility and Education Insights to track student progress and adapt future assignments accordingly.
To learn more about these new applications, you can:
- Visit Microsoft’s resource: “Introducing Search Progress: A new way to assign and track research projects in Microsoft Teams.”
- Download the Search Progress one-pager.
- Take Microsoft’s free module to develop search strategies with Search Coach and Search Progress.
As artificial intelligence and information literacy increasingly intersect in educational landscapes, having the right tools is essential. Microsoft’s Bing Chat Enterprise and Search Progress provide a potential opportunity to further harness the power of AI in education, allowing staff and students to experience the future of AI learning. What do you think about the new Bing search engine? Be sure to leave your comment below and come along to the next Microsoft for Teaching Sig to learn more about Bing Chat Enterprise and the range of available Microsoft Tools and applications.
