Montana

How a digital learning academy is bridging Montana's educational miles with help from AI

An interview with Jason Neiffer, the Executive Director of Montana Digital Academy, Montana’s state virtual school.

Four images of Jason Neiffer, the Executive Director of Montana Digital Academy, engaging in day-to-day operations
3 min read

There's no more rural state than Montana. If you were to drive from the northwestern corner of the state, and head to the south eastern part of the state, that's a 15-hour drive in the Montana winter. This geography challenge is pretty extraordinary. Small towns like Eureka and Ekalaka have wonderful thriving schools, but they don't have the teachers to offer a diverse set of electives.

Because of this, Montana Digital Academy was created by the 2009 legislature to put together a statewide effort around distance and digital learning to try to make as large of an impact as possible. For the vast majority of students that we serve, we're helping them find access to an elective they can’t get in their face-to-face environment. Having a statewide program that can offer an alternative is extremely important to make sure every student has equal access to the diversity of courses and environments they desire to find future success in the world.

I've been here since day one, first as the curriculum director and now as the executive director. From the get go, we’ve had much more interest than we anticipated, serving nearly 2,500 students in our first year.

When generative AI became available in late 2022, our team was pretty captivated. I immediately started connecting with the technology. It seemed obvious right away this would have a significant impact on education and distance learning. But the narrative right now about AI and education is very dominated by AI as a cheating machine. We understand the concern, but I also think it’s preventing the larger conversations we need to be having about how these technologies help us do our jobs better so we can improve school environments for the students we’re serving.

For instance, creating a great online course is exceedingly time-intensive. As a result, we've been working on a process to turn a generative AI tool into an expert that we can bring into the process, saving teachers time so they can focus more on their students. Google’s NotebookLM and Gemini are perfect for this because we can curate the sources it’s pulling from and engage with the material. We’re mindful of the fact that there are many open questions about intellectual property and AI, so we’re very thoughtful about how we pick our sources.

For example, for the world geography course we’re developing right now, Gemini helped us determine what’s typically taught in a high school geography course, and then we used Google’s NotebookLM to pull from a rich list of topics in those open licensed expert textbooks. It’s as if we have all these wonderful college professors as our content area experts helping us decide what to teach.

Jason Neiffer, Executive Director of Montana Digital Academy

But we also want to be very thoughtful about keeping the human in the loop. The seat of the pants wisdom of teachers remains extremely important. If you've taught geography for 20 years, you're going to know some intangibles about what's going to get student interest. So, we pull humans back in to say, “Based on your experiences, what do you think is going to engage our kids here?”

Another incredible use we’ve found with NotebookLM is helping us organize institutional knowledge to promote more knowledge-sharing across the organization. We send people in and out of these educational trainings and conferences all the time, but who has time to go through a Google Doc where someone took notes?

With Google’s NotebookLM, we can create these incredible mind maps from 150 pages of handouts or an audio recording of a training session from my Pixel. NotebookLM keeps adding features that make this an even more elegant process to extract the right information from all this content.

Jason Neiffer, Executive Director of Montana Digital Academy

The variety of knowledgeable resources help inform our work and improve our students’ learning experience. I qualify to retire in the state of Montana right now, but AI has given me some new energy, and I want to see where it all goes. There are lots of things that just don't fit within the 40-hour work week that we could be doing to make education more responsive and valuable for all the students we’re teaching. Thinking about the possibilities is truly exciting.