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.