Editor’s note: This blog was originally published on August 21, 2023, and was updated on December 14, 2023, to include the following: Starting early February 2024, all faculty and higher education students 18+ will be eligible when signed in to Microsoft Copilot (formerly Bing Chat Enterprise) with their work or school account. Eligibility includes Student Use Benefit users. Learn more at aka.ms/CopilotExpansionEDU
Today, we’re excited to share two ways we’re enhancing search experiences in education to help provide access to better answers, unlock creativity, and save time. Bing Chat Enterprise is now available in preview for Microsoft 365 A3 and A5 faculty users at no additional cost. And at a time when information literacy is more important than ever, we’re pleased to announce the general availability of our newest Learning Accelerator, Search Progress.
Leverage AI-powered chat with commercial data protection
Since Bing Chat Enterprise was launched in preview at Microsoft Inspire last month, we’ve heard from many of you who want to use it for your work as an education professional. We know generative AI has the potential to help educators, staff, and researchers alike to rediscover the joy of work by alleviating administrative burdens and reclaiming time and energy to focus on what matters most in and outside the classroom. But we also know that to do that, you need to be assured your data will remain protected.
Bing Chat Enterprise gives your organization AI-powered chat with commercial data protection. What goes in—and comes out—remains protected. This means user and chat data will not leak outside the organization, chat data is not saved, Microsoft has no eye-on access to it, and chat data is not used to train our underlying models.
Like Bing Chat, Bing Chat Enterprise is grounded in web data and provides complete answers with links to content sources, along with visual answers that include graphs, charts and images, and is designed in line with our AI principles.
Once Bing Chat Enterprise is enabled, faculty can access it from Bing.com/chat or the Microsoft Edge sidebar when signed in with a Microsoft Entra ID (Azure Active Directory).
If you’re an IT admin licensed for Microsoft 365 A3 or A5 and you want to enable or opt out of Bing Chat Enterprise for your faculty, you can review the documentation to manage Bing Chat Enterprise. Once enabled, faculty can access it from bing.com/chat or the Microsoft Edge sidebar when signed in with their work account. Unless you opt out, Microsoft will enable Bing Chat Enterprise by default for eligible users no earlier than September 21st.
We look forward to hearing about how you’ll use it. You can ask Bing Chat Enterprise to help:
- Draft content: “Create lesson plans on the Kinematics unit for my AP Physics class. Include the relevant learning objectives, materials, and activities”
- Personalize learning: “Generate a reading passage sample for my 3rd grade class about the ocean, include three versions for Lexile levels 420L to 650L, 520L to 820L, 740L to 940L”
- Brainstorm: “List 20 unique project ideas for my secondary school European history class”
- Summarize a PDF open in Edge: “Recap the findings of this flipped classroom research paper and list three recommendations and three challenges”
- Improve efficiency: “Act as an elementary school schedule design expert, review the schedule to identify problems and suggest changes that provide additional planning time for educators”
You can find even more applications and tips in the Microsoft Learn module Empower educators to explore the potential of artificial intelligence.
Bing Chat Enterprise is not available for students, they will continue to be able to access Bing Chat with a Microsoft account. We’re continuing to listen to feedback and work with the education community. If you have more questions about Bing Chat Enterprise, visit our Tech Community Blog.
Develop lifelong information literacy skills with Search Progress
Information literacy is critical, especially as the need for students to be able to evaluate content for credibility and potential fabrications grows in the era of AI. Search Progress, a new Learning Accelerator, allows educators to create, customize, and assign research projects where learners use Search Coach in a structured environment to gather sources and reflect on selections to help students gain lifelong information literacy skills. Search Progress is built into Teams Assignments and is now available to all Teams for Education customers.
Search Progress offers many benefits for both educators and students. For educators, Search Progress allows you to get a view of your student’s thinking in the research process. The final assignment will provide you visibility into a search-by-search breakdown of your student’s search habits and the queries used.
Students can practice information literacy skills in Search Progress with built-in features that help them improve how they gather and evaluate sources.
For students, Search Progress helps build information literacy skills by offering simple and authentic ways to find, curate, and reflect on sources throughout the research process. Your students are empowered to practice information literacy skills with built-in features that help them improve and reflect on how they gather and evaluate sources. To help students learn about credibility, sites that frequently post news have NewsGuard ratings that evaluate their adherence to journalistic standards.
Like all Learning Accelerators, Search Progress will offer educators a wide range of actionable student- and class-level data with Education Insights. With this, it becomes much more straightforward for you to identify which of your students are ahead, which are on track, and which will need more assistance. You can also use Insights to have deeper conversations with your students about their specific search habits, and to better tune future assignments to the needs of your class.
Search Progress will offer educators a wide range of actionable student- and class-level data with Education Insights.
Search Progress gives you and your students support throughout the entirety of a research assignment, helping learners of all ages gain lifelong information literacy skills. Start adding Search Progress to your assignments today to teach information literacy to your students.
- Visit Introducing Search Progress: A new way to assign and track research projects in Microsoft Teams.
- Download the Search Progress one-pager.
- Take the free Microsoft Learn module Develop search strategies with Search Coach and Search Progress.
As information literacy skills and innovations in AI become a bigger part of learning and education, we know it’s important for you and your students to have the right tools to succeed. We’re excited to be able to offer a range of tools in this space for educational institutions that now includes Bing Chat, Bing Chat Enterprise, Search Coach and Search Progress, and Azure OpenAI on your data for when tailored solutions are needed.
