AI Use Case: Australian Catholic Schools Takes the Lead

Via the Australian AI in Education Podcast from Dan Bowen and Ray Fleming.

Dan and Ray are a great listen and do a great job of alternating news, application, and study roundups with interviews and longer-form discussions on the usage of AI in education. Over the last two topic podcasts, they focused on the deployment of AI in Brisbane's Catholic Schools.

The Archdiocese of Brisbane has 146 schools with over 76,000 students across its territory (reminder that the continental US minus the Pacific Northwest and New England is about the size of Australia) and partnered with Microsoft to roll out CoPilot to its teachers and students.

The first podcast features Leigh Williams, CIO of Brisbane Catholic Education, who discusses the project. Leigh's enthusiasm for students and supporting teachers comes through clearly in the podcast. The project began by asking pilot schools in the Archdiocese to track their time. Teachers and staff then received training and support in these pilot schools on CoPilot. After using it, teachers again tracked their time. This simple study showed that workloads were reduced by nine or more hours and was the spark to create buy-in from staff across the Archdiocese.

Leigh also discusses rooting this rollout in the Rome Call for AI Ethics and the use of change champions to promote the project, support colleagues, and roll it across and within schools. By the time of the podcast (Australia's summer), they tracked that 85% of staff were using AI daily—a far higher number than most other fields and organizations.

The second podcast features the duo of Lee Barrett and Prem Radhakrishnan, who work at CEnet, and built CEchat—an AI chatbot for the schools. Essentially, this two-person team worked with Cogniti—an open-source, education-focused chatbot—to adapt the tool to Catholic schools. CEnet is a not-for-profit organization that supports Catholic dioceses across Australia with technology infrastructure and support.

The podcast is split into two, roughly fifteen-minute, segments. The first covers overview and implementation with the duo explaining their goal and process. The second focuses on a conversation between Dan and Prem and delves more deeply into the technical aspects, including security and integrations with Google and other tools. The flagging features and agent creation are also discussed.

ceChat's roadmap

The interviews are relatively short and provide a roadmap for schools, Catholic and otherwise, to pursue cooperation, change, and AI in exciting ways. First, this project emphasizes the importance of cooperation. With dioceses and schools working together, there is a support system for technology, training, and professional development—something one or a few schools would struggle to do at scale.

Second, by establishing a concrete plan for rollout, creating buy-in, offering multiple avenues of support, and celebrating quick wins, the AI project follows change management best practices. It isn't being treated as a small, random decision to try, but instead a systematic approach for teachers and students to address real goals: teacher support and workload, student skills and knowledge, and ethical development around this topic in a Catholic context.

Lastly, the project is a call to recognize the need to approach AI in a Catholic context. AI is here—our students are certainly engaging with it out of the classroom. AI use and ability are at their lowest capability today—it will only get better. Our schools cannot miss the chance to teach our students to be effective, efficient, and ethical users of AI as they did with cellular devices, social media, and other technological changes that have damaged the social and moral fabric of our children.