Microsoft has announced Bing Chat Enterprise and a new learning accelerator, Search Progress, to enhance the search experience for education purposes. Bing Chat Enterprise is available in preview for Microsoft 365 A3 and A5 faculty users at no additional costs and will allow the said users to chat with an AI-powered assistant.
Here is what you need to know about the two features:
Microsoft Bing Chat Enterprise
Bing Chat Enterprise will allow educators, staff, and researchers to leverage generative AI to assist with various tasks including drafting content, generating summaries and schedule planning. This feature is not available for students and is exclusive to Microsoft 365 A3 and A5 Education users only. Students can continue using Bing Chat with a Microsoft account.
Microsoft points out that similar to Bing Chat, Bing Chat Enterprise is grounded on web data and provides complete answers with links to content sources, along with visual answers that include graphs, charts and images. In addition, the company has announced the feature will offer commercial data protection. This means user and chat data will not be leaked, saved, accessed or even used by anyone outside of the organization including Microsoft. Additionally, chat data will not be used to train underlying models.
Once enabled, eligible 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 from September 21st.
Introducing Search Progress
Microsoft has launched Search Progress, a new Learning Accelerator aimed at improving the Search Experience for both educators and students.
Students can practice information literacy skills in Search Progress with built-in features that help them improve how they gather and evaluate sources. Part of the announcement blog released by Microsoft reads, “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 Experience will provide feedback on how students can improve their information literacy skills based on the monitored student’s search behavior.
It is designed to allow educators to create, customize, and assign research projects. In addition, Search Experience will provide educators with actionable student and class-level data insights. Search Progress is built into Teams Assignments and is now available to all Teams for Education customers.
