When Meta held its annual conference at the end of September, the tech giant announced it is betting that the next wave of computing will come in the form of smart eyeglasses.

Mark Zuckberberg, Meta’s founder and CEO, held up what he described as the first working prototype of Orion, which lets wearers see both the physical world and a computer display hovering in the field of vision.

“They’re not a headset,” he said on stage as he announced the device, which looked like a set of unusually chunky eyeglasses. “This is the physical world with holograms overlaid on it.”

For educators, this might not come as welcome news.

After all, one of the hottest topics in edtech these days is the growing practice of banning smartphones in schools, after teachers have reported that the devices distract students from classroom activities and socializing in person with others. And a growing body of research, popularized by the Jonathan Haidt book “The Anxious Generation,” argues that smartphone and social media use harms the mental health of teenagers.

When it’s proving hard enough to regulate the appropriate use of smartphones, what will it be like to manage a rush of kids wearing computers on their faces?

Some edtech experts see upsides, though, when the technology is ready to be used for educational activities.

The idea of using VR headsets to enter an educational multiverse — the last big idea Meta was touting when it changed its corporate name three years ago from Facebook — hasn’t caught on widely, in part because getting a classroom full of students fitted with headsets and holding controllers can be difficult for teachers (not to mention expensive to obtain all that gear). But if smart glasses become cheap enough for a cart to be wheeled in with enough pairs for each student, so they can all do some activity together that blends the virtual world with in-person interactions, they could be a better fit.

“Augmented reality allows for more sharing and collaborative work than VR,” says Maya Georgieva, who runs an innovation center for VR and AR at The New School in New York City. “Lots of these augmented reality applications build on the notion of active learning and experiential learning naturally.”

And there is some initial research that has found that augmented reality experiences in education can lead to improvements in learning outcomes since, as one recent research paper put it, “they transform the learning process into a full-body experience.”

Cheating Glasses?

The Orion glasses that Zuckerberg previewed last week are not ready for prime time — in fact the Meta CEO said they won’t be released to the general public until 2027.

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But the company already sells smart eyeglasses through a partnership with sunglass-maker Ray-Ban, which are now retailing for around $300. And other companies make similar products as well.

These gadgets, which have been on the market for a couple of years in some form, don’t have a display. But they do have a small built-in computer, a camera, a microphone and speakers. And recent advances in AI mean that newer models can serve as a talking version of a chatbot that users can access when they’re away from their computer or smartphone.

While so far the number of students who own smart glasses appears low, there have already been some reports of students using smart glasses to try to cheat.

This year in Tokyo, for instance, an 18-year-old allegedly used smart glasses to try to cheat on a university entrance exam. He apparently took pictures of his exam questions, posted them online during the test, and users on X, formerly Twitter, gave him the answers (which he could presumably hear read to him on his smart glasses). He was detected and his test scores were invalidated.

Meanwhile, students are sharing videos on TikTok where they explain how to use smart glasses to cheat, even low-end models that have few “smart” features.

“Using these blue light smart glasses on a test would be absolutely diabolical,” says one TikTok user’s video, describing a pair of glasses that can simply pair with a smartphone by bluetooth and cost only about $30. “They look like regular glasses, but they have speakers and microphones in them so you can cheat on a test. So just prerecord your test or your answers or watch a video while you're at the test and just listen to it and no one can tell that you’re looking or listening to anything.”

On Reddit discussions, professors have been wondering whether this technology will make it even harder to know whether the work students are doing is their own, compounding the problems caused by ChatGPT and other new AI tools that have given students new ways to cheat on homework that are difficult to detect.

One commenter even suggested just giving up on doing tests and assignments and trying to find new ways of assessing student knowledge. “I think we have too many assessments that have limited benefit and no one here wants to run a police state to check if students actually did what they say they did,” the user wrote. “I would appreciate if anyone has a functional viable alternative to the current standard. The old way will benefit the well off and dishonest, while the underprivileged and moral will suffer (not that this is new either).”

Some of the school and state policies that ban smartphones might also apply to these new smart glasses. A state law in Florida, for instance, restricts the use of “wireless communication devices,” which could include glasses, watches, or any new gadget that gets invented that connects electronically.

“I would compare it very much to when smartphones really came on the scene and became a regular part of our everyday lives,” says Kyle Bowen, a longtime edtech expert who is now deputy chief information officer at Arizona State University, noting that these glasses might impact a range of activities if they catch on, including education.

There could be upsides in college classrooms, he predicts.

The benefit he sees for smart glasses is the pairing of AI and the devices, so that students might be able to get real-time feedback about, say a lab exercise, by asking the chatbot to weigh in on what it sees through the camera of the glasses as students go about the task.

Two instructors at Vilnius University in Lithuania brought in some unusual teaching assistants earlier this year: AI chatbot versions of themselves.

The instructors — Paul Jurcys and Goda Strikaitė-Latušinskaja — created AI chatbots trained only on academic publications, PowerPoint slides and other teaching materials that they had created over the years. And they called these chatbots “AI Knowledge Twins,” dubbing one Paul AI and the other Goda AI.

They told their students to take any questions they had during class or while doing their homework to the bots first before approaching the human instructors. The idea wasn’t to discourage asking questions, but rather to nudge students to try out the chatbot doubles.

Would you use an AI teaching assistant? Share your thoughts.

“We introduced them as our assistants — as our research assistants that help people interact with our knowledge in a new and unique way,” says Jurcys.

Experts in artificial intelligence have for years experimented with the idea of creating chatbots that can fill this support role in classrooms. With the rise of ChatGPT and other generative AI tools, there’s a new push to try robot TAs.

“From a faculty perspective, especially someone who is overwhelmed with teaching and needs a teaching assistant, that's very attractive to them — then they can focus on research and not focus on teaching,” says Marc Watkins, a lecturer of writing and rhetoric at the University of Mississippi and director of the university’s AI Summer Institute for Teachers of Writing.

But just because Watkins thought some faculty would like it doesn’t mean he thinks it’s a good idea.

“That's exactly why it's so dangerous too, because it basically offloads this sort of human relationships that we're trying to develop with our students and between teachers and students to an algorithm,” he says.

On this week’s EdSurge Podcast, we hear from these professors about how the experiment went — how it changed classroom discussion but sometimes caused distraction. A student in the class, Maria Ignacia, also shares her view on what it was like to have chatbot TAs.

And we listen in as Jurcys asks his chatbot questions — and admits the bot puts things a bit differently than he would.

Listen to the episode on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or on the player on this page.