EdChat — South Australia's Department-Built, Microsoft-Backed School AI Chatbot: 8-School Trial, 90-Teacher and 700-Student Survey

In 2023 the South Australian Department for Education, working with Microsoft, trialled EdChat, a department-owned generative AI chatbot with built-in safety controls and full logging of interactions so staff can see usage. The first phase ran for eight weeks in eight government high schools, reaching more than 1,500 students and 150 educators; a second phase added eight more schools.
Researchers from the University of South Australia (Kovanovic, de Laat and Marrone) report survey data from about 90 teachers and 700 students. Teachers felt safer than with public tools because student data is not used to train models, said it saved lesson-planning time and helped create personalised activities, and noted students could get support when teachers were unavailable. Their questions concerned how student data is stored and who can access EdChat records.
Concerns included hallucinations and wrong information, content filters that sometimes blocked legitimate learning on topics such as history, reproductive health and politics, harder plagiarism detection, and a need to build students' prompting and critical-thinking skills.
Caution: the peer-reviewed journal article was still under review when the findings were published (The Conversation, September 2024), the trial-launch coverage is a news report, and no learning-outcome measures are reported. The department announced plans to extend EdChat to remote, rural and lower-socioeconomic schools.

Read the full analysis: https://channellife.com.au/story/south-australia-trials-edchat-an-ai-chatbot-enhancing-education-safety