AI-based applications and ChatGPT: A Boon or Bane to the educators

The dawn of Industrial Revolution 4.0 followed by Industrial Revolution 5.0 brought mixed reactions among us, some of us went to an extent of saying that it will be the beginning of the end of humanity, as humans will lose millions of jobs, but statistics say that million plus new jobs will be created with the advent of Industry 5.0 that brings intervention of human intelligence into play in the form of COBOTS and space for personalization.

It is predicted that 99% of Construction jobs, 99% of Agricultural Jobs, and other mundane and mediocre jobs will be lost to intelligent machines. Human beings have limitations when it comes to the analysis and processing of voluminous amounts of data, speed, and are affected by fatigue and this is where the machines take over human beings.

As an academician, I would like to narrow down my discussion to the impact of AI in the field of education and focus on ChatGPT which is another marvel coming out of the field of AI. The extraordinary abilities of ChatGPT to perform complex tasks within the field of education have caused assorted feelings among educators as this advancement in AI seems to revolutionize existing educational praxis.

How ChatGPT can be leveraged to maximize teaching and learning? Policymakers, researchers, educators, and technology experts could work together and start conversations on how these evolving generative AI tools could be used safely and constructively to improve education and support students learning.

Now diving into the technological aspects of ChatGPT we find that it is based on transformer architecture, a type of neural network that has been shown to be very effective for NLP tasks. It is trained on large data sets of text, such as books and articles, and learns to generate text that is similar to the text it was trained on. ChatGPT is capable of not only holding a real human-like conversation on a wide range of topics but also producing convincing creative content. ?ChatGPT has an unprecedented ability to carry out remarkably complex tasks such as writing an article, story, poem, an essay, ability to provide a summary or expansion of the text, adjusting text to reflect a different perspective, and even writing and debugging original computer code. The extraordinary abilities of ChatGPT to perform complex tasks within the field of education have generated diversified reactions and feelings amongst the educators’ community. Some educationists perceive ChatGPT and related generative AI as the future of teaching and learning as well as educational research others are skeptical and view it as a threat and a potential end to most educational activities with no or little analytical abilities.

Microsoft and Mint had organized a power-packed discussion forum based on the Tech-Driven Learning theme. The topic that came to my account for discussion was “How do you think AI-driven technology like ChatGPT can enable personalized learning experiences for students? Ad how it can be used to assess students learning and progress more effectively than traditional assessment methods”.

???????????Personalized learning is an educational approach that aims to customize learning for each student’s strengths, needs, skills, and interests. This kind of learning can be very well designed by using AI-based applications and in particular ChatGPT can be used to provide personalized tutoring and feedback to students based on their individual learning needs and progress. A study by Chen and colleagues (2020) demonstrated that a conversational agent based on a generative model (ChatGPT) could provide personalized math tutoring to students, resulting in improved learning outcomes. The study showed that the conversational agent was able to provide explanations that were tailored to students' misconceptions and were able to adapt to their level of understanding. Also, each student gets a learning plan based on what they know and how they learn the best. In this way, it can aid the teachers to create tailor-made or customized learning for each student which otherwise is a big challenge. Overall, ChatGPT has the potential to be a powerful tool for enhancing teaching and learning by providing personalized tutoring, automated essay grading, language translation, interactive learning, and adaptive learning.

AI-based assessments: Terwiesch who is a Professor at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania indicated that it usually takes 20 hours of work to create an exam and another 10 hours for TA’s (Teaching Assistants) to test the exam and write solutions to it. However, ChatGPT was able to create the exams within 10 hours and reduced TA’s time to 5 hours. This shows a 100% productivity increase in the “exam writing operation” (Terwiesch, 2023, p. 23).

Ideally, higher education teachers would create an atmosphere where students are invested in their learning. The need of the hour is for humanizing the academy by integrating empathy, kindness, and compassion into learning and teaching. It would be explained to students that writing is a form of thinking and that they miss out on a critically important form of learning if they try to delegate their writing to ChatGPT or another AI.

Finally, I would like to conclude by providing a few recommendations to the teaching community:

·realize that digital literacy education is of critical importance and has to include AI tools, which should be part of the curriculum like how we allow students to carry calculators in the classrooms.

·?avoid the creation of an environment where faculty is too overworked to engage and motivate their students;

·?conduct training for faculty on AI tools such as ChatGPT;

·?provide training on academic integrity for students;

·?avoid offering curricula and courses that do not make sense to students (as, consequently, they might cheat because the value of the work of their learning is unclear to them);

·update academic integrity policies and/or honor codes that include the use of AI tools;

·??specifically, develop policies and clear, easy-to-understand guidelines for the use of language models in learning and teaching – the guidelines should include information on the proper use of these tools and the consequences for cheating; and

·??encourage, support, and share research on AI tools’ effects on learning and teaching.

I thank all those readers who have taken the time to read and reached this line of my article. ?

References:

1.?????Tan, S. (2019). The rise of immersive learning. Journal of Applied Learning and Teaching, 2(2), 91-94. https://doi.org/10.37074/jalt.2019.2.2.12

2.?????Baker, T., & Smith, L. (2019). Educ-AI-tion rebooted? Exploring the future of artificial intelligence in schools and colleges. Nesta Foundation. https://media.nesta.org.uk/documents/Future_of_AI_and_education_v5_WEB.pdf

3.?????Chia, O. (2023, January 6). Teachers v ChatGPT: Schools face new challenges in the fight against plagiarism. The Straits Times, https://www.straitstimes.com/tech/teachers-v-chatgpt-schools-face-new-challenge-in-fight-against-plagiarism.

4.?????D’Agostino, S. (2022, October 26). Machines can craft essays. How should writing be taught now? Inside Higher Ed, https:// www.insidehighered.com/news/2022/10/26/machines-can-craft-essays-how-should-writing-be-taught-now

5.?????Earl, L. M. (2012). Assessment as learning: Using classroom assessment to maximize student learning. Corwin Press.

6.?????Ferster, B. (2014). Teaching machines: Learning from the intersection of education and technology. Johns Hopkins University Press.