The educational potential of large language models: using ChatGPT as a teaching note

The recent surge in the development of generative artificial intelligence (AI), especially large language models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT and GPT 4, has generated overall excitement among most educators, and fear in some.

Many of those warning of the dangers AI poses are wary of the disruption that accompanies progress, which nevertheless is always beneficial in the long run. However, some experts and insiders have also highlighted concerns about the impact this technology could have on our personal relationships and social life. Among the latter is Geoffroy Hinton, an expert in deep learning, who resigned from his position at Google.

The defenders of this latest technological wave include notables such as Bill Gates, who argues that ChatGPT will change the world, and that rather than leading to the elimination of human employment, it will instead transform the world of work. Thirty years ago, in the first of his books, he also announced that robots would never replace teachers. Lest we forget, it was Microsoft, the company he created, which acquired a stake in OpenAI, creator of one of the most popular chatbots in use at the moment.?

Somewhere between the naysayers and the devotees are the majority of educators, who are trying to adapt to what I would describe as a breakthrough rather than disruption. Sam Altman, Founder of Open AI, recently visited IE University and explained where he believes this transformative technology is taking us.?

I’d like to share some of my experiences from my Strategy course with IE Business School's Global Online MBA students, where we are pioneering many of the new applications of AI in pedagogy. Some of the best sources of improvement in education often come from practices shared with other colleagues, inside and outside IE. I found Stadler and Reeves' article,?Three Lessons From Chatting About Strategy With ChatGPT and Bieger and Kolmar's Examining,?Teaching and Learning in the Age of AI?particularly inspiring.

To begin, a few working principles:?

• LLMs and similar AI technology will transform the way we access information, data and knowledge. It is likely to be as decisive a change as the printing press or the internet were in the past.

• The use of these tools will require teachers and students to manage these devices in a way that enriches the learning process, provides access to reliable content, and exercises certain skills, such as critical thinking, that make graduates more employable.

• The risk of ChatGPT and similar services is not that students will use them to cheat in exams. If this is your main concern, I’m afraid you’ve long since lost touch with the essence of contemporary education. Today, the goal of educators is not about passing on knowledge, but rather to develop an enquiring mind, to inculcate critical thinking, to encourage entrepreneurship and creativity.?

• That said, if you’ve been an educator for a long time, you may have experienced some steep learning curves when assessing your students. Grading on the basis of a knowledge test, or running a multiple-choice test does not require a professor. One of the most value-added functions of teachers is getting to know their students, what their strengths and weaknesses are, and also to act as a coach to accompany their personal development.

• By quickly and efficiently processing data and content, LLMs become resources that facilitate multiple educational and professional tasks, much like a calculator enables complex operations to be performed quickly.?

• Similarly, at least for the time being, these technologies will not replace the learning process as such. For example, to obtain a report on a strategic question, such as "what are the future trends in the retail fashion sector", it is necessary to properly introduce the questions, process the answers, and even enter into an iterative process in which new questions are formulated and further answers are refined.

• The developers of these applications themselves acknowledge that ChatGPT's contributions, whether data, information or opinion, may be false or biased. Their search system for resolving requests is based on the popularity of possible answers, not on their truthfulness, appropriateness or suitability.

Given these assumptions, how can teachers use this technology to enhance the learning process??

Below are a few suggestions based on the experience with my students, who have the typical profile of professionals with management responsibilities, in large or medium-sized companies, an average age of around 30 years old and a diverse cultural background. I understand that these tips are not necessarily applicable to all types of students, especially younger ones.

I will use the example of the asynchronous class I taught in early June on?Inditex, the Spanish retail fashion company.

• The first of the tasks that the student is usually asked to perform, together with reading of the case, is the?search for information, data, analysis and opinions about the company, its management, performance and strategy. With the emergence years ago of internet search engines such as Google, this process has become somewhat distorted and automated. Compared to the traditional field analysis or physically searching through a library’s shelves or archives, most students over the last 20 years tend to select the most immediate entries in search engines, regardless of their veracity, depth or direct relation to the topic under discussion.?

Which means that using ChatGPT does not substantially change modern search processes, instead customizing it according to the questions asked. This makes it harder to track down possible plagiarism using tools such as?Turnitin.?

During this search phase, I always ask students to look for unusual information or data in reliable media to avoid misinformation and bias.?One of the greatest lessons for students is knowing how to select the right sources to use for an accurate analysis, a technique that will serve them for the rest of their professional careers. Recently, Financial Times’ Gilian Tett showed, for example, that one of the risks for potential investors who use ChatGPT is the use of imaginary information to make their decisions.?

• Formulating?strategic proposals. Traditionally, teachers who used the case method made use of the teaching notes prepared by the authors. These documents outline the order the teacher could follow during the session, the questions suggested to the students and any possible answers. With time and the digital dissemination of these materials, the truth is that these contents are easily accessible, so that if teachers want to be original they have to go off script, or select original or exotic case studies.

• ChatGPt has now become the new "teaching note". If, for example, we ask: "what are the threats and opportunities in the retail fashion sector" the answer will likely be much more complete, synthetic and up-to-date than that provided by the original teaching note, or any other report from a consulting firm. Recall that the application draws from multiple sources, including the most popular academic journals.

Even if ChatGPT is asked, "What are the best avenues for Inditex's growth?", the answer, after a caveat, will be structured in bullets and will again be more complete than the teaching note and other standard documents. As Stadler and Reeves explain: "Experienced strategists know to be skeptical of 'facts'. What is true most of the time may not be true in a specific case. What was true in the past may not be true in the future. What happens to be true may not be inevitably and persistently so. And even if a statement is robustly true in these senses, there are always alternative ways of framing problems and solutions."

The challenge for teachers is to get their students to think "out of the box", in a counter-factual and counter-intuitive way, even if their starting point is the answers provided by ChatGPT. The challenge will be to elaborate a discursive sequence that favors the development of critical capacity and creativity, while still making subsequent use of the application to find answers to new questions.

In conclusion,?AI highlights the importance of developing students' capacity to argue their case. It would be an irreversible loss if they were to copy what they take from another source, without justifying the reasons.??

In the area of business strategy, it is often said that 20% of success comes from an idea, and 80% on its execution. Perhaps the emergence of new AI technology now means execution is 95% of success, though my colleague Norman Curtis wonders if that equation may even turn to a 50/50 balance.

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