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ChatGPT’s Growing Role in Education
Module 4: ChatGPT’s Growing Role in Education
An Educator’s Guide to ChatGPT
by Burak Senel
If you’re an instructor, no doubt you’re all too familiar with the name ChatGPT. You may have used it yourself or heard about it from your colleagues or students. In fact, it may feel like a persistent earworm, humming away in the backdrop of every pedagogical conversation these days. This generative AI tool is quickly gaining a seat at the education table, revolutionizing interactions and molding new forms of teaching and learning. However, the path to educational innovations is paved with questions, dilemmas, and apprehensions.
Before we embrace the future, let's study the footprints of the past.
Evolution of Educational Tools: From the Skinner Machine to ChatGPT
The fascination with machines enhancing education isn’t a new concept. Skinner Machine, an early attempt at automating teaching, illustrates how we have used technology to help students learn more in less time.
As the timeline of educational tools evolved, so did our aspirations. Computers, the Internet, and mobile phones emerged, changing our interactions with information and, not surprisingly, student-teacher interaction. Tools transformed from static objects to dynamic entities, engaging students in ways never thought possible.
We observe that technology has been used to help educators provide personalized learning experiences, give immediate feedback to students, and empower students to become autonomous learners.
Regarding personalized learning, recent advancements such as educational mobile apps offer more personalized content based on a student’s grade level and interests. Although impressive, without AI the real goal is yet to be achieved: creating an environment where each student is uniquely catered to—not just through pre-prepared content, but in a dynamic, interactive way.
Providing immediate feedback was another significant leap toward augmenting learning with educational technology. Skinner, in contrasting his technology with traditional feedback methods, highlighted the delay in conventional feedback-giving, for example. AI offers more comprehensive and dynamic feedback here, too.
Finally, technological advancements, such as Web 2.0, helped with learner autonomy. With learners taking ownership of their education, the dynamic changes—they are no longer passive recipients, but active contributors to their learning processes.
Fast forward to the present, and we have the likes of Duolingo and Khan Academy using AI to cater personalized educational experiences, offer immediate feedback, and enable autonomous learning.
The same large language model, GPT-4, which allows Duolingo and Khan Academy to achieve all three also powers ChatGPT. ChatGPT’s greatest appeal? It “understands” us, it talks to us, and—students love this—it writes for us. This unique characteristic has drawn the educational community into two camps. Some hail ChatGPT as a groundbreaking tool with its authentic interactions and potential for accelerated learning. Yet others express skepticism, warning that such a tool might actually stunt the learning process. So, how do we navigate this divide?
The Educator’s Guide to Using ChatGPT: Harnessing the Tool
ChatGPT can be a tool of inspiration, a language painter for content, and even an assistant of sorts. Its roles are multi-faceted, but a sense of balance is key. It’s important to distinguish high-stakes tasks from low-stakes ones. High-stakes tasks directly affect students’ learning experiences. For these tasks, human supervision remains critical. When it comes to grading or feedback giving, for instance, the personal, contextual knowledge about a student is irreplaceable. Moreover, ChatGPT does not have accountability—a key trait that human educators possess and students deserve. In these cases, educators can provide their evaluation to ChatGPT and have ChatGPT provide the language.
On the other hand, for low-stakes tasks, like writing announcements for a course, crafting emails to communicate with students, extracting information from students’ responses, or even creating a to-do list from an assignment description, ChatGPT’s efficiency is hard to ignore. Regarding writing emails, for example, ChatGPT is a great tool to use for answering emotionally-charged emails in a professional tone.
Navigating the Integration of ChatGPT in Teaching: The Four Commandments
As with any technology, it's success in education depends on how it is used. Be explorative, remembering that these are nascent technologies and it’s okay to learn along the way. Be transparent with your students about the role of AI in your classroom. Be clear about your expectations. And lastly, foster a culture of responsible use.
In short:
1. Exploration: Treat ChatGPT as a new technology that you and your students will navigate together. Embrace the opportunities and challenges it presents.
2. Transparency: Be open about how you’re using ChatGPT and its potential limitations. Have your students do the same.
3. Clarity: Provide clear guidelines for students about how and when they can use ChatGPT assistance.
4. Responsible Use: Encourage ethical use of ChatGPT and warn against overreliance and unintended plagiarism.
5. Privacy: Ensure you respect student privacy while using ChatGPT. (See OpenAI’s data management page.)
Yet, just as ChatGPT can bridge gaps, it can also create them. The intimacy and personal access that are distinctive features of traditional education might be compromised, particularly at a time when academia is competing against online innovative modes of education. There are valid concerns around insufficient or ineffective instructor training, leading to insecurities about using the tool.
Charting the Ethical Landscape: Concerns and Counteractions
From the instructor side, the implementation of any new tool in education requires thoughtful planning, consideration, and support. Schools and educational institutions need to provide robust training programs to equip instructors with the necessary skills and knowledge to use AI tools effectively and confidently. This training should include not only the technical aspects of using the tool, but also ethical considerations, potential limitations, and best practices to integrate it into their teaching methodology.
Another concern is the potential misuse of ChatGPT. Could students employ it to do their assignments for them? There are tools, like OpenAI’s AI classifier, to check for AI-written text, which often has a telltale statistical pattern. However, these technologies are not perfect and will yield false positives, leading to challenging situations such as a Texas professor failing more than half of his class. As technology continues to change the educational paradigms we have grown accustomed to, we might feel the need to blame the new and shiny toy students use to cheat today. The constant being the motivation to cheat from the student’s side and not the ever-changing tools, we need to address the motivation to cheat. Even if we manage to spot AI-generated content with perfect precision, a motivated student can easily paraphrase ChatGPT’s responses to circumvent detection. However, setting clear guidelines on the use of ChatGPT in the syllabus and assigning tasks that are process-focused rather than solely results-driven can deter or make it easier to spot such misuse.
Last but not least is the risk of AI “sanitizing” student language. A homogenous language style, stripped of linguistic errors, can obscure valuable insights into a student’s proficiency and style, especially for language teachers. Here, it's important to help students understand how having ChatGPT write for them can stall their own linguistic development.
In the Classroom: Practical Tips for Teachers
In light of these potential pitfalls, what is the best way to integrate ChatGPT into teaching? First, introducing and allowing ChatGPT in later assignments can provide a clearer sense of a student’s capabilities before AI assistance. Adopting a process-based approach rather than focusing solely on the end product can ensure learning remains a journey, not just a destination.
Moreover, assigning multimodal tasks that necessitate different kinds of competencies and critical thinking will prove challenging for ChatGPT to replicate. Reflective assignments that require introspection, personal experiences, and unique insights are likewise difficult for AI to reproduce authentically.
In short:
1. Introduce ChatGPT in Later Assignments: This intentional delay can help you gauge a student’s unaided capabilities.
2. Adopt a Process-Based Approach: Focus on how students arrive at the answer, not just the answer itself.
3. Assign Reflective Assignments: Similarly, have students reflect on their work. Tasks requiring introspection and personal experiences will likewise be hard for ChatGPT to reproduce authentically.
4. Assign Multimodal Tasks: Tasks that demand different types of modes—such as pictures, videos, and sound—will be difficult for ChatGPT to replicate.
At the Heart of It All: Education’s Human Core
Despite the AI revolution, we must remember that education thrives on human interaction, on the unique spark between student and teacher. ChatGPT is a tool, a powerful and intriguing one, but a tool nonetheless. Its value lies in how we, as educators, wield it to inspire, engage, and enrich the learning journey of our students.
As we journey into this brave new world of generative AI in education, let us remember to carry the best of our past with us: the curiosity to explore, the courage to question, and the wisdom to understand. After all, isn’t that what education is truly about?
The arrival of ChatGPT in the educational landscape is but a new chapter in an ongoing story. How we write that chapter depends on us—the educators and learners. Let’s write it wisely.
About Burak Senel
