Recently, ChatGPT has become popular worldwide. As a generative artificial intelligence software, ChatGPT can generate text on any topic, completing various tasks including answering questions, writing articles, papers, and poetry. It has been praised by many as having “significant historical significance, comparable to the birth of the internet or personal computers.”
What challenges will ChatGPT bring to education? How should education respond to the challenges posed by ChatGPT? How can schools and teachers utilize ChatGPT effectively?
ChatGPT is essentially a chat tool, officially launched by the San Francisco-based AI company OpenAI in November 2022. So, what makes ChatGPT special compared to other AI products?
In addition to answering structured questions, such as grammar corrections, translations, and finding answers, the key point is that it can solve relatively open-ended questions, such as programming. It can also tackle complex structured problems, such as creating tables and summarizing translations.
Moreover, with just a slight prompt, ChatGPT can generate beautifully written and eloquent text. It has now been used to write love letters, poetry, novels, and school papers. In a recent survey, a staggering 89% of American college students reported using ChatGPT for assignments, raising concerns among many.
What challenges does the wildly popular ChatGPT bring to education? Is it a poison or a remedy for education? Let’s take a look→
What challenges will ChatGPT bring to our education?
ChatGPT’s emergence represents a landmark point for the development of AI, and the rapid advancement of technology is, to some extent, “forcing” the education sector to initiate deeper reforms, compelling us to rethink the impact and challenges AI brings to education and teaching systems. The main points are as follows:
1 Challenge to Our Talent Perspective
What kind of people should we cultivate in the future? In contrast to the mechanical efficiency of AI, what advantages do humans need to develop? Many jobs may be replaced by AI in the future, so clarifying the direction of talent cultivation is the primary issue for education, as we need to ensure that students have sufficient “future survival skills.”
2 Challenge to Our Curriculum Perspective
Looking to the future, what should children learn to meet these challenges? How can we guide students to use artificial intelligence effectively during their learning process to enhance efficiency while also stimulating their creative thinking? Education must help students set creative learning goals, and promoting creative learning is a significant challenge.
3 Challenge to Our Teaching Perspective
How should educators teach? The rapid development of AI brings more technological challenges to education, and educators must seize opportunities to utilize AI technology to update teaching methods, enhance teaching experiences, and improve educational quality.
4 Challenge to Our Evaluation Perspective
Artificial intelligence has created a certain impact on the assessment of learning outcomes. Surveys abroad show that it has become common for students to complete assignments using ChatGPT.
Moreover, many students online admit to using ChatGPT to write papers. Faced with assignments completed by students and AI, many teachers find it difficult to distinguish between the two. Therefore, educators need to rethink and make substantial and innovative changes to teaching and assessment methods.
In summary, regarding educational practices themselves, the development of artificial intelligence represented by ChatGPT has already pushed the education model centered around knowledge transmission into a corner.
On one hand, ChatGPT can almost answer all questions students ask, and it can teach according to each student’s needs. So, what value do our teachers still hold?
On the other hand, since this knowledge can be so easily obtained, what is the significance of our children spending so much time learning and doing exercises? What exactly should our children learn that is most urgent?
How to ride the wave and utilize ChatGPT in education?
Fear and avoidance cannot stop the tide of technology; the era of deep integration of education and AI has arrived, and how to use AI as a tool to transform it into an opportunity for education rather than a threat is a new change that the education system must face in the future.
Accepting ChatGPT as a teaching assistant tool can make it a friend or helper for teachers, releasing students’ creativity, providing personalized tutoring, and better preparing students to work alongside artificial intelligence systems in the future.
So, for the disruptive value of ChatGPT, how can schools and teachers get started? Here are six common applications:
1.
Course Design
ChatGPT can provide creative ideas for teachers’ course designs, assist in retrieving and organizing literature, and generate complete course materials such as syllabi, course plans, and reading materials.
For example, inputting “Please design an inquiry-based course for second graders, themed ‘The Sound of Crickets'” quickly yields results from the AI. Then, we can provide more detailed design requirements: “To be conducted during the summer vacation, lasting ten days, aimed at cultivating students’ inquiry abilities, critical thinking skills, collaboration skills, as well as knowledge related to natural history, measurement, and statistics, combining formative and summative assessments, and needing to specify time planning, materials to prepare, and background information.” In no time, ChatGPT outputs a detailed course report (see below).
2.
Lesson Preparation Assistance
In addition to course design, ChatGPT can effectively participate in lesson preparation, providing teachers with a starting plan, offering general and routine content, and helping teachers save initial brainstorming time. Of course, such plans often resemble a simple recipe design guide, from which a chef can create an actual recipe based on the ideas provided.
Specifically, lesson preparation can be approached in the following ways.
Knowledge Search: Quickly search for relevant knowledge points through Q&A. Just ask the AI a question, such as “Explain the Doppler effect in language understandable to eighth graders,” or “Convince me to ban animal testing,” and ChatGPT will quickly generate a set of solutions.
Generate Teaching Content: Automatically generate related teaching content by giving ChatGPT some instructions, thereby improving lesson preparation efficiency.
Classroom Simulation: Simulate dialogue with ChatGPT to better understand students’ questions and prepare for class.
Language Translation: If teachers need to use other languages in class, they can utilize ChatGPT for translation, thereby enhancing lesson preparation.
3.
Classroom Assistant
ChatGPT can provide a real-time sharing platform for teachers and students, answering questions in real-time, providing ideas for classroom activities, increasing classroom fun and richness, and helping students understand complex content and concepts, becoming an AI teaching assistant, after-school tutor, or debate practice partner for teachers.
For example, in an English class, teachers can use the following methods to enhance classroom effectiveness.
Become a Writing Prompt Generator: Teachers can ask ChatGPT to generate story openings or creative writing prompts for students to use as a basis for writing.
Become a Reading Comprehension Tool: Teachers can have ChatGPT generate a passage on a topic students are learning, allowing students to read and answer related questions. This helps assess students’ understanding of the material and identify areas where they may need additional support.
Become a Vocabulary Builder: ChatGPT can generate sentences using unfamiliar words for students, allowing them to guess the meaning of words based on context, thus expanding their vocabulary.
Become a Class Discussion Question Generator: Teachers and students can ask ChatGPT questions, combining them with substantive discussions in class to make discussions richer and beneficial for students to refine their thinking and practice their ideas.
4.
Assignment Assessment
ChatGPT can also participate in student assessments, generating assignments and exams, helping teachers evaluate students and observe learning progress.
For example, a teacher can send a thematic article to the AI and request the generation of ten multiple-choice questions to test students’ understanding of the article. Out of the ten questions generated by the AI, six are usable, which undoubtedly makes it a fantastic teaching aid, allowing teachers to generate new questions anytime, anywhere according to teaching requirements.
5.
Learning Assistance
ChatGPT can provide rich explanations, methods, information, and ideas, helping students understand knowledge more deeply and creatively, increasing learning efficiency and interest, and effectively supporting students in achieving autonomous and personalized learning, understanding their learning gaps and needs, motivating learning and self-improvement, stemming from its following functions.
Extracting Key Points. It can quickly generate learning materials such as summaries, flashcards, and quizzes, helping students review and learn course materials. Students can ask ChatGPT to read a chapter from their textbook and generate a concise and understandable summary. ChatGPT can also help students break down tasks, dividing large tasks into smaller, manageable parts, cultivating students’ sense of autonomy and confidence in task completion.
Content Translation. ChatGPT can freely translate teaching content, making it easier for students to understand. Students can also seek assistance from ChatGPT in learning various languages, obtaining resources for that language, such as vocabulary lists, dialogue practice, and grammar courses. Moreover, when we learn a new word, we can also ask the AI how to use that word in a sentence.
Personalized Guidance. ChatGPT technology can diversify teaching resources and information, helping students acquire problem-solving skills by providing explanations, distributed instructions, and additional resources. This is significant for students who struggle with a particular subject or concept and need extra support, as it can enhance their self-efficacy and learning motivation.
Project Research. ChatGPT can also play an important role in inquiry-based learning, project-based learning, problem-based learning, and thematic inquiry learning in primary and secondary schools. For instance, a student writing a research paper on climate change can ask ChatGPT for relevant information and receive a list of materials.
6.
Task Assistant
ChatGPT can easily handle writing emails, papers, scripts, drafting business proposals, creating poetry, stories, and even coding, checking program errors, and can naturally assist teachers and students in daily activity planning through idea generation, improvement suggestions, and feedback on written work.
For example, automatically generating various work summaries, weekly reports, and monthly reports to fully implement “reducing the burden on teachers” and “reducing the burden on students.”
Source: Guangming Social Educators
