In the digital and intelligent era, the emergence of cutting-edge technologies like ChatGPT is accelerating the transformation of educational models. In this transformative era, where will educational reform head? How can we promote educational innovation and guide teachers to adapt to new technologies? How can we cultivate students’ future competitiveness? How can we utilize artificial intelligence to achieve personalized teaching? What is the impact of AI products in the education sector?
At the recent 2024 AI and Education Development Conference, experts and scholars from the education field discussed these issues in hopes of generating more new teaching methods and solutions.
Where is Educational Reform Heading in the AI Era?
It has become a consensus among many experts and scholars in the education field that the arrival of the AI era will accelerate educational reform. However, where exactly will educational reform in the AI era head?
At the conference, Professor Zhang Zhiyong from Beijing Normal University mentioned that the application of artificial intelligence in education is becoming increasingly widespread. Not only can it help teachers improve the efficiency of education and teaching, but it can also facilitate better class management, intelligent tutoring, intelligent teaching, intelligent assessment, and intelligent management. Moreover, it can provide students with more personalized courses and learning scenarios. At the same time, we must recognize the risks, difficulties, and challenges that AI applications face in the education sector.
Zhang Zhiyong believes that China’s education faces four challenges: the “Qian Xuesen Question” (why our schools cannot cultivate outstanding technological innovation talents), the “Lü Xingwei Concern” (moral education is the biggest challenge for future education), the “Gardner Question” (how can humanity manage and use its intelligence well), and the “Qian Yingyi Concern” (future AI may render the advantages cultivated by our education system obsolete).
In this context, facing the AI era, Zhang Zhiyong believes we must rethink: how should education change in the face of social transformation?
In Zhang Zhiyong’s view, education should focus on cultivating students’ values, judgment ability, innovation ability, creativity, and emotional education in future social development, emphasizing the construction of an ethical and moral system after the high development of machine intelligence.
As the uncertainty of future society increases, it is even more necessary to cultivate creative individuals. The virtual characteristics require the cultivation of human communication and social emotional skills in the real world. The non-organizational and digital nature of future society needs to cultivate individuals’ ability to autonomously plan and manage themselves and their digital survival skills. Future society requires individuals who can lead a happy life and have a sense of community for humanity.
Zhang Zhiyong believes that the future will see a dialogue between humans and intelligent systems, which will change the form of our education. In the education field, AI will create new teaching models. The traditional dual structure—teacher and student—will transform into a triadic structure—teacher, machine, and student. Machines will become intelligent teaching assistants, learning companions, or mentors, learning and growing together with teachers and students.
The development of artificial intelligence is profoundly changing the face of education. In terms of learning methods and management evaluation, AI empowerment in education will create many new educational scenarios, supporting and empowering new educational methods such as personalized learning, providing immersive learning experiences, and achieving gamified learning, social learning, collaborative learning, autonomous learning, problem-driven learning, and project-based inquiry learning. Education can involve accompanying, performance-based, and behavioral evaluations to assess students’ learning outcomes.
Zhang Zhiyong also mentioned that past teachers’ labor was individualized, competitive labor under exam-oriented education. With the support of the online world, the future professional lives of teachers will present new forms, existing in a professional community. Teachers’ teaching methods will shift to team labor and collaborative teaching. New characteristics of teacher labor will emerge, utilizing new technologies to work more intelligently and innovatively, further testing teachers’ innovative capabilities. Additionally, teachers will become researchers of students’ learning and development data. In the past, teachers studied textbooks and curriculum standards; now they need to continuously research the vast amounts of data generated from teaching and learning to iterate teaching and learning and study patterns in student development.
How Should Educational Concepts and Mechanisms Change Under AI?
In the AI era, what should the relationship between technology like AI and education, and between teachers and students be like? How should educational concepts and mechanisms change under AI? At the conference, experts and scholars shared their views on these issues.
Sun Xianliang, principal of Haier School and former principal of Qingdao No. 2 Middle School in Shandong Province, believes that the relationship between humans and AI will be an important relationship in the future era. Traditional education can no longer meet the developmental and growth needs of students in the AI era. The educational value in the AI era is being reconstructed, making it particularly important to cultivate autonomous individuals who can harness technology. Therefore, school education must actively embrace change, focusing on cultivating students’ moral capabilities, lifelong learning abilities, and creative thinking skills, while accelerating the iteration of the educational ecosystem.
He believes that the AI era provides students with an open environment and platform, requiring teachers to innovate educational models through continuous learning and development, providing personalized developmental support for students. The relationship between teachers and students should be zero distance, connectable anytime and anywhere, while schools should gather sufficient resources to create boundaryless learning support for students, encouraging them to create new knowledge. In the AI era, schools should become the cradle of student growth and an incubator for innovation, providing them with limitless possibilities and opportunities. School education should shape a tropical rainforest ecosystem, allowing everyone to showcase their strengths, enabling each student to present their unique traits, achieving a harmonious coexistence.
When discussing the relationship between education and AI, Lu Huiying, vice dean of the Faculty of Education at the University of Hong Kong, believes that learning about AI, learning from AI, providing new learning methods, and expanding learning capabilities to help us understand human learning are the roles AI plays in education. Future learning should be productive learning, interdisciplinary teamwork, and a dynamic, interactive, and diverse process, cultivating individuals who can adapt to rapid changes and have a sense of responsibility towards the country and society.
Li Zhimin, former director of the Science and Technology Development Center of the Ministry of Education and vice president of the China Education Development Strategy Society, pointed out that the key to AI empowering education lies in the shift of concepts and mechanisms.
Li Zhimin stated that today’s students are a generation that coexists with the internet; they can skillfully live with the internet and instinctively learn through screens, so the impact of AI + education cannot be underestimated. In educational teaching, if students cannot freely choose their subjects and teachers, and if credits cannot be mutually recognized and degrees cannot be equivalently connected, the maximum benefits of AI + education will be hard to realize.
“We need to quickly study and formulate online certification standards for teaching resources, establish evaluation standards for online learning effectiveness for certified teaching resources, and develop methods for issuing micro-certificates for courses,” Li Zhimin emphasized.
He also proposed that teacher training and development are crucial factors for ensuring the success of educational digital transformation. Teachers need to master new teaching tools and methods, updating their educational concepts. Strengthening teacher training in information technology capabilities is essential to cultivate a teaching workforce with digital teaching capabilities. At the same time, promoting educational digital transformation requires establishing a diversified, process-oriented educational evaluation system and fully utilizing data analysis technology to optimize the evaluation process.
Additionally, Cheng Jieming, former vice president of the University of Hong Kong, pointed out from another perspective that the institutionalization of education in industrial society required students to comply with the education system, where grades shaped students’ values. However, relying solely on academic qualifications is insufficient for lifelong benefits. The development of AI reduces teachers’ workloads and encourages students to become the masters of their learning, but educational innovation is not necessarily related to technology; returning learning to students and integrating it into their lives is more important than merely relying on the application of technology. The autonomy and freedom of learning that schools provide to students are crucial.
How Should We View the Impact of AI Products Like ChatGPT in Education?
In recent years, the potential negative impacts of AI applications in education have garnered social attention and concern. In response, Pu Guoguang, executive dean of the School of Computer Science and Software Engineering at East China Normal University, believes there is no need for excessive worry.
“Whether students use ChatGPT to do their homework is not my concern, because even without ChatGPT, students can copy homework, which cannot be prohibited. Historical experience also proves that the efficiency of teachers transmitting knowledge is the highest. Schools are not just places for imparting knowledge; they are also venues for social activities. As long as AI technology does not become an organic entity, it can never replace schools.” Pu Guoguang believes that all technology serves humanity, and as long as we make good use of AI technology, it will undoubtedly serve education.
Pu Guoguang noted that in the future, research-oriented talents will be the core driving force behind industry evolution and will occupy an advantageous position in the evolution of social relations. Education in the AI environment needs to cultivate research-oriented and design-oriented talents.
“The traditional education sector in China emphasizes science over humanities, with many believing that the humanities are not important. However, I personally believe the opposite; in the AI society, the humanities will make a strong comeback because they are truly research-driven sciences without a standard answer, allowing humanity to explore continuously, such as in aesthetics, arts, humanities, society, and philosophy,” Pu Guoguang stated.
Professor Fang Houbin from Columbus State University and director of the China Deep Learning Center also emphasized that the ultimate goal of education is to cultivate well-rounded talents, including innovative talents, but not all students will work in the AI field. Education should focus on students’ abilities to lead a happy life, interpersonal skills, and cultural literacy, which are essential skills for students in life.
Jiang Li, director of the Stanford University Center for AI, Robotics, and Future Education, pointed out that the vast majority of schools currently cultivate students’ ability to work independently, where calculators and computers are not allowed in exams, believing that bringing a computer renders the exam meaningless; but the most important skill in the AI era is actually the ability of humans + AI.
At the same time, Li Zhengtao, vice president of the Chinese Society of Education and director of the Ministry of Education’s training center for secondary school principals, noted that the emergence and application of ChatGPT and Sora have changed the ways people communicate, learn, and work, while also bringing challenges of information overload and technological dependence.
Li Zhengtao believes that the human-machine conflict will be a major contradiction facing human society in the future, rooted in human-machine competition. AI replacing humans in some repetitive, low-skill jobs has raised concerns about unemployment and skills transition. Meanwhile, humans are continuously learning and adapting to new technologies, seeking ways to coexist and compete with them. The increasing dependence of humans on AI tools has raised concerns about technological reliance. Humans need to be cautious of over-reliance on technology and maintain their independent thinking and judgment abilities, achieving self-transcendence and evolution in the process of surpassing AI.
Source: Pengpai News Technology
