Hello everyone, welcome to this week’s Discussion thread!
This week, we’re focusing on using AI in Education. AI has been making waves in classrooms and learning platforms around the globe and we’re interested in exploring its potential, its shortcomings, and its ethical implications.
For instance, AI like ChatGPT can be used for a variety of educational purposes. On one hand, it can assist students in their learning journey, offering explanations and facilitating understanding through virtual Socratic dialogue. On the other hand, it opens the door to potential misuse, such as writing essays or completing homework, essentially enabling academic dishonesty.
Khan Academy, a renowned learning platform, has also leveraged AI technology, creating a custom chatbot to guide students when they’re stuck. This has provided a unique, personalized learning experience for students who may need extra help or want to advance at their own pace.
But this is just the tip of the iceberg. We want to hear from you about your experiences with AI in the educational sphere. Have you found an interesting use case for AI in learning? Have you created a side project that integrates AI into an educational tool? What does the future hold for AI in education, in your view?
Looking forward to your contributions!
“Potential misuse” is a bit of a weasel phrase… student use of AI assistants is rampant, the ways they use them are almost always academic misconduct, so it’s actual misuse.
Our institution bans use of AI assistants during assessments, unless permitted by a subject’s coordinator. This is because using ChatGPT in a way that’s consistent with academic integrity is basically impossible. Fixing this means fixing ChatGPT etc, not reimagining academic integrity. Attribution of ideas, reliability of sources, and individual mastery of concepts are more important than ever in the face of LLMs’ super-convincing hallucinations.
There are no Luddites where I teach. Our university prepares students for professional careers, and since in my field we use LLMs all day long for professional work, we also have to model this for students and teach them how it’s done. I demonstrate good and bad examples from Copilot and ChatGPT, quite frequently co-answer student questions in conversation with ChatGPT, and always acknowledge LLM use in materials preparation.
I also have a side project that provides a chat interface to the subject contents (GPT4 synthesis over a vector store). It dramatically improves the quality of AI assistant answers, and makes it much easier to find where in the materials a concept was discussed. Our LMS search sucks even for plain text content. This thing fixes that and also indexes into code, lecture recordings, slides, screenshots, explainer videos… I’m still discovering new abilities that emerge from this setup.
I think the future is very uncertain. Students who are using ChatGPT to bluff their way through courses have no skills moat and will find their job roles automated away in very short order. But this realisation requires a two-year planning horizon and the student event horizon is “what’s due tomorrow?” I haven’t seen much discussion of AI in education that’s grounded in educational psychology or a practical understanding of how students actually behave. AI educational tools will be a frothy buzzword-filled market segment where a lot of money is made/spent but overall learning outcomes remain unchanged.