From the Head of Learning and Teaching – ChatGPT and Education

From the Head of Learning and Teaching – ChatGPT and Education

Like many people over the summer months, I watched the rapid evolution of ChatGPT. What started as brief mentions in some of my feeds quickly became a dialogue that posed as many questions as there were answers. Schools in New York were already talking of blocking and banning this new technology as it hit them mid-term and my own networks in Australia quickly turned the conversation to discussions of our own responses. Was this a new technology to be feared and kept out at all costs or was it something we should embrace with open arms?

What is Chat GPT? ChatGPT stands for Chat Generative Pre-Trained Transformer, it is what is known as a Large Language Model and is trained on approximately 300 billion words. Its output is guided by human feedback in a form of reinforcement learning. This is what enables it to write text that reads as though it was written by a human. This form of artificial intelligence (AI) is not new, nor is it the only one of its kind. At the moment it is free but whether this will remain the case in the future is unknown. As with all technology it does have its limitations. The output is only as good as the prompts you input, equally its responses to concepts that are too recent will be limited as it can only draw on publicly available content. As the technology continues to evolve, I am sure these limitations will change.

So, what does this mean for education? All technology can be used with both positive and negative intent. While there are valid concerns about the use of this tool to produce work that is not the student’s own, there is a growing body of thought about how we can teach students to harness a technology such as this to support and challenge them in their learning. Rather than talking about how we block students from using tools to assist them in assessments, we should be discussing how we evolve assessment. Can the use of technology such as chat GPT be used to deepen our understanding of complex concepts and improve retention of the important facts?

There are set of guidelines attributed to a professor at the Wharton School, Penn University that provide food for thought as the discussion of the use of AI continues to evolve. This is a discussion that as a staff we spent much time on as part of our professional learning program last week, where we were guided by the provocations of David Caspari, CEO of Janison and a thought leader at the intersection of education, innovation and technology.

Already there are a multitude of ideas about how to use Chat GPT as part of learning and teaching. Some are teacher centred, for example producing sample essays to use in class discussions, generating discussion prompts that encourage students to think critically and solve problems, creating formative assessment questions that assist the teacher in checking for understanding and the list goes on. The student-centred ideas are equally diverse. Imagine preparing for a test and asking ChatGPT to create adaptive questions to test your understanding of a given topic. If you answer correctly, it gives you a more challenging question. It could be used for providing real time feedback on practice questions. Or, for the student that is practising a new concept taught in class that day for homework who just needs one more explanation this type of AI could be just what they need.

Do we have concerns that that the use of AI will lead to an increase in issues of academic honesty in the short term? No more so that we already do in relation to the use of external tutors or other online facilities. I am confident that MLC School students have a clear understanding of what academic honesty entails and that the deliberate engagement in these practices will have consequences; however, we will continue to develop this understanding in relation to the use of AI. Will this challenge us as educators to think about the nature of the tasks we set? Yes, it will, and this is a good thing.

 

Sources:

– Linda Emms
Head of Learning and Teaching