tech giants Google, Microsoft, and OpenAI have inadvertently assigned educators around the world important tasks for the summer: adjusting their assignments and teaching methods to accommodate a new batch of artificial intelligence features with which students will enter the classrooms. classrooms in the fall.
School and university educators were already struggling to keep up with ChatGPT and other ai tools during this academic year, but a new round of announcements Last month by major artificial intelligence companies may require even greater adjustments by educators to preserve academic integrity and accurately assess student learning, teaching experts say.
Meanwhile, educators also have dozens of new edtech products to check out that promise to save them time on lesson planning and administrative tasks thanks to ai.
One of the most significant changes was OpenAI's announcement that its latest generation of chatbot, which it called GPT-4o, would be free for everyone. Previously, only an older version of the tool, GPT-3.5, was free, and people had to pay at least $20 a month to access the latest-generation model. The new model can also accept not only text, but spoken voice inputs and visual inputsso users can do things like share a still photo or image of their screen with the chatbot to get feedback.
“It's a revolutionary change,” says Marc Watkins, a professor of writing and rhetoric at the University of Mississippi and director of the university's ai Summer Institute for Writing Teachers. He says that when many educators experimented with the previous free version of ChatGPT, many were not impressed, but the new version will be a “huge wake-up call” about how powerful the technology is, he adds.
And now that students and teachers can talk to these next-generation chatbots instead of just typing, there's new concern that the so-called “homework apocalypse” unleashed by previous versions of ChatGPT it will get worseas teachers may find it even more difficult to design tasks that students cannot simply have these ai robots complete for them.
“I think that's really going to challenge what it means to be an educator this fall,” Watkins adds, noting that the changes mean teachers may not only need to change the type of assignments they assign, but also rethink how they deliver the material. now that students can use ai tools to do things like summarize lecture videos for them.
And education appears to be an area identified by technology companies as “killer app” of ai chatbots, a use case that helps drive adoption of the technology. Last month, several demonstrations by OpenAI, Google and other companies focused on educational uses of their latest chatbots. And just last week OpenAI released a tech-innovation/artificial-intelligence/2024/05/31/new-chatgpt-zeroes-higher-ed” target=”_blank” rel=”noopener nofollow”>new partnership program aimed at universities called ChatGPT Edu.
“Both Google and OpenAI are targeting education,” says José Bowen, a longtime higher education consultant and leader, who co-wrote a new book called “Teach with ai.“They see this as a great use case and also a tremendous market.”
Change of classes
tech giants aren't the only ones changing the equation for educators.
Many smaller companies have launched tools in recent months aimed at educational uses and are marketing them heavily on TikTok, instagram and other social media platforms to students and teachers.
A company called Turbolearn, for example, has abandoned the video on tiktok titled “Why I Stopped Taking Notes During Class,” which has been viewed more than 100,000 times. In it, a young woman says that she discovered a “trick” when she was a student at Harvard University. She describes opening the company's tool on her laptop during class and clicking a record button. “The software will automatically use your recording to take notes, flashcards, and quiz questions,” she says in the promotional video.
While the company markets this as a way to free up students to focus on listening in class, Watkins worries that skipping note-taking will mean students tune out and don't do the work of processing what they hear in class. a conference.
Now that such tools exist, Watkins suggests that teachers look for more ways to do active learning in their classes and put more of what he called “intentional friction” into student learning so that students are forced to stop and participate. or to reflect on what is said.
“Try pausing your lecture and start having discussions with your students; engage in small group discussions,” he says. “Encourage students to make notes, to read with a pen, pencil or highlighter. “We want to slow things down and make sure they stop for a while,” even as ads for ai tools promise a way to make learning faster and more efficient.
Slowing down is the advice that Bonni Stachowiak also gives to educators. Stachowiak, dean of teaching and learning at Vanguard University, points to recent advice from teaching guru James Lang to ai?sra=true” target=”_blank” rel=”noopener nofollow”>“Walk slowly” the use of ai in classroomstaking into account the fundamental principles of teaching while educators experiment with new artificial intelligence tools.
“I'm not talking about resisting; I don't think we should bury our heads in the sand,” Stachowiak says. “But it's okay to reflect and slowly experiment” with these new tools in classrooms, he adds. This is especially true because keeping up with all the new announcements about ai is unrealistic considering all the other demands of teaching jobs.
However, the tools are arriving quickly.
“The maddening thing about all of this is that these tools are being deployed publicly in a big experiment that no one asked for,” says Watkins of the University of Mississippi. “And I know how difficult it is for teachers to make time for anything outside of their workload.”
For that reason, he says university and school leaders must drive efforts to make more systematic changes in teaching and assessment. “We're going to have to dig really deep and start thinking about how we approach teaching and how students approach learning. “It’s something the entire university will have to think about.”
The new tools are also likely to mean new financial investments for schools and universities.
“At some point, ai will become the next big expense,” Bowen, the education consultant, told EdSurge.
Although many tools are free right now, Bowen predicts they will end up costing universities at a time when budgets are already tight.
Saving time?
Many of the newest ai tools for education are aimed at educators and promise to save them time.
Several new products, for example, allow teachers to use ai to quickly rework worksheets, test questions and other teaching materials to change the reading level, so that a teacher can take a newspaper article and quickly review it. so that younger students can understand it better.
“They will literally rewrite your words for that audience or that purpose,” Watkins says.
These features are found in several commercial products as well as free ai tools; Last month, the nonprofit Khan Academy ai/khan-academy-and-microsoft-partner-to-expand-access-to-ai-tools/” target=”_blank” rel=”noopener nofollow”>Announced that would make its ai tools for teachers free for all educators.
“There's good and bad in these things,” Watkins adds. On a positive note, these tools could greatly help students with learning difficulties. “But the problem is that when we tried this,” he adds, “it helped those students, but it got to the point where other students said, 'I never have to read anything again,' because the tool could also summarize and convert any text in a series of vignettes.”
Another popular feature of new ai services is trying to personalize assignments by tailoring educational materials to the student's interests, says Dan Meyer, vice president of user growth at Amplify, an assessment and curriculum company, writing a newsletter on teaching mathematics.
Meyer worries that these tools are being overhyped and may have limited effectiveness in classrooms.
“You can't take the same boring problems that students do every day and change them to be about baseball,” he says. “Kids will end up hating baseball and not loving math.”
He summed up his point of view in a recent post he titled: “ai-is-best-at-something” target=”_blank” rel=”noopener nofollow”>Generative ai is better at something teachers need the least.”
Meyer worries that many new products start with what generative ai can do and try to launch products based on that, rather than starting with what educators need and designing tools to address those challenges.
At the university level, Bowen sees potential benefits for teachers in the near future, if, for example, tools such as learning management systems add artificial intelligence functions that can perform tasks such as creating a website for the course after the course. instructor provides you with a study program. “This will be a real time saver for teachers,” she predicts.
But teaching experts say the biggest challenges will be finding ways to keep students learning while preparing them for a workplace that appears to be rapidly adopting artificial intelligence tools.
Bowen hopes universities can find a way to focus on teaching students the skills that make us more human, as ai takes over routine tasks in many white-collar industries.
“Maybe,” he says, “this time we'll realize that the liberal arts really matter.”
