Key points:
Misconception: ai will encourage students to cheat.
Truth: Educators need to reconsider how they evaluate student work.
By Carl Hooker
One of the biggest misconceptions about ai in education is that it will encourage students to cheat and raise concerns about academic integrity. Did students cheat before ai existed? Yes. Could students use generative ai tools like ChatGPT to cheat and take shortcuts on an assignment? ABSOLUTELY. However, there are a couple of major problems with this line of thinking.
The first is a concern for equity. Educators consider it socially acceptable for a student to hire a tutor to help him or her write his or her college admissions essay. We also accept the fact that many times a parent helps build their fourth grader's science fair project. In both cases, we do not consider it cheating. However, if a student uses generative ai to help him edit his college admissions paper or brainstorm ideas for a science fair, there is a belief that he is dishonest. By considering human-assisted help fair but computer-assisted help not fair, we create an equity gap.
The second reason ai cheating is being mishandled is the belief that it will encourage students to cheat. This is like saying that a vaporizer will encourage students to smoke. If you remove the vaporizer, you still don't address the behavior. The same goes for ai.
Instead of focusing on students using technology to cheat, educators should reflect on what they are assessing. Are they actually measuring student learning or is it a completion-based assignment or worksheet? Is the “process” being evaluated with the same or greater care than the final “product”? By focusing assessments on the learning process rather than the product, educators can not only prevent ai-assisted cheating, but they can also better assess a student's understanding of a particular topic..
Misconception: ai will eliminate jobs.
Truth: it will create more jobs, with different requirements.
By David McCool
The misconception is that ai will eliminate jobs, but in reality it will create more jobs, with different requirements, than it eliminates. These new jobs will disproportionately require durable skills like critical thinking and collaboration, making it more important than ever for people to learn these skills and, if they can, show them to employers by earning microcredentials.
As we move towards an ai-driven world, students, employees and job seekers must remain agile and competitive in the market, so upskilling is essential. Microcredentialing your lasting skills will demonstrate your abilities for future jobs as ai-could-create/?sh=6b7fd8b06f04″ target=”_blank” rel=”noreferrer noopener”>Sentiment Analysis, Content Creators and ai Roles that require long-lasting skills and cannot be automated. In many industries, ai will simply change the nature of jobs available. For the most part, those transformed jobs will be more attractive than the menial tasks they are replacing. Manufacturing workers, for example, may be freed from the production line, where they used to watch for defective products all day, to spend their time improving processes using insights gained from ai systems.
The role of ai in education has changed and not everyone understands what it can do. A discovery we made during the pilot of our lasting skills course SkillBuild by Muzzy Lane is that the students did not know that the ai was guiding them to improve based on their contributions. They were grateful when they discovered that, in our microcredential courses, ai helps students by giving them the additional assets and feedback they need to hone their lasting skills, pushing them to the top of today's changing job market.
Misconception: ai is a static tool.
Truth: ai is constantly evolving.
By Wilson Tsu
Where I see people get the most wrong about ai is thinking that what it is now is what it will be in the future. Take open ai as an example. Going from ChatGPT, which launched in November 2022, to GPT4 in March 2023 was a big jump in capacity. When ChatGPT came out and educators really started digging into it, they may have thought, “It's not going to pass my class like a human would, so I don't have to worry about this.” And just a few months later, they saw that GPT4 could pass their class. And now Open ai has announced that people will be able to create their own GPTs. We don't know to what extent that will change things, but it is a big step.
What I mean is that you can't think in static terms when it comes to ai. It's changing so quickly and there's so much investment in ai right now, so many resources, so many smart people working on it, that as soon as you think you know what's going on, it's going to change dramatically. And it's changing so fast that no one can really know what's going on except a small handful of people working deeply on it. For me, the most important truth about ai right now is that as soon as we think we have mastered it, it will be different.
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