Does AI Mark The End of Traditional Teaching?

Is ChatGPT a storm in a teacup or the straw that will break the education camel’s back?  

“Some leading educationalists report hearing Hemmingways bell tolling for education.  For some it tolls out a warning as the good ship education is blown towards the rock strewn coast. Others just shrug and say nothing has changed.

But what if we cut the melodramatic hype? What if we are objective and listen to thought leaders and respected academics?

2023 And Future Thoughts

The start of 2023 has brought a plethora of AI articles to this and other platforms. Both Jamie Smith’s The Power of AI … and Amanda Kirby’s Alert for education articles should be required reading for governors, curriculum managers and senior managers. 

The latest developments in AI ought also be a wake up call to examination bodies, because it attacks the very foundation of how we teach and examine students. 

ChatGPT  had Professor Jim Al Khalili tweeting recently and asking how he could set student work when his students could get ChatGPT to write the paper for them. As both an academic and a public engagement in science practitioner Al Khalili is well positioned to make an informed comment. Indeed, in his recent BBC programme, The Joy of AI, he did just that. 

Does AI Undermine Teaching And Examinations?

I could of course ask ChatGPT to answer this question and the answer could be on my screen in whatever style I want a second later. But ChatGPT might just regurgitate some of the untruths and urban myths the web is filled with. However, with a bit of judicious editing I could produce a reasonable answer quite quickly  

And that illustrates the problem. Information is not only now at our fingertips (it has been for many years thanks to Google), it can now be presented not just as a list of pages for us to visit, but as a written answer to our question, ready to submit or publish. 

So prevalent is the concern over this that researchers submitting papers for peer review are now told they cannot include ChatGPT among the paper’s authors! They are also told they must cite any information derived from AI. 

It’s a trust thing. The accuracy of AI written information is suspect! 

And ChatGPT certainly isn’t infallible. But each iteration will make it less fallible. It will soon be extremely effective in the hands of people that need very little training or experience in using it. That’s the real threat. It’s also an education sector opportunity. 

How education reacts to ChatGPT, and its ilk, will resonate with us for decades. . 

We’ve Been Here Before

ChatGPT isn’t actually a technology step change. It’s just one in a long line of technology improvements that started … at whatever baseline date you care to choose …. because technology gave us blackboards to replace clay tablets and slates. And OHPs to replace blackboards. Then came smartboards.

But these have been tools to help us teach. Search engines were different. They made knowledge more accessible to everyone. 

Of course some of the information on the web is wrong, myth or downright lies and being able to spot the fake has become a skill we’ve all had to learn. Fact checking has become the norm. 

Google came along and evolved a whole new way of finding information and ChatGPT is just more technology standing on the shoulders of that giant. But, in a sense it is also a radical change. 

Previously students could source information but had to then assemble it into their written paper. Some would argue this meant they had to understand it. Others have marked papers where the understanding was clearly absent. 

Today, ChatGPT will find the answers and produce the paper. The student doesn’t even have to read it. So we now need to implement marking strategies that determine if the student understands the topic. That might mean using oral exams, viva voce, and if that is the case why bother with the written part of the exam?

Many now argue that if we need to change the examination method perhaps we also need to change the teaching method. They argue that testing written papers and testing memory in an examination hall has no bearing on the students ability to use their learning in a practical situation. They further argue we should be teaching the application and implementation of knowledge. 

For some years I taught agricultural business management. The students sat a written paper but the results really had no bearing on their ability to manage a farm. It was just a measure of their ability to remember the theory. The real test for me was when we took the students onto a farm they didn’t know, provided them with all the records they needed and time to chat with the farmer before analysing the businesses performance and recommending alternative strategies. They had a fortnight to work on their recommendations. There was no right or wrong answer but marks were given for how they justified their case which had to be backed up with facts, figures and other verifiable evidence of the practicality of their answer. 

Students repeatedly told me that the practical exam was the time when all the lectures on gross margins, breakeven budgets, labour and machinery profiles suddenly made perfect sense. For me it was the time when they actually learnt what really mattered most and gained the confidence to move forward. 

FE Looks At Threats Not The Opportunities

One thing I’ve learnt in my years in education is that the focus is too often on the negative. FE frequently looks at the threats new situations offer and not the opportunities. ChatGPT is the opportunity to build on the advances in teaching some lecturers found during lockdown in zoom, hybrid teaching etc. AI isn’t going to go away so we should embrace the opportunities it brings with it. 

We need to look at how we teach, what we teach, and how we examine our students. Our aim is surely to prepare students for the real world, not the past. 

Managers and governors also need to look forward and determine where education needs to go. Because if you think this is scary, wait until you see what is around the corner. 

What Is The Future Bringing?

I’m a bionic learner. There I’ve admitted it. 

Of course I’m not the first. You don’t always see them but they are in society and we teach them. The earliest form of (semi) bionic student were those with glasses. Then came those with contact lens. I’ve also taught those where cataracts have meant they have a lens replaced with an artificial one.  

In my own case it’s not glasses. I’ve had a hearing aid fitted. Most of my friends haven’t noticed because it is very discrete and most of it sits deep in my eustachian tube. 

So what I hear you say? Well this one is different. It is bluetooth enabled. It means I can listen to the TV, my phone, a podcast, music etc without anyone knowing I’m doing so. 

If I were so inclined I could couple it up to my Google glasses and it could dictate my exam answers, via Chat GPT, right into my ears and the invigilator would be hard pressed to catch me! 

But that’s not the scary bit. That’s already possible. The really scary bit, which I see as an opportunity for education, is when everything I read, see, hear and interact with is recorded via my glasses and hearing aids into cyberspace. 

Imagine how useful that will be when ChatGPT can search through my previous experiences, and the whole of cyberspace, and find the answers to any question I care to pose. No longer is access to knowledge limited, no longer am I limited by my memory. 

Education then needs to change from the acquisition of knowledge to how to utilise knowledge. In some cases the knowledge and dexterity will be tested but for some the outcome is going to be purely cerebral and that offers so many challenges. For me it’s about the golden opportunity education is about to be presented. But only if they embrace this change.

Of course many online courses already embrace AI. My online language course uses AI to put Ebbinghuss’ spaced learning theory to good practice alongside the use of AI to determine my progress and next lesson. It grades me minute by minute and progress is faster because of it. 

You see none of this is new. Only the delivery mode. We’ve known about much of this, and related areas such as MicroDegrees that can be powered by AI, for centuries. 

In 2020 I wrote that the demise of adult courses was greatly exaggerated. Not everyone agreed with me and some provided evidence of the demise in English colleges. They missed the point. It had declined in colleges, but AI wielding platforms such as Coursera were delivering huge volumes of adult training and learning. 

Founder of Coursera, Daphne Koller, was US university based but it saddens me that UK university or college based computer scientists didn’t exploit AI with the same vigour and become true colleges of the future. 

Stefan Drew was formerly a college director of marketing after which he set up an education marketing consultancy with clients on three continents. Now “almost retired” he was a regular contributor to this site for many years.