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Kicking the Educational Tires of ChatGPT

  • MIT Technology Review education issue graphic

I love to read magazines. When I want to find out the latest chit-chat on a subject of interest to me, I go browse and buy. I usually purchase when I’m at an airport or at Barnes and Noble. I’ve recently taken to explore the latest on AI in education, yet the online headlines keep moving the AI end zone with ever-increasing morsels of contradictory predictions.

I happen to be at Barnes and Noble earlier this month and had a wild-hair to purchase all of the magazines that featured AI. I wanted to find something positive about AI in classroom situations where fear mongers wouldn’t have the upper-hand on the tone of the articles. The May/June 2023 MIT Technology Review was among my pulled collection. The cover promised teachers who believed that AI could improve education.

Enter Will Douglas Heaven, senior editor for AI at MIT Technology Review and author of “The Education of ChatGPT.” Heaven quotes many teachers and educators who have found ways to utilize ChatGPT for student learning and even suggests that “banning them [chatbots] is futile, possibly even counterproductive.”

Heaven follows up this statement with a quote from Richard Culatta, CEO of the International Society for Technology in Education (ISTE) and a former colleague of mine from the early 2000s. “We need to be asking what we need to do to prepare young people—learners—for a future world that’s not far into the future.”

Bingo! Culatta hit the educational AI nail on the head for me. With all the doom and gloom swinging around about AI, there seems to be more sour soothsayers talking about the end of education than prescient prophets like Culatta who sense a beginning of “new” education that must innovatively prepare learners with knowledge and skill sets to navigate within the digital acceleration.

Granted, there is much to be done to figure out this future, but I’m with Heaven on this one to the positives of AI and with Culatta on prepping learners for the inevitable. Heaven ends with another quote from Culatta: “We have to withhold some of our quick judgment. That’s not helpful right now. We need to get comfortable kicking the tires on this thing.”

Excuse me for a moment. I’m pausing to go kick some tires.

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Sam Altman’s AI conversation and ChatGPT’s answer to my question

I’ve started doing some research on Artificial Intelligence. I’m mainly interested in its application to support learning for the millions of potential “students” who find themselves outside of a formal educational system either because of lack of opportunity or poverty. The idea would be that personalized learning scaffolding could be built through AI to fit the educational trajectory that a student needs to take. My desire to start down that AI road began before OpenAI’s Chat GPT came to the forefront.

As OpenAI came into my purview, I listened to an interview of Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, to see if I could pick up any clues as to what might be coming down the AI pipe. Altman said that AI is the biggest technological platform of our generation—a legitimate revolution. He said that with AI, the marginal costs of intelligence and energy are trending towards zero. AI will impact ALL computing and will quicken iteration cycles. He said we will see an explosion of new companies that will use the large language model as a service.

The main societal issue at the beginning of the AI revolution will be disruption of economic activity. He suggested that we will need to have a new social contract on how we think about fairly distributing wealth, who will get access to AGI systems, and how governance will work. I think the AI disruption will also affect how we think about education, how it is distributed, what even is the nature of education. What will it be that we need to learn? Who will determine what we need to learn?

In the spirit of OpenAI, I decided to ask ChatGPT “What are the best ways in which AI can support learning?” I was surprised at its ability to immediately inform me of five different ways articulated in succinct terms. Here is what it gave back.

AI can support learning in several ways, including:

  1. Personalized Learning: AI can personalize learning experiences for individual students, using algorithms to adapt to their needs and progress. This can help students learn at their own pace, with content and activities that are tailored to their specific learning style and level.
  2. Intelligent Tutoring Systems: Intelligent tutoring systems can provide real-time feedback to students, helping them understand and learn from mistakes, and improve their skills. These systems can also track student progress and suggest activities or resources to help them improve.
  3. Automated Grading: AI-powered tools can help automate grading and provide more consistent and objective evaluations of student work. This can save teachers time and provide students with faster feedback on their progress.
  4. Adaptive Testing: Adaptive testing systems can use AI algorithms to dynamically adjust the difficulty level of questions based on the student’s performance. This can help identify knowledge gaps and provide more accurate assessments of student learning.
  5. Content Creation: AI can also be used to create educational content, such as videos or interactive simulations, that is tailored to specific learning objectives and student needs.

By incorporating AI into the learning process, students can benefit from more personalized and adaptive learning experiences, faster and more consistent feedback, and access to high-quality educational resources.