Can Education Benefit from AI?
A recent research from the Walton Family Foundation demonstrates that educators are driving innovation when it comes to integrating OpenAI’s ChatGPT into their classrooms. This nationwide survey across 2000 K-12 students and educators across 5 major cities has been cited by the Office of Educational Technology in their recent report on AI in the classroom, and shows how prevalent ChatGPT already is in schools.
51% of teachers report using ChatGPT in some capacity. Out of these, 40% of teachers use it weekly and 10% use it almost every day. Uses include lesson planning (30%), coming up with creative ideas for classes (30%), and building background knowledge for lessons and classes (27%). Meanwhile, 33% of students aged 12-17 say they’ve used ChatGPT for school in some capacity, with 47% of those students aged 12-14.
59% of teachers say that “ChatGPT will likely have legitimate educational uses that we cannot ignore”, while only 24% say that “ChatGPT will likely only be useful for students to cheat”.
This survey also showed that both educators and students find AI tools such as ChatGPT to be truly useful in the classroom.
68% of students think it can help them become better students, and 75% think it can help them learn faster. 73% of teachers say ChatGPT can help their students learn more, 77% say it could help them grow as teachers, and 65% of them would rather people spend more time developing solutions for how to incorporate ChatGPT into teaching and learning.
For teachers and students, ChatGPT is an example of why we need education to modernize. A clear majority of students (63%) and teachers (72%) agree with the statement “ChatGPT is just another example of why we can’t keep doing things the old way for schools in the modern world.”
The Many Use Cases of AI in the Classroom
It can tremendously enhance our understanding of subjects. For example, AI models are being used by historians to examine documents from the past and create a more accurate picture of human life and society.
New skills and new ways of learning are emerging. Many forward thinking teachers and professors are experimenting with having their students play with ChatGPT, evaluate and grade its responses, teaching prompt engineering, and differentiating facts from made up hallucinations of a machine. These are going to be the skills of the future, and it is imperative that the new generation of students are well-versed in them.
Hyperpersonalization in learning is coming. Many applications in the education technology market, such as Khan Academy’s Khanmigo, are adopting AI and ChatGPT like models to provide experiences to students that feel like one-on-one tutoring.
Educators are reporting vastly reduced preparation time for lesson and quiz preparation and assessment, leaving time for deeper and richer conversations with students in classrooms.
AI’s abilities that are beneficial to learning include being able to synthesize, condense, and explain a concept (e.g differentiation in Calculus) or a piece of text (reviewing key points of a document), providing feedback on a student’s work with specific pointers, helping a student in the critical process of ideating for a project, etc can make it a one-on-one tutor.
Even its shortcomings in providing factual information and logical fallacies can become a conversation starter in class, teaching students how to identify disinformation generated by AI, which in a world which will be increasingly filled with AI-generated false content, will be an invaluable skill.