How AI is making teaching more interesting.
Educators will gain the most from quality AI applications.
The first public professional reaction to ChatGPT came from the academic community.
Students aren’t just lazy individuals, they are smart and well-organised as a community. So, the first casualty were - class tests and exercises. ChatGPT spread like wildfire through dorm rooms, exam halls and among writers of online tests.
But, don’t underestimate teachers.
Teachers are used to intelligent sounding gibberish. But when it suddenly became universal, they knew something was up. And of course - some started fearing for the future of education.
With GPT-4, educators initially couldn’t believe their horror. After some time, with experimentation, we learnt that atleast for now, GPT-4, like other models, can “hallucinate”, i.e., make up citations and facts. Anticipating the problem, OpenAI launched an AI text classifier to help find the human amongst his AI friends.
Examiners sighed a heave of small relief, we can be ahead of the curve, perhaps?
The answer is ‘Yes’.
But the answer, more accurately, is - ‘You are asking the wrong questions.’
Like all professions who feel threatened by generative AI, teachers have found pillars of self-comfort.
“Not only does it make up citations, its knowledge base is outdated. Our teaching is specialised. Our content is unique. We are building the tools to catch cheaters and pretenders.”
For educational institutions, generative AI is an assault on integrity that must be countered by integrity.
Scepticism and fear being is a common reaction, though the reasons can be different, when Generative AI first collides into your professional world.
But like elsewhere, I will bet on it being short-lived as educators experience the profound changes (for the better) in their lives, and the lives of their students enabled by the very technology they are sceptical of.
While teaching is a job like every other, teachers are among the proudest professionals. Meaning is a big part of their (or your) motivations, even amongst the most disinterested teachers. You will hear things like
“The highest satisfaction levels come from nurturing the minds of students.”
This means, choosing what to teach, how to engage students, how to deepen relationships and collaboration, creating objective tests and exams, intervening where required to advance learning, all the wonderful things we like to do when we choose to teach. Not just our students, but our colleagues, our children, our friends - with whom we seek to inspire, influence and grow.
But like in all other jobs, the ‘good parts’ are accompanied by the bad parts.
Among the complaints amongst those who have teaching jobs (add here) are:
1. Administrative - paper work, paper work.
2. Organisational - meetings, meetings (staff, parents, bad news, unpleasant conversations).
3. Policing - especially students in situations (classrooms, exams, tests);
4. Repetitive - grading, scoring, feedback.
Many of the above are necessary because expectations are high among students - an increasing challenge in a fiercely competitive education market. Things like testing often or having a working relationship with donors and parents, are a matter of life and death for some institutions.
With innovations in AI and language models, life is about to get a lot better.
Like my advice to lawyers, my advice to educators would be - embrace the technologies that are changing your lives for the better.
Let’s talk about grading.
Grading is painful, repetitive and extra to your job.
You carry student papers everywhere, hoping to grade some in between breaks from everything else. A recurring burden that takes away from learning, teaching and time with your family. Even when you get paid for doing it, your time is spent better doing the actual work, such as - focussing on weak students, communicating feedback and improving the testing process.
To test more often means to increase the burden of grading, taking time away from teaching.
To test less often means to give your students fewer opportunities to fail and grow. To standardise testing means to remove the depth of the teaching experience in exchange for efficiency.
This is the reason automated grading and feedback tools are resonating among educators.
It is important to understand one fundamental truth:
AI will never replace professionals. It will only make them more productive, and allow them to create more value.
In the case of teaching professionals, this means - having software generate objective grades and feedback that is ready to be reviewed by you and your students. It also means - faster feedback loops, more flexibility, creativity, and freedom. And - being able to teach students more and being able to serve more students and better.
If you are someone in the teaching business who is reading this, you should be worrying less about say - whether ChatGPT is being used for plagiarism, and more about - how AI can improve the lives of your staff, teachers, researchers and students. When you do, these small matters that are so big in your heads will resolve themselves faster than you can say “AI”.
This isn't just about testing a new tool, which you can free of cost, by writing back.
It's about pioneering a shift in education, about reclaiming your time, and about redefining what it means to teach and to learn.