While some educators fear the rise of artificial intelligence tools could lead to a spike in student misconduct, a British Columbia professor said the potential benefits of the new technology shouldn’t be dismissed too soon. says.
Since its release in public beta in November, ChatGPT has impressed humans with its ability to imitate human writing – drafting resumes, writing poetry, and completing homework assignments in seconds. That ability is a concern for many Canadian teachers, but not everyone sees it as a threat.
George Velezianos, professor at Royal Roads University in Victoria, British Columbia, and Canada’s Chief Researcher for Innovative Learning and Technology, said ChatGPT not only helps students improve their writing, It can also encourage educational institutions to develop better ways to assess student learning. Spit out the facts in a written essay.
“Students who use ChatGPT are not automatically cheating,” said Veletsianos. on the island Monday.
According to Veletsianos, seeing what ChatGPT spits out on a particular subject can be very helpful for students whose mother tongue is different from the one they’re studying. This helps students expand their vocabulary and improve their grammar and sentence structure.
He also said that even if the students were initially confused, it could help clarify the student’s assignment, as long as they didn’t try to pass the material off as their own.
“This response, which focuses on cheating and developing other tools to catch cheating students, carries a lot of baggage and holds us back that we don’t trust students. It’s part of a bigger problem we’re having.”
However, the reality of ChatGPT’s functionality raises many concerns.
The New York City Department of Education has banned ChatGPT in all public schools due to concerns about ChatGPT’s impact on learning and accuracy. The Quebec Ministry of Education is currently evaluating the impact of this technology on student learning and teacher work, particularly ministerial exams.
Jeremy Kurgaupt, an English teacher at the Collège de Maisonneuve in Montreal, typed some of the essay questions into the program and was horrified by the results.
In less than a minute, the AI spit out a response comparable to the work some students might produce. Klughaupt said many of his colleagues were “scratched” by not knowing how to proceed with course planning and evaluation.
“As teachers, many of us feel torn between our two roles of teaching and increasingly policing our students,” says Klughaupt.
But Veletsianos says there is an opportunity here for educational institutions to develop policies that frame ChatGPT as a helpful tool, not an adversary of the educational system.
“It is beneficial for us to understand its possibilities and limitations, to understand that it has many limitations, to understand how it can be used ethically and responsibly,” said Beretzianos. rice field.
He hopes the invention of ChatGPT will encourage educators to think outside the box when assessing student comprehension. This could include oral presentations, essays reflecting personal experiences, and community-based projects, he suggested.
Veletsianos also believes that ChatGPT technology may eventually be integrated into existing educational tools, likening it to the functionality of dictionaries and thesaurus available to Microsoft Office users.
“The cat is out of the bag. It will not disappear.”
ChatGPT is an interactive program trained by AI laboratory OpenAI. According to OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, it launched on November 30 and already has more than 1 million users.
