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This author is bringing up one of my biggest concerns about AI adoption, which is that it's allowing people to come off as an expert while just skipping the learning process entirely. The learning process is where personal development happens. It's where you become a better person. And I don't just mean in college, I mean in all things. And professors are supposed to somehow make sure that students are going through that process, while also being told to adopt AI in the classroom.
Also, I first skimmed the headline as "It's time to teach ChatGPT to know pain," and...YES.
Students often carry misconceptions about coursework. They may view an instructor as an opponent standing in the way of the grade they want. And they see “getting the right answers” as the goal of education because that’s how you secure that grade.
Pedagogy aside, this is not entirely untrue in the lower division, at least on an institutional level. It’s usually the institution propping instructors up to stand in the way. They are told “you have to meet these learning outcomes, so these assignments have to do X, Y, and Z” and turns out X, Y, and Z are bullshit, but it meets accreditation standards if the class is audited. I taught rhetoric and it had to be explicitly Aristotelian. It blew chunks, nobody liked it or really understood it, but it was what the department justified to the institution for accreditation purposes.
I hated giving grades. I wanted to see continual improvement rather than final products. With a gun to my head I wouldn’t go back.
The direction I’m moving, and other teachers as well is to only consider in class work for assessment. Specifically pencil and paper work.
If you had asked me to predict what a high-quality education would look like post-Covid I would have said high quality videos made with great production value with rock star teachers and domain experts involved. Combined with local teachers offering a more personal tutoring like experience to clarify the videos.
If you asked me now what a high-quality education would look like in the post-AI future. I would say boarding schools that don’t allow phones, with almost all assessments being done in person with pencil and paper.
There’s no denying that technologies can make certain topics unnecessary to learn. Calculators can do basic calculus with ease these days and AI can summarize a text or write a bland essay or implement a simple intro to HTML assignment. But if the goal for education is to learn we have to limit the use of technologies that limit learning.
I suppose there’s another debate to be had about vocational learning and taking advantage of modern tools. That’s usually why I say “high-quality” education when discussing these things. For the average family AI is here to stay in education. For the schools for the elite, AI is an experiment which is slowly being kicked out.
10% of the male students, and 20% of the female students of a class use ChatGPT. There are 100 students in the class, and the class is evenly split between male and female. How many students used ChatGPT to answer this question?
I learn in the time of GPT and It's pain. I can't ask other students about college stuff cause they are tech bros who answer "ask chat GPT".
The problem is also that a lot of uni/college studying for students is endless, (not always but often) unfun and almost ritualistic stream of homework essays of given topics, that you just have to do to pass, and many times you are also punishes for going outside the set box. It was this for me. This is just because the real point of isn't to learn, or really prepare for working life or profession, or academic career it's really to quantify the students learning for a purpose of a grade that leads to a degree. Essays are just the easy way to test handling of abstract ideas for a large amount of students. Then people whine that students now are tempted to turn to the magic talking box that can do the tedious and boring work for them.
The good old (fountain) pen and paper are the only solution for this, together with oral examinations. I started studying at the University just a few years before covid and AI happened. I withnessed this unfortunate change on my skin... I remember that at the beginning the quality of teachings was much higher than in the last years. I never really learned anything online and at a certain point it become difficult to engage in group tasks because other students were just using AI. At the end, I graduated but I don't feel that I got what I wanted. The first time when I saw an AI generated assignment from one of my classmates, I thought that this person was lacking critical thinking capabilities (I didn't know at the time that it was AI generated). I believe that REAL negative effects of AI in education will be felt soon and it will be painful. Skilled jobs cannot rely on people that graduated just by prompting on chatbots.
Translation: we are screwed
Share the pain, make them hand-write everything. 😉
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