My hottest take yet: chatgpt won’t change much about school.
It’s been almost a year since ChatGPT launched and chatbots in general blossomed into this huge ecosystem. During that time it has been used for both good things, and not so good things; I say with personal experience in mind. In education in particular it’s been quite a ride.
As a student myself, I’ve been through lots of changes that, at first seemed like revolutions that turned into a minor footnote.
Previous “Revolutions” in Education
The first thing that comes to mind is youtube. Youtube, the video platform, pushed the world towards a content-creator society we see today. With Indian channels teaching math, tiktokers filming themselves dancing and more, it changed the world. But for education, things changed very little.
Teachers still taught using powerpoint slides and visualizers. Real life examples were in pictures in books and hands-on activities. I admit that youtube gave teachers more material to explain, but a revolution? For me not so much.
For me a revolution would be watching youtube as the main platform for education. Giving out homework to watch youtube videos. Everything done online courses. More akin to youtube science channels. But that is not case.
Some online education platforms exist as well. Coursera and the like. But I don’t feel like I learned very much from those courses. Why youtube and online learning didn’t change education is because of an essential fact.
The Essence of Education
You can’t learn something without genuine effort.
Learning is effort. Learning is time. Learning is homework. Learning is sitting through lectures.
You simply can’t change that with passive learning like youtube. Online education takes quite a bit of effort, but I don’t think online quizzes or classwork requires as much willpower as physically sitting in class and writing on paper does. Especially not watching something on youtube.
Now back to ChatGPT
What ChatGPT Will Change
As a student myself, I use ChatGPT a lot in my work, and I will say that like youtube, it’s passive education. I genuinely feel that inputting prompts and reading outputs and inputting new prompts is not education, its more like entertainment. It also takes the challenge out. You’re not actually putting in any effort. So, in a sense it changes education in a bad way.
It also changes how teachers perceive students’ work. Before, if a student’s work is good, it’s good. But now it’s difficult to separate work made by a student and by inputting prompts. So teachers would have to be more skeptical. There’s already a few examples of teachers rejecting work because they think it’s done by an AI. This too, will get worse with time.
What ChatGPT Will NOT Change
As bad as everything seems, this AI tool will not revolutionize everything. Because of the slow rate of adoption and, as I’ve said before of effort, teachers would probably teach in the same manner they have done. People say teaching will have less “write something from facts” and more “checking the truthfulness of the facts”, but I doubt it.
What Teachers Should do About it
Little can be done to reverse the effects of ChatGPT, but I think that you can plan around it. First, teaching things which can only be done in the physical world, like oral exams, and on-site tests. Second, having students citing sources in their work. The former cannot be done by any chat bot, since it takes a real human. The latter, chat bots are bad at, though the Bing bot seems somewhat capable.