Tech giants Google, Microsoft, and OpenAI have unintentionally given educators around the world a big summer homework assignment: adapting assignments and teaching methods to accommodate the new set of AI capabilities that will be entering students’ classrooms this fall.
Educators at both schools and universities have already struggled to keep up with ChatGPT and other AI tools this school year, New Announcements Education experts say education reforms implemented by major AI companies last month may require further adjustments by educators to maintain academic integrity and accurately assess student learning.
Meanwhile, educators also have a number of new educational technology products to consider that promise to save time on lesson planning and administrative tasks thanks to AI.
One of the biggest changes is that OpenAI has announced that its latest generation chatbot, GPT-4o, is now available for free to everyone. Previously, only the older version of the tool, GPT-3.5, was free, and you had to pay at least $20 per month to access the state-of-the-art model. The new model can now read not only text, but also Audio and visual inputThis allows users to share still images or screen shots with the chatbot to get feedback.
“This is a game-changing change,” said Mark Watkins, a lecturer in writing and rhetoric at the University of Mississippi and director of the university’s AI Summer Institute for Writing Teachers, adding that many educators were unimpressed when they tried the previous free version of ChatGPT, but the new version will be a “huge wake-up call” to the power of the technology.
And now that students and professors can talk to these next-generation chatbots, rather than just type, they can start to use the so-calledHomework ApocalypseUnleashed by previous versions of ChatGPT It will get worseIt may become more difficult for professors to design assignments that cannot be completed by AI bots on students’ behalf.
“I think what it means to be an educator is really going to be questioned this fall,” Watkins added, noting that these changes will not only require professors and teachers to shift the types of assignments they give, but they may also have to rethink how they deliver instructional materials, as students can now use AI tools to perform tasks like summarizing lecture videos.
And education is where technology companies areKiller App“Education” of AI chatbots is a use case that is driving adoption of the technology. Last month, several demos by OpenAI, Google and other companies focused on educational uses of modern chatbots. And last week, OpenAI New University Partnership Program It’s called ChatGPT Edu.
“Google and OpenAI are both targeting education,” said longtime higher education leader and consultant,Education using AI.“They see this as both a great use case and a huge market.”
Class Changes
It’s not just tech giants that are changing the game for educators.
In recent months, many small businesses have released tools targeted at education use cases and are aggressively promoting them to students and teachers on TikTok, Instagram and other social media platforms.
For example, a company called Turbolearn: TikTok videos The video, titled “Why I No Longer Take Notes in Class,” has been viewed more than 100,000 times. In it, a young woman says she discovered the “trick” while attending Harvard University. She explains that she opened the company’s tool on her laptop during class and clicked the record button. “The software automatically uses your recording to create notes, flashcards and quiz questions,” she says in the promotional video.
The company markets it as a way to help students stay focused in class, but Watkins worries that not taking notes will make students less likely to pay attention in class and process what they’re hearing in lectures.
Now that these tools exist, Watkins suggests that professors should find more ways to create active learning in their classes and incorporate more “intentional friction” into student learning to force students to stop and participate and think about what is being said.
“Pause the lecture and have a discussion with your students. Have small group discussions,” he says. “Encourage students to annotate. Read with pen, pencil or highlighter. While AI tools are advertised as ways to make learning faster and more efficient, we want to slow down the pace of our classes and allow students to pause for a moment.”
Bonnie Stachowiak also advises educators to slow down. Stachowiak, dean of the School of Education at Vanguard University, points to some recent advice from education guru James Lang: “Go slow” with AI in the classroomAs educators try new AI tools, they should keep some fundamental principles of education in mind.
“That doesn’t mean resisting it. I don’t think we should turn a blind eye to reality,” Stachowiak says. “But it’s okay to slowly explore and slowly experiment with these new tools in the classroom,” she adds. This is especially true because it’s not realistic to keep up with every new AI announcement, given all the other demands of the teaching profession.
However, tools are emerging rapidly.
“The infuriating thing about all of this is that these tools are being publicly deployed in a grand experiment that nobody wanted,” said the University of Mississippi’s Watkins. “I know how hard it is for faculty to carve out time for anything other than work.”
That’s why university and school leaders need to drive efforts to make more systemic changes in teaching and assessment, he says. “We have to start thinking hard about how we approach teaching and how we approach student learning. This is something that has to be thought about across the university.”
The new tools will also mean new financial investments for schools and universities.
“At some point, AI will be the next big expense,” Bowen, the education consultant, told EdSurge.
Though many of the tools are free for now, Bowen predicts that these will ultimately be costly for universities at a time when budgets are already tight.
Save time?
Many of the latest AI tools for education are targeted at educators, promising to save time.
For example, some new products allow teachers to use AI to quickly rework worksheets, test questions and other materials to change the reading level, so a teacher could take a newspaper article and quickly revise it to help younger students better understand it.
“They literally rewrite your words to fit their audience and purpose,” Watkins says.
Such features are also available in several commercial products and free AI tools. Last month, nonprofit Khan Academy Announced The company plans to make its AI tools for teachers available free of charge to all educators.
“There are good and bad things about these tools,” Watkins adds. The good thing is that they can really help students with learning disabilities. “But the problem is, when we tested this, it helped those students, but it also led to other students saying, ‘I don’t need to read anything anymore,’ because it can take any text and summarize it into bullet points,” he adds.
Another popular feature of the new AI services is personalizing assignments by tailoring learning materials to students’ interests, said Dan Meyer, vice president of user growth at Amplify, a curriculum and assessment company. Mathematics Teaching Newsletter.
Meyer worries that these tools are overhyped and have limited usefulness in the classroom.
“We can’t take all the boring word problems students solve every day and turn them into baseball problems,” he says. “Kids will end up hating baseball instead of loving math.”
He summed up his views in a recent post:Generative AI is best suited to areas where teachers are least needed.”
Meyer is concerned that many new products are starting with what generative AI can do and pushing products based on that, rather than starting with educators’ needs and designing tools that address those challenges.
At the university level, Bowen believes faculty could benefit in the near future as tools like learning management systems are equipped with AI capabilities to perform tasks like building a website for a course as an instructor enters a syllabus. “It could be a real timesaver for faculty,” he predicts.
But education experts say the biggest challenge will be figuring out how to keep students learning while also preparing them for a workplace that is rapidly adopting AI tools.
As AI takes over routine tasks in many white-collar industries, Bowen hopes that universities can find ways to focus on teaching students the skills that will make them most human.
“Maybe this time they’ll realize that the liberal arts really do matter,” he says.
