Education in the Era of Generative Artificial Intelligence (AI): Understanding the Potential Benefits of ChatGPT in Promoting Teaching and Learning

Year 2023, Volume: 7 Issue: 1, 52 - 62, 31.12.2023

David Baidoo-anu Leticia Owusu Ansah

https://doi.org/10.61969/jai.1337500

Cited By: 57

Abstract

Since its maiden release into the public domain on November 30, 2022, ChatGPT garnered more than one million subscribers within a week. The generative AI tool ⎼ChatGPT took the world by surprise with it sophisticated capacity to carry out remarkably complex tasks. The extraordinary abilities of ChatGPT to perform complex tasks within the field of education has caused mixed feelings among educators, as this advancement in AI seems to revolutionize existing educational praxis. This is an exploratory study that synthesizes recent extant literature to offer some potential benefits and drawbacks of ChatGPT in promoting teaching and learning. Benefits of ChatGPT include but are not limited to promotion of personalized and interactive learning, generating prompts for formative assessment activities that provide ongoing feedback to inform teaching and learning etc. The paper also highlights some inherent limitations in the ChatGPT such as generating wrong information, biases in data training, which may augment existing biases, privacy issues etc. The study offers recommendations on how ChatGPT could be leveraged to maximize teaching and learning. Policy makers, researchers, educators and technology experts could work together and start conversations on how these evolving generative AI tools could be used safely and constructively to improve education and support students’ learning.

Keywords

ChatGPT, Education, Generative AI, Teaching and Learning

References

• Abukmeil, M., Ferrari, S., Genovese, A., Piuri, V., & Scotti, F. (2021). A survey of unsupervised generative models for exploratory data analysis and representation learning. Acm computing surveys (csur), 54(5), 1-40. https://doi.org/10.1145/3450963.
• Alshater, M. (2022). Exploring the role of artificial intelligence in enhancing academic performance: A case study of ChatGPT (December 26, 2022). Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=4312358 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.4312358
• Altman, S. (2022, Dec. 4). Twitter. https://twitter.com/sama/status/1599668808285028353?s=20&t=j5ymf1tUeTpeQuJKlWAKaQ.
• Aydın, Ö., Karaarslan, E. (2022). OpenAI ChatGPT Generated Literature Review: Digital Twin in Healthcare. In Ö. Aydın (Ed.), Emerging Computer Technologies 2 (pp. 22-31). İzmir Akademi Dernegi.
• Aydın, Ö., & Karaarslan, E. (2023). Is ChatGPT leading generative AI? What is beyond expectations? Academic Platform Journal of Engineering and Smart Systems.
• Brown, T., Mann, B., Ryder, N., Subbiah, M., Kaplan, J. D., Dhariwal, P., et al. (2020). Language models are few-shot learners. Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems, 33: 1877-1901.
• Chen, Y., Chen, Y., & Heffernan, N. (2020). Personalized math tutoring with a conversational agent. arXiv preprint arXiv:2012.12121.
• D'Mello, S., Craig, S., Witherspoon, A., & Graesser, A. (2014). Affective and learning-related dynamics during interactions with an intelligent tutoring system. International Journal of Human-Computer Studies, 72(6), 415-435.
• Elsen-Rooney, M. (2023). NYC education department blocks ChatGPT on school devices, networks. Retrieved on January 24 2023 from https://ny.chalkbeat.org/2023/1/3/23537987/nyc-schools-ban-chatgpt-writing-artificial-intelligence.
• Earl, L. M. (2012). Assessment as learning: Using classroom assessment to maximize student learning. Corwin Press.
• Gui, J., Sun, Z., Wen, Y., Tao, D., & Ye, J. (2021). A review on generative adversarial networks: Algorithms, theory, and applications. IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering. doi: 10.1109/TKDE.2021.3130191.
• Herft, A. (2023). A Teacher's Prompt Guide to ChatGPT aligned with 'What Works Best' Guide. Retrieved on January 23 2023 from https://drive.google.com/file/d/15qAxnUzOwAPwHzoaKBJd8FAgiOZYcIxq/view.
• Hu, L. (2023). Generative AI and Future. Retrieved on January 23 from https://pub.towardsai.net/generative-ai-and-future-c3b1695876f2.
• Jovanović, M. (2023). Generative Artificial Intelligence: Trends and Prospects. https://www.computer.org/csdl/magazine/co/2022/10/09903869/1H0G6xvtREk. 0.1109/MC.2022.3192720.
• Johnson, M., Schuster, M., Le, Q., Krikun, M., Wu, Y., Chen, Z., ... & Chen, Y. (2016). Google's neural machine translation system: Bridging the gap between human and machine translation. arXiv pre.
• Kim, S., Park, J., & Lee, H. (2019). Automated essay scoring using a deep learning model. Journal of Educational Technology Development and Exchange, 2(1), 1-17.
• Lucy, L., & Bamman, D. (2021, June). Gender and representation bias in GPT-3 generated stories. In Proceedings of the Third Workshop on Narrative Understanding (pp. 48-55). http://dx.doi.org/10.18653/v1/2021.nuse-1.5.
• Metz, C. (2022, Dec.11). The new chatbots could change the world. Can you trust them? The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/10/technology/ai-chat-bot-chatgpt.html.
• Mollman, S. (2022, December 9). ChatGPT has gained 1 million followers in a single week. Here’s why the A.I. chatbot is primed to disrupt search as we know it. Yahoo Finance. https://finance.yahoo.com/news/chatgpt-gained-1-million-followers-224523258.html?guccounter=1&guce_referrer=aHR0cHM6Ly9kdWNrZHVja2dvLmNvbS8&gucereferrer_sig=AQAAAFoaVt0Jgmrz33m4F8LQ93tU37YKNp45BNiRU295yW5YSO9Pki rImoDOfHuNU3b9C9E4zFl6W1R6mSZrM5SFK7y0Au9ht wMKUfBuhQ0Y254BzjvjaY ypRR60aUlPgL3xfTqaM81r3SoP4-QEwJD1lW3avB5uVyxoyu0Src7ffpU.
• OpenAI. (2022). ChatGPT: Optimizing language models for dialogue. OpenAI. Published November 30, 2022. Accessed January 17, 2022. https://openai.com/blog/chatgpt/.
• O’Connor, S., & ChatGPT. (2023). Open artificial intelligence platforms in nursing education: Tools for academic progress or abuse? Nurse Education in Practice, 66, 103-537. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.nepr.2022.103537.
• Pavlik, J. V. (2023). Collaborating With ChatGPT: Considering the Implications of Generative Artificial Intelligence for Journalism and Media Education. Journalism & Mass Communication Educator, 0(0). https://doi.org/10.1177/10776958221149577
• Petersen, J. (2021). Innovative assessment practices. Retrieved on 2 August 2022 from https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=&cad=rja&uact=8&ved=2ahUKEwjhzbGO38T5AhW2hIkEHXPNDdoQFnoECAkQAQ&url=https%3A%2F%2Ffreshgrade.com%2Fwp-content%2Fuploads%2F2020%2F07%2FFG-Innovative-Assessment-Whitepaper-1.pdf&usg=AOvVaw1fWCFBStSE4BqDTXT5_Voi.
• Qadir, Junaid (2022): Engineering Education in the Era of ChatGPT: Promise and Pitfalls of Generative AI for Education. TechRxiv. Preprint. https://doi.org/10.36227/techrxiv.21789434.v1.
• Rudolph, J., Tan, S., & Tan, S. (2023). ChatGPT: Bullshit spewer or the end of traditional assessments in higher education?. Journal of Applied Learning and Teaching, 6(1). https://doi.org/10.37074/jalt.2023.6.1.9.
• Tate, T. P., Doroudi, S., Ritchie, D., Xu, Y., & Uci, m. w. (2023, January 10). Educational Research and AI-Generated Writing: Confronting the Coming Tsunami. https://doi.org/10.35542/osf.io/4mec3.
• Terwiesch, C. (2023). Would Chat GPT3 get a Wharton MBA? A prediction based on its performance in the operations management course. Mack Institute for Innovation Management at the Wharton School: University of Pennsylvania.
• Thunstrom, A. O. (2022, June 30). We asked GPT-3 to write an academic paper about itself- then we tried to get it published. Scientific American. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/we-asked-gpt-3-to-write-an-academic-paper-about-itself-mdash-then-we-tried-to-get-it-published/.
• Warren, T. (2023, January 9). Microsoft is looking at OpenAI’s GPT for Word, Outlook, and PowerPoint. The Verge, https://www.theverge.com/2023/1/9/23546144/microsoft-openai-word-powerpoint-outlook-gpt-integration-rumor
• Williams, C. (2023). Hype, or the future of learning and teaching? 3 Limits to AI's ability to write student essays. . London School of Economics internet blog. https://kar.kent.ac.uk/99505/.
• Willis, J., Adie, L., & Klenowski, V. (2013). Conceptualising teachers’ assessment literacies in an era of curriculum and assessment reform. The Australian Educational Researcher, 40, 241-256. https://doi.org/10.1007/s13384-013-0089-9.
• Wiliam, D. (2011). What is assessment for learning?. Studies in Educational Evaluation, 37(1), 3-14. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.stueduc.2011.03.001.
• Zhai, X., (2022). ChatGPT User experience: Implications for education. (December 27, 2022). Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=4312418 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.4312418.
• Wang, W., Chen, Y., & Heffernan, N. (2020). A generative model-based tutoring system for math word problems. arXiv preprint arXiv:2010.04.