It’s almost as if a storm like no other has suddenly appeared on the horizon and our compulsion to batten down the hatches on our educational ship,lest it sink forever to the murky depths of oblivion,is overtaking our rational brains.
Chat GPT is a language-processing AI model that is capable of generating human-like text,such as essays.iStock
ChatGPT, that can write essays or complete tasks such as a student’s homework,and its inevitable ensuing versions,is no storm. Nor is it an existential threat to the role of teachers.
It emerges at a time when in Australian schools despite increased funding and teachers working longer hours. And it could be the greatest opportunity to land at our feet in recent history if we can emerge from below the decks and adjust the sails of our schools accordingly.
ChatGPT will not be ignored. It’s not a technological fad,and it’s not something any educator should think will go the way of Pokemon Go or the Atari 2600 any time soon. It will fundamentally change the way we educate,and its first impost will be on the way we assess.
When a machine can produce a credible essay on the first onshore days of the First Fleet,evaluated against simple assessment criteria and adjusted as though written by a garden-variety Year 9 student who doesn’t want to write the essay herself … we just aren’t going to be able to set that style of assessment task anymore.
Any assessment that a student completes independently at home is now going to be compromised.
Of course,it always was. We’ve long been turning a blind eye to the parental influence on homework and project/essay-based assessments despite teachers being fully aware that they discover far more about parental capabilities – or Google’s potential – than those of their students when they set these tasks.
But finally,we may have crossed a point of no return,unable to justify trudging the tired path of delivering a lecture at school,setting a task,collecting the task,marking the task and returning a grade that has so slowed our educational progress.
So impossible will it be in the ChatGPT future for any teacher to determine the integrity of any student’s learning when not in their direct supervision,that the very formula for educating them will finally be forced to change.
The good news is that innovative models for learning have been emerging for some time now. When,an American educator,started tutoring his cousins in advanced mathematics in 2004 – not by doing their homework or assignments for them,but by video recording his expert tuition – he was unaware that he was birthing an approach called “flipped learning” that would have exponential potentials.
By 2018,more than 70 million students globally were independently accessing his free online education platform,Khan Academy,built on the approach of “watch the lecture at home,do the work in class” and countless students were using it as their study technique to improve test scores at school.
Some valid criticisms of Khan emerged,based chiefly around his absence of any pedagogical skill,being the skills,techniques and tactics that great teachers deploy to engage and progress their students.
But imagine he did. Even better,imagine if the people who do have those skills were the ones producing the videos. Perhaps then we’d have a game changer on our hands.
Alas,even the sudden arrival of the pandemic and the frantic,admirable pivot to remote learning choreographed by our educators failed to change the model beyond the crisis. We defaulted back to the old methodology as soon as we could unmask.
ChatGPT won’t permit the same return to these fabled good old days.
As scary as it may sound,our schools should resist any urge to merely weather the ChatGPT storm and instead embrace its immense possibilities.
For if a Year 9 student can have an essay written for them by a machine,couldn’t the same machine be capable of compiling the yard duty timetable that assistant principals across the country waste hours pulling together?
Could it write the school’s annual finance report for the bursar or develop a science unit of work for a Year 1 teacher on “minibeasts” that incorporates a series of learning intentions and critical success criteria? The short answer is that it could. Schools right now face a choice. Fight the wave of ChatGPT or surf it.
If our schools and their systems can attack the assessment conundrum posed by ChatGPT with the vigour and determination that they attacked remote learning,their reward might just be a significant reduction in the pointless “administrivia” so clogging their workdays.
And that might leave some room and time to … I dunno … teach.
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