ChatGPT and Education: Student and teaching fraternity at crossroads

Concerns regarding ChatGPT shouldn't be based on what it is currently; rather, they should be based on what it has the potential to become in the future.

Education and ChatGPT

ChatGPT is a large-scale language model that can produce text that reads as though it was written by a human in response to an input or environment. It is capable of performing the vast majority of text-generating jobs, including those that demand the use of natural language for expression. Examples of such activities include text completion (such as email and report writing), paraphrasing, summarising, machine translation, and question answering.

Applications based on conversational artificial intelligence, such as chatbots and virtual assistants, can also benefit from its utilization in the right context. As an additional perk, ChatGPT has demonstrated that it has potential as a code writer.

However, ChatGPT is not ideal for jobs that necessitate reasoning, expertise, or fresh data. Some evidence suggests that ChatGPT has difficulty with arithmetic computations or complex mathematical calculations, suggesting that such models do not fully acquire logic.

Moreover, we cannot easily replace or update entities in these massive language models in the same way we do with knowledge bases. Most of the training material in the current model comes from publicly available data before 2021, which means that such algorithms cannot produce reliable information promptly. The ChatGPT platform has many potential uses for generating text, but users should exercise caution when acting on the platform’s outputs because they may be based on inaccurate or obsolete data or information.

Teaching fraternity and ChatGPT

ChatGPT can help teachers streamline their lessons and provide their students with a more engaging and rewarding educational experience. ChatGPT shows educators how to make personalized lesson plans, respond to student questions, and offer immediate feedback on student work. Teachers can use this tool to their own advantage by making use of it to build interactive quizzes, games, and other engaging activities to enhance their regular teaching approaches.

Educators that use ChatGPT will gain the tools they need to automate routine processes like grading and giving feedback, freeing up their time to better meet the individual needs of their students. As an added bonus, educators will develop a richer familiarity with the technology and its potential uses in the classroom. ChatGPT could be useful for teachers across grade levels and subject areas who are looking to integrate technology into their lessons in order to make them more interactive and interesting for their students. Before implementing ChatGPT in classrooms, teachers should ensure they have a firm grasp of the technology’s fundamentals.

Benefits

On the other hand, educators may discover effective uses for it in the classroom. Chatbots could help with routine schoolwork so that students can concentrate on more complex topics. Some educators, for instance, are trying out novel approaches to student engagement, such as project-based learning. The employment of a chatbot to generate ideas for such tasks may prove fruitful. The potential impact of this technology on evaluation and maybe on the learning process itself is considerably greater. Personalizing the educational experience for each student is one way to increase efficiency and better meet the needs of today’s multicultural classrooms.

Issues with ChatGPT

It is important to remember that ChatGPT is a tool, and as such, it should be used in conjunction with other sources of knowledge and direction rather than as a stand-alone resource. It’s also important to stress that ChatGPT results must undergo careful scrutiny before being used in any research project. The risks of plagiarism, inadequate originality, and over-reliance on the model are real considerations for students conducting research with ChatGPT.

Vimal Babu,
Associate Professor of HR & OB,
SRM University

To address these issues, educators should instruct students on how to make ethical use of language models and give them criteria for determining whether or not the information produced by the model is trustworthy. Teachers and professors should be aware of these issues and talk to their students about safe and effective research practises when using ChatGPT. Plagiarism can be prevented by the use of anti-plagiarism training and software as well as through increased awareness of the issue among students.

In its most basic version, ChatGPT accesses resources on the internet that are open to the public in order to provide an answer to a question. Artificial intelligence is unable to engage in abstract or critical thought; as a result, it is frequently unable to provide suitable responses to issues that need such thinking.

It’s possible that making homework more difficult could assist teachers in schools/universities to escape the threat of competition posed by ChatGPT. Therefore, concerns regarding ChatGPT shouldn’t be based on what it is currently; rather, they should be based on what it has the potential to become in the future.

Vimal Babu

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