For years now, education has evolved symbiotically with the advancements of technology. However, with recent technological developments, the phenomenon of artificial intelligence has shaken the education world, spear-headed by a site called ChatGPT.

What is ChatGPT?

ChatGPT is an artificial intelligence Chatbot run by a company called OpenAI. The website allows one to prompt the Chatbot to do things like:

• Write emails 
• Write essays
• Compose poetry 
• Answer questions 
• Solve mathematical problems
• Generate complex lines of code
• Incorporate moods or demeanors that the prompt may include.

At first glance, this resource seems like a convenient tool for everyday work…

But on further inspection, the AI’s impact on the educational world is frightening to say the least.

Impact on Academia

As you can assume, a resource like this exposes students to an easy way out. With essentially no limits to what you can prompt the AI to do, students have the ability to use the AI to avoid doing their own assignments, papers, exams, and more, all with the click of a button. Inevitably, the production of original works in schools is going to decrease greatly with such a convenience. That is why educators like Chey and Pav, hosts of VoicED educational podcast “The Chey and Pav Show” believe that there is no use in worrying and whining about the issue. They dissect the issue in depth in their article The Increased Need for Proficient Questioning. They believe that we should lean into this evolved, and evolving, technology in order to work with it, rather than against it.

Their way around this issue is by promoting the use of “Proficient Questioning”. Essentially combatting the shortcut of using AI by centering the learning in the classroom on the questions being asked by the students, and improving the quality of the questions. They deduced that good questions promote:

• Better communication
• Better understanding of perspectives
• Innovation and problem solving
• Better engagement with the content

This would allow students to have already grasped the content in the classroom; therefore, when they are given assignments, papers, essays, etc, they are familiar and understand the concepts they covered in the classroom. Making these assignments and such just reassurances to the content, regardless of the use of ChatGPT.

All in all, it is helpless to try and take down the advancements of AI for the sake of academia. It is more effective to put our minds towards figuring out how to utilize and work around this newfound technology in order to harness its benefits and evolve the educational world simultaneously with the technology of today.

Check out The Chey and Pav Show

Thank you for reading!

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