Advertisement

Opinion | Letting ChatGPT into the classroom could open doors to preparing teachers and students for the future

  • While there are valid concerns about the use of ChatGPT, it offers positive teaching and learning opportunities for both educators and students
  • An AI-assisted writing classroom could have many different entry points to broaden student engagement and prepare them for a future that is already here

Reading Time:4 minutes
Why you can trust SCMP
3
Illustration: Craig Stephens
Full disclosure, this opinion piece is completely written by me – a human – with no assistance from OpenAI’s ChatGPT or any other artificial intelligence large language model. Microsoft Word, ChatGPT’s distant cousin, corrected my spelling and reminded me to check my use of punctuation and some potentially ungrammatical clauses and sentences, but the thinking here is mine alone and I typed all of it.

ChatGPT could have easily completed a similar 1,000-word reflection in under five minutes. It might have produced the same kind of message with the right prompt and meticulous clarifying questions I supplied.

The University of Hong Kong last week announced a policy temporarily banning students from using ChatGPT and AI-based tools for coursework. Other Hong Kong universities, just like universities from the rest of the world, will have policies outlining what to do with content generated by AI and submitted to teachers in response to an assignment, exam or a full capstone requirement.

Polytechnic University, my home university, recently completed the first of many ChatGPT webinars attended by more than 500 participants, demonstrating the tool and discussing a range of teaching and assessment implications. PolyU has an AI and Data Analytics secondary major for undergraduates in several of its departments, so we are expected to be positioned to understand ChatGPT as much as possible and to be prepared.

In global academia, ChatGPT has been referred to as disruptive, upending our time-tested paradigms about education and learning. Its impact on the generation of knowledge, especially through writing, is a cause for major concern and even panic for many. One of the primary recipients of anxious thoughts and rushed policy declarations in schools is the essay, especially the high school and undergraduate kind.

Writing for The Atlantic, Stephen Marche argued that the undergraduate essay “has been the centre of humanistic pedagogy for generations. It is the way we teach children how to research, think and write. That entire tradition is about to be disrupted from the ground up”.

Advertisement