Artificial Intelligence in Education: What It Means for Students

A generation of children experienced education in a form that had never been expected and will probably never be experienced again. Even if we have another pandemic, we will not be going into it with the complete lack of preparedness or appropriate technological skills we faced during COVID. 

Many studies try to make sense of the lockdown’s impact on the students and their learning. The common wisdom appears to be that there has been that students have fallen behind in their progression compared to previous generations. As is often the case in South Africa, this has been made worse by the gap between resourced and underserved communities. 

A new black swan has floated into view as schools return to normal. Social media and the news cycle have been flooded with information about the ChatGPT system and the effect that it will have on assessment. If you ask it, ChatGPT will write an essay for you for your classwork and can do so with deliberate mistakes and in language that is appropriate to any age. Ask it to write a two-hundred-word essay on the Second World War from the perspective of a fourteen-year-old and make three grammar and five spelling errors, and it will do so. 

When we consider technology’s potential changes to our understanding of school, COVID opened the garage door, and ChatGPT sent the school bus careening down the driveway with no breaks. 

Schools are resilient. They have, mostly, managed to avoid changing or assimilating disruptive technologies and tame them so that they do not fundamentally change students’ daily experience. iPads get turned into glorified textbooks, and coding becomes a marketing strategy. We tell children to use google to look up the most basic facts, and it becomes the new encyclopedia. 

When disruptive technology like cellphones, calculators or ChatGPT appear on the scene, the first thing a school does is ban its use. Schools then find ways to include these technologies into the curriculum to use them in a way that causes the least disruption to business as usual. 

What schools can do instead it see them for the opportunity they represent. Any school, you will always find those few teachers who have recognised the potential and found ways to take the learning in their classrooms to the next level. These teachers are the pioneers and prophets who are not believed in the own towns. If we look at the example of the essay, a good teacher will see the chance to get her students to find the grammar and spelling errors. She will want the children to work in collectives to improve the work done by the AI and engage in discussions based on asking the AI to write the essay again and again from different perspectives and biases. 

Microsoft products are adding features monthly that increase accessibility and allow a school willing to embrace change at scale to get their students to focus their learning on transferrable skills like collaboration, persistence, self-regulation, and self-reflections. Skills that are on the edges of learning but seldom feature at the core of a lesson because we are trying to teach children the ‘facts’ and prolonging the myth that there is such a thing as a perfect answer. 

We are in the bus whether we want to be or not. The school leadership is in the driver’s seat and can choose to close their eyes in the hope that the change will have gone away when they look again; or steer the school onto the road to the future with all the uncertainty and promise that implies.

Colin Northmore