ChatGPT and Education

What is ChatGPT

ChatGPT is a free-to-use natural language processing tool driven by AI technology that allows you to have human-like conversations and much more with the chatbot. The language model can answer questions and assist you with tasks like composing emails, essays, code etc (Sabrina Ortiz, 2023). Cameron  Cashman(2023) says that ChatGPT is an AI chatbot. This means a user can enter a text prompt and receive an intelligently-generated output, allowing for a back-and-forth conversation. While similar platforms have existed for a few years now, what makes ChatGPT so impressive is its detail and versatility. 

These two recent authorities have put together some definitions and we can draw the following conclusions about ChatGPT : 

1. It is an AI technology- AI stands for artificial intelligence. Artificial intelligence started with a man called Allan Turing who brought in the concept of a thinking machine and John McCarthy later coined the term artificial intelligence. In artificial intelligence, humans are developing a machine that mimics humans and acts rationally. 

2. It is a chatbot- It is a computer program designed to simulate conversations with human users. Which means you can respond to the questions and ask it along the way. Something that search engines cannot do. 

3. It assists you with tasks - As alluded to by Sabrina(2023) above. The language model can assist you with tasks like emails, essays, code and so on. This is why Cameron (2023) brought in the issue of the versatility of the chatbot. ChatGPT makes people chat and the GPT stands for Generative Pre-Trained Transformer.  

Implication to Education 

Technology has been used to aid education and as educationists, one of the first things that we are likely to do is to resist it or be sceptical. Do you remember how we resisted mere calculators for use by students during mathematics lessons, search engines, Google Translate, Wikipedia, and PhotoMath? The million-dollar questions are, are they going to disrupt traditional teaching? Can we be adaptive? Is education evolving forward, and should we block them?  Do they make education more relevant?  Well, there is an attempt to look at this Chatbot and see how it has affected education positively and negatively.  

Uses of ChatGPT

As the name suggests ChatGPT is a chatbot. This means users can engage in a conversation on a wide range of topics, such as personal hobbies, interests, and so on. This means you may ask it just as you will be asking a person. Students may ask questions to research further. With chatGPT, information is at your fingertips. It is a matter of giving it text instructions and off one goes. 

 It can generate a variety of different text-based material, like emails, advertisements, entire stories, speeches, music etc. It even answers questions on potentially complex topics like science, technology, and history-making. It is helpful for completing homework or research projects. Instead of students inundating teachers with questions about their homework chatGPT may assist. 

It can be used to tell jokes, write music, and stories, suggest movies, TV shows, and books, suggest thesis topics, make lesson plans and activities and give advice on personal anecdotes. One good thing it does is it can correct its own mistakes, ask follow-up questions, and often get into the finer details of a specific topic. This means it has capabilities beyond search engines and other AI tools like chatsonic etc. 

For programmers, chatGPT can write and debug computer code. This has really revolutionised the way programmers work. Programmers would concentrate mostly on planning, drawing use cases, ERD diagrams and other systems development aspects and leave the coding to chatGPT. With chatGPT, errors in codes may be fixed as you chat with it and this helps to perfect a code, you make some follow-up suggestions, for example, you can let it write a code that overwrites or changes the variable to string or integer etc. 

Chat GPT Limitations 

1. It is a text-based chatbot and does not draw illustrations or diagrams. Hence most people find it useful in text-based tasks and does not really become as handy in other areas. 

2. It sometimes generates wrong answers, since it does not rely on the internet, it may give information that is not up to date. It cannot tell you about the weather in a particular place for example. Also never rely on it on medical advice, or get the facts right on key historical events. You must always verify with some more sources its facts. Do not always believe what it says, take it with a pinch of salt. 

3. ChatGPT has a lot of bias.  There was a time I wanted it to write about institutionalised discrimination of black people and also LGBTs. It went on to write what I really didn't want. Which shows how it has a rigid bias.   I also wanted it to condemn fake asylum seekers in a certain article and it went on to justify asylum seekers. There was a time I wanted it to condemn some political practices and it went on to give me some long sentences to justify them first.  It means it has a level of bias in it. 

4. It is quick to apologise and lacks certainty. When using ChatGPT it is not assertive. This lack of confidence makes this Chatbot lose some credibility.

5. It has limited knowledge of the world and events after 2021. Since it is not internet reliant it only knows of information in 2021 and before. 

6. I've heard that it struggles to do math sometimes. It mostly relies on users' feedback and you can convince it on some mathematical concepts which may be wrong. 

7. This is a personal experience with ChatGPT. After finishing writing this blog, I put the whole blog on chatGPT and asked it to write it and ensure that there are no spelling and or grammatical mistakes. It just wrote a few paragraphs and finished. I kept on giving it prompts to continue and it went on writing what I had not written in the blog. The conclusion I am making is that if it is given too much text it fails to comprehend. The reason is in a blog post there are some rhetorical questions which now it would be trying to answer yet they are part of the blog. An example is where I wrote below, can we use chat GPT for learning? It went on trying to answer such a rhetorical question when I just wanted it to rewrite this blog in correct English. I did not use it to assist me in any way. 

8. Another limitation I have discovered is that as you chat, yes it remembers what you have been talking about but it gets lost along the way. Even when I tried to remind it about my article it could not remember it. One thing we must know is that AI tools are trying to mimic human beings and they will never be as good as human beings. 

Implications in the classroom for students and teachers. 

1. Students can use the Chatbot to do their assignments and ask it where they need clarifications. 

2. It gives different responses all the time therefore there is no way teachers can check for the plagiarism of work by students. If 20 students ask the same question differently they will get different answers since it doesn't keep responses in a database. There is a demo AI tool called AI GPT-2 Output Detector that helps to detect if the text has been AI-generated. However, it is still undergoing development. At the end of this write-up, there are also some anti-AI plagiarism tools for teachers to use. 

3. Blocking the site at the school and dissuading students or teachers from using it does not really work and when it comes to technology, adapting it is the best. Students and teachers have a way of continuing to access it even if it is blocked. 

4. Use of ChatGPT, chatbot, and AI tools isn't that bad. As we speak AI has spread its tentacles in our system and there are some assignments that used to be relevant long back that are going to be irrelevant in the near future. Teachers would need to look at critical thinking and the application of concepts to the student's environment and current issues. For example, there would be no need to give students generic assignments but situational and relevant ones in which AI has no experience. 

5. Students will have to learn how to navigate life with AI. AI is here to stay and there is nothing we can do as teachers. Resisting technology is an act of chasing a wild goose. We will fight it until cows come home. The best thing is to look at several ways teachers may make use of it or ensure that the students produce their original work. A website called DitchThatTextbook says,  "But let's put it this way. There are some really, really mindless, terrible writing prompts out there ... math worksheets ... and project assignments. If we're looking long-term, this technology will eventually start to push some of those terrible assignments out and force us to come up with something new. It'll probably be painful, and many of us will probably hate parts of the process. But in the end, we will evolve to something better.:" 

6. Use both pen and paper and digital tools in teaching. This could be a solution, but not a permanent one though. Having supervised work in class where students use a pen and paper and use digital tools for their research makes a bit of sense. A contribution made by @jmattmiller on Twitter says that this could not be an answer to chatGPT or AI. And of course, there is an acknowledgement that if this is done now we will be pretty sure that the work is theirs but AI isn't going away. 

7. Make use of collaborative learning and discussions. Generally, 21st-century educationists believe that collaboration is one of the backbones of learning. Despite them taking information from AI tools or searching from the internet, that ability to put together information and make it be put in a coherent and intelligible manner is enough evidence of learning. When students are able to communicate their findings from collaborative learning then they are learning well. 

8 . Have students demonstrate creativity in class. Instead of a teacher asking questions or giving assignments the students can easily get their answers from chatGPT. When students take what they've learned or information they've found from other sources they're engaging in elaboration. And that's a good thing. ​Jesse Finafrock (2019) dines elaboration as the technique of helping students make connections between their lives, and what they've previously learned, to grasp new concepts and lessons.

9. Memory strategies - As a teacher, you must make sure that you implement some retrieval practices like asking students about what they learned in the previous week or month. Get the students' contribution on what they know and how they feel or say something about what they would have not studied. Retrieval practice is a simple research-based teaching strategy that dramatically raises students’ grades. When students retrieve and bring information to mind, this mental challenge produces durable long-term learning. Easy learning leads to easy forgetting. Stop cramming, reviewing, and re-teaching. Instead, simply ask students what they remember. No prep, no grading, just powerful teaching(Pooja K. Agarwal and  Patrice M. Bain, 2019). 

10. Make use of projects - Besides being pupil-centred, projects make sure that students produce their original work and that there is no room for plagiarism. In other words, the methods of assessment by the teacher must not only be centred on the regurgitation of information but applying it within a specific environment and situation. 

11. Discuss issues to do with ethics- At times teaching students the need for originality and ethical issues will quash aside all our fears. 

Can we use this in teaching and learning 

The answer to this is a big Yes. Here are ways in which teachers may use ChatGPT in teaching. 

1. Use it as a more complex source of information than Google, Yahoo or Bing, etc

2. It must be used to give students more complex sources of examples where the teacher may not give more or would have forgotten. 

3.  Ask ChatGPT to write your lesson plans. (Or at least to get some new ideas.) Teachers get new ideas and edit the lessons to meet their current needs. ChatGPT may continue giving you better lessons if you keep on guiding it and at times tell it what you want your lesson to be like and it will do it exactly like that saving that time. 

4. Use ChatGPT to show students good writing examples. Generate summaries, poems, and literature character analysis to make students see how things must be done. 

5.  Ask ChatGPT to give your students immediate feedback on their writing. Instead of waiting to give your students some feedback, this AI tool may do it. 

6. Use ChatGPT to automate some teacher tasks for you: write quiz questions, writing prompts, and content-related jokes for class or set questions. An example is if you want 10 questions that have all Blooms' taxonomies levels. ChatGPT will give you. 

7. Use ChatGPT to summarize texts that students are reading. This can help them understand what they just read or reviewed. It can summarise a book chapter or character. 

8. Add ChatGPT to the "think pair share" thinking routine. Think Pair Share: A Teaching-Learning Strategy to Enhance Students' Critical Thinking. It is best explained here. Think pair share is a teaching strategy that most teachers are aware of. 

9. Grade the bot. Have ChatGPT generate the kind of writing your students will create. Then, have students grade the bot using the rubric you would have created. 

10. Debate the bot. Take a position. Argue your side against ChatGPT. This gives students unlimited debate reps.

11. Have students ask ChatGPT for advice. It's not a counsellor, but it summarizes what's on the web and can be helpful.

12. Ask ChatGPT big, hard-to-solve questions to see what it says/how it handles it.

13. Anticipate the bot. Ask students what they expect ChatGPT to say about a topic they're studying.

14. Take several ChatGPT responses to a prompt, take the best parts, improve, and assemble a better final product.

15. Use ChatGPT to generate prompts and questions for class.

16. Use it to remix students' work. For example, after students have created an essay or a poem, they can use chatGPT to check how it remixes their work. 

17. Grade the bot -  The teacher and students discuss some rubrics and ask the bot to make its answers and then students grade the bot using the rubrics they have created. 

Some AI detecting Tools. 

AI Text Classifier by OpenAI: A tool released this week by the creators of ChatGPT.

GPTZero: A tool created by a college student to help educators.

Fictitious.ai: An AI detector that integrates with Canvas LMS.

AI Writing Check: A free service provided by Quill and CommonLit.

Writer's AI Content Detector: Created for web designers by available to anyone

ChatGPT: It can tell you if the text itself is AI-generated or not. 

Conclusively ChatGPT has just come and set the pace. But there are likely going to be some better AI tools in the future since it has set the benchmark. Developers may not be keen to develop something they know is inferior to ChatGPT and this means the world of AI has just begun and one needs to either shape up or ship out. But if you decide the latter, it means being left out and becoming redundant. While teachers may never be replaced, where AI is taking us is likely going to see their roles changing from being content and concepts maestros to facilitators or guides, focusing more on cultivating critical thinking, creativity, and interpersonal skills in students.

I am an experienced educationist with a rich background spanning over 20 years in teaching. My passion has shifted towards the dynamic realm of academic technology in recent years. I bring forth a comprehensive understanding of educational technology, coupled with expertise in Microsoft and Google applications. Currently pursuing a PhD, I hold a Master's degree in Education, a BSc Hon in Information Systems, a Dip MIS, and a Diploma in Education (Mathematics), complemented by various other certificates. For further communication, please feel free to reach out to me via my email at bothwell.riside@gmail.com.