Teachers are expected to utilize OpenAI’s AI-powered tools to develop interactive tutorials and lesson plans for their students but confident educators are apprehensive about the technology and its potential for malfunction
OpenAI has launched a complimentary online course intended to assist K-12 educators in acquiring the necessary skills to integrate ChatGPT, the company’s AI chatbot platform, into their classrooms.
The one-hour, nine-module program, developed in partnership with the nonprofit organization Common Sense Media, with which OpenAI maintains an active partnership, provides an overview of the fundamentals of AI and its pedagogical applications.
According to OpenAI, the course has been implemented in “dozens” of educational institutions, including the Agua Fria School District in Arizona, the San Bernardino School District in California, and the Challenger Schools charter school system.
According to internal research conducted by the organization, 98% of participants reported that the program provided them with novel concepts or methodologies that they could implement in their professional endeavors.
Robbie Torney, senior director of AI programs at Common Sense Media, stated that schools nationwide are confronted with novel opportunities and obstacles as AI transforms the educational landscape.
“We are proactively preparing for this transformation by providing support and education to teachers on the front lines through this course.”
However, confident educators do not perceive the program as beneficial and believe it could be misleading.
Lance Warwick, a sports lecturer at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, is apprehensive that resources such as OpenAI will normalize AI use among educators who are oblivious to the ethical implications of the technology.
Warwick discovered the modules on privacy and safety to be “very limited” and contradictory, even though OpenAI’s course addresses some of ChatGPT’s limitations, such as its inability to fairly grade students’ work.
“One of the example prompts provided by OpenAI instructs the user to integrate grades and feedback from previous assignments, while another instructs the user to develop a prompt for an activity that teaches the Mexican Revolution,” Warwick observed.
“The subsequent module on safety instructs the user to refrain from entering student data and then discusses the bias inherent in generative AI and the challenges associated with accuracy.” I am uncertain as to whether those are compatible with the use cases.
Sin á Tres Souhaits, a visual artist and educator at The University of Arizona, has discovered that AI tools are beneficial for creating supplementary course materials and assignment guides.
However, he also expressed apprehension that OpenAI’s program does not explicitly address the potential for the company to exert control over the content that instructors generate using its services.
Tres Souhaits told TechCrunch, “If educators are developing courses and coursework on a platform that grants the company the authority to replicate and distribute that data, it will cause significant instability.”
OpenAI’s intentions regarding utilizing, packaging, and selling their models’ output remain obscure to me. low
OpenAI states in its Terms of Service that it does not sell user data and that users of its services, including ChatGPT, own the outputs they generate “to the extent permitted by applicable law.”
Nevertheless, Tres Souhaits remains skeptical that OpenAI will not secretly modify its policies in the future in the absence of further assurances.
Tres Souhaits compared AI to cryptocurrency. “It is novel, which presents a plethora of opportunities; however, it is also so unregulated that I am uncertain about the reliability of any assurance.”
The United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) advocated for governments to regulate the use of AI in education late last year—This includes establishing standards for data and user privacy.
However, little progress has been made since then, and neither has AI policy in general.
Tres Souhaits also objects to the absence of any AI tools other than OpenAI’s own in OpenAI’s program, which is marketed as a guide to “AI, generative AI, and ChatGPT.” “It appears that this serves to substantiate the notion that OpenAI is the AI company,” he stated.
“It is a prudent business decision for OpenAI.” However, we already have an issue with these tech policies, which have an enormous impact because they have established themselves as the epicenter of innovation and have become synonymous with the technology itself.
Josh Prieur, a former classroom teacher who serves as the product director at Prodigy Education, an educational games company, expressed a more optimistic perspective regarding OpenAI’s educator outreach.
Prieur contends that OpenAI’s program is transparent about the risks and that there are “clear upsides” for teachers if school systems implement AI in a “thoughtful” and “responsible” manner.
“Teachers continue to express apprehensions regarding the potential for AI to dehumanize the learning experience and plagiarize content, as well as the dangers of becoming overly dependent on AI,” Premier stated.
“However, education is frequently the determining factor in overcoming apprehensions regarding integrating new technology into educational institutions while also guaranteeing that the appropriate safeguards are in place to ensure students and teachers’ protection and productivity”
OpenAI is making a concerted effort to penetrate the education market, which it regards as a critical growth sector.
Leah Belsky, who previously served as Coursera’s chief revenue officer, was appointed OpenAI’s inaugural GM of education in September. Her assignment was to expand the reach of OpenAI’s products to additional educational institutions.
In the spring, the company introduced ChatGPT Edu, a variant of ChatGPT specifically designed explicitly for various uses various uses.
As per Allied Market Research, AI in the eduon marketeducationd to be is expected $88.2 billion within the next decade. However, growth has been sluggish to begin, mainly due to the skepticism of pedagogues.
A quarter of public K-12 instructors reported that using AI tools in education causes more harm than good in a survey conducted by the Pew Research Center this year.
Just 18% of K-12 educators are employing AI in their classrooms, according to a separate survey conducted by the Rand Corporation and the Center on Reinventing Public Education.
Educational leaders have been similarly hesitant to experiment with AI themselves or to introduce the technology to the educators they supervise.
According to educational consulting firm EAB, few district superintendents consider AI to be a “very urgent” need this year. This is especially true concerning pressing issues like chronic absenteeism and understaffing.
The nixed research on AI’s educational impact. Has not convinced non-believers. Researchers from the University of Pennsylvania discovered that Turkish high school pupils who had access to ChatGPT performed worse on math tests than those who did not.
In a separate study, researchers observed that German students who used ChatGPT could locate research materials more readily. Still, they tended to synthesize those materials less successfully than their non-ChatGPT-using peers.
ChatGPT is not a substitute for pupil engagement, as OpenAI explains in its guide. Some educators and schools may never be persuaded that it is a substitute for any phase in the teaching process.