TECHNOLOGY UNDER CONSIDERATION
The use of Open AI in Teaching and Learning: An innovative technology mentioned in Ed Surge, The Horizon Report, and Ed Tech Magazine.
RESOURCES
Mollick, E. (2023). The Homework Apocalypse: Fall is going to be very different this year. Educators need to be ready. Available at: https://www.oneusefulthing.org/p/the-homework-apocalypse (Site visited on 07/05/2024).
Young, J.R. (2024). As More AI Tools Emerge in Education, so Does Concern Among Teachers About Being Replaced. Available at https://www.edsurge.com/news/2024-07-02-as-more-ai-tools-emerge-in-education-so-does-concern-among-teachers-about-being-replaced. (Site visited on 07/05/2024).
REASONS FOR SELECTING THE INNOVATION
The launch of ChatGPT as a Chabot and the visual assistant Open AI in 2022 increasedBack to top the use of Chabot in educational settings. Many students andBack to top instructors use Chabot to search for information, answer short questions, compose some essays, and solve some mathematical problems (Srivastava and Agarwal, 2024).
However, the increased use of Open AIt created some concerns among educators, such as the possibility that Chabot and open AI may encourage cheating among students and replace teacher jobs (Young, 2024; Mollick, 2023). Therefore, the aim of this study was to test Open AI technology and see how students use it effectively.
The study's main questions were: Which types of essays do students use open AI to complete? What strategies can instructors use to ensure student engagement as open AI technologies emerge?
DATA COLLECTION, ANALYSIS AND FINDING ON THE INNOVATION
The results of this technology test demonstrate that the use of open AI is important in education because it increases students' access to learning resources. The majority of students use Chabot for assignments. However, the study shows that most students just copy and paste directly whatever they find in the AI Chabot without digesting or contextualizing the contents. Setting assignments that require critical thinking, analysis, or synthesis of various ideas, referring to the high level of Bloom taxonomy, can also prevent students from cheating (Bharatha et al., 2024).
Educators need to foster an environment that ensures students' engagement and active learning. Teachers, for example, should avoid questions that do not stimulate students' critical thinking and engagement when providing assignments. In these types of assignments, students can easily secure AI bots to complete for them (Young, 2024). Instead, they can engage students in problem-solving activities, scenarios, and case studies.
Young (Ibid.) noted that when ChatGPT and other open AI emerged, the main concern of educators was cheating, as many students were using ChatGPT to do assignments. This practice has the potential to undermine the role of assignments in student learning. It was also thought among educators that ChatGPT would reduce human interactions and replace teachers. According to Young (2024), none of these perceived threats were true about AI.
Mollick (2023), citing Thomas Lancaster's blog, demonstrated that cheating among students predated ChatGPT, citing the hiring of over 20,000 full-time essay writers in Kenya as an example. Also, in his interviews with the teachers, Young (2024) found that many teachers agreed that open AI technology could not replace them because it lacks so many things that the teachers are bringing to the classrooms. Attesting to this, one teacher, Lauren Reynolds from Riverwood Elementary School in Oklahoma City, mentioned, “What I bring to the classroom is something that AI cannot replicate.” On this, she added that a teacher has a human connection and gets to know kids on an individual basis.
Similarly, Mollick (2024) proposed that instead of discouraging open AI for various reasons, leaders should devise strategies to leverage AI's capabilities. AI can be helpful in reducing teachers’ workloads in the same way that a school hires a part-time teacher to support full-time teachers in a school. Mollick (Ibid.) expressed that many teachers would find satisfaction in this type of support. With that comparison, AI can perform tasks like preparing lesson plans, marking tests, and many other activities, leaving the teacher with ample time to manage other school activities.
FIELD NOTES: DESCRIPTION OF PROCEDURES TO TEST THE INNOVATION
For this mini-research, I chose to test open AI technology in my classroom for undergraduate students on the education management course that I teach at Sokoine University of Agriculture. I explained to the students why this study was important. I assured them about the privacy and confidentiality of the study. I conducted a short survey on how students use ChatGPT for essay questions.
In my test, I asked students to make sure that they have Chabot installed on their smartphones, computers, or tablets. I then gave the students two sets of assignments: a direct question titled "How does management differ from leadership?" and a case study explaining how, as the head of department in a school, I can "plan for change provided that the school suffers a massive failure of students, a government budget cut, three newly recruited staff have been introduced to the school, but two staff are about to retire from teaching, and the school is introducing an open learning system." The school's head maintains an authoritarian style.
Students attending an educational management course received these two assignments. These two questions revealed students' efficiency when using ChatGPT. For the first question, approximately 98% of students received direct assistance from bot AI. However, the majority of students struggled to get answers from Chabot for the second question. As a result, the second question involved a lot of critical thinking and discussions on the part of the students.
Random selection determined the study participants, but inclusion in the sample required enrollment in an educational management course. I chose this sample because various literatures (Jonas, 2024; Fyfe, 2023) have informed my study that that students use Open AI to complete assignments. I was interested in determining the students' usage of open AI applications for assignment completion and the prevalence of cheating. This analysis takes into account the Bloom taxonomy of learning (Elim, 2024).
RESULTS ON THE INNOVATION TEST
Open AI technology is improving, and many educators use it for educational purposes that benefit both students and teachers. While it provides crucial support for students' learning, it also needs to embrace the principles of teaching, which include students' active learning and engagement (Young, 2024).
The potential benefits of AI Chabot include the ability to provide learners with a large amount of information. Other uses of AI can alleviate teachers' workloads in teaching and assessments, provided they also participate in school management activities (Perks, 2020). By providing students and staff data in school organizations, AI can also monitor student engagement and participation in the classroom, prepare lesson plans, websites, and perform learning analytics (Pabba and Kumar, 2022; Young, 2024).
This technology's potential dangers include security and privacy issues, which can seriously affect the system's integrity (Radulov, 2019). For example, in the education setting, the use of AI in examinations may raise significant concerns. Not only does the use of AI in education raise significant security concerns, but the US public has recently expressed concerns about security issues with voting machines (Yu, 2024). Chatbots may also struggle with the interpretation of complex language, nuances, slang, or context-specific information. Chatbots require regular maintenance and updating to increase efficiency (Elish and Boyd, 2018).
Based on my research, I recommend that instructors encourage the use of open AI rather than discouraging it because it already provides a lot of support for learning. Instructors should design some classroom activities that engage students in various ways (Chen et al., 2023). Engineers and programmers can continue to work on improvements for language software (Maruthi et al., 2021). Use strong security protocols, such as encryption and authentication mechanisms, to protect user data and ensure compliance with data privacy regulations while also continuing to update and maintain Chabot by incorporating new information, refining responses, and addressing user feedback (Abed and Anupam, 2023).
PERSONAL REFLECTION
Although I heard about ChatGPT and Open AI, I didn't explore them in depth like I did with this field test. I have been hearing a lot of negative perceptions about it, similar to those mentioned by Young and others, that include cheating, replacing teachers’ jobs, and depriving students’ engagement in learning. My field test has provided evidence to the contrary. ChatGPT, if used effectively, can be a powerful educational tool for both teachers and learners.
There are many ways to avoid students cheating on assignments. As I have found in my study of problem solving, case studies and scenario assignments may make it challenging to get direct responses from AI bots. It is a wake-up call for us instructors to design student activities that will be engaging. This can discourage lecturing, as students using Chabot AI can just record the lectures and prepare cards and questions. But classroom activities, such as discussions, can somehow engage students.
I've discovered that some students struggle to use Chabot because they simply copy and paste responses from AI bots. In one instance, during the assignments, I discovered that two students had identical activities, indicating that they had copied the text from the AI bot.
The positive experience is that, through this field test, I was able to prove that open AI and Chabot are not at all bad. There are positive elements to it. I understand that students utilize Chabot to the fullest extent possible. As a result, we must use this technology to improve instructors’ performance in areas where they struggle.
On the downside, using this technology in an educational setting necessitates competency-based learning and adherence to educational principles. In terms of education, this tool requires a certain level of expertise in the field of instructional design to prevent any potential harm. It is not for everyone. Students who utilize it must possess the necessary knowledge to authenticate the information they receive from the bot AI. If they do not have that capacity, bot AI may become a useless tool and a nightmare.
I plan to apply the benefits I gained from this process to other innovative technologies. Despite the challenges encountered in the process, open AI is a useful tool for educators today and in the future.
REFERENCES
Abed, A. K., and Anupam, A. (2023). Review of security issues in Internet of Things and artificial intelligence‐driven solutions. Security and Privacy, 6(3), e285.
Bharatha, A., Ojeh, N., Fazle Rabbi, A. M., Campbell, M. H., Krishnamurthy, K., Layne-Yarde, R. N., ...and Majumder, M. A. A. (2024). Comparing the Performance of ChatGPT-4 and Medical Students on MCQs at Varied Levels of Bloom’s Taxonomy. Advances in Medical Education and Practice, 393-400.
Chen, Y., Jensen, S., Albert, L. J., Gupta, S., and Lee, T. (2023). Artificial intelligence (AI) student assistants in the classroom: Designing chatbots to support student success. Information Systems Frontiers, 25(1), 161-182.
Elim, E. H. S. Y. (2024). Promoting cognitive skills in AI-supported learning environments: the integration of bloom’s taxonomy. Education 3-13, 1-11.
Elish, M. C., and Boyd, D. (2018). Situating methods in the magic of Big Data and AI. Communication monographs, 85(1), 57-80.
Fyfe, P. (2023). How to cheat on your final paper: Assigning AI for student writing. AI & SOCIETY, 38(4), 1395-1405.
Jonas, M. (2024). Mitigating Use of Artificial Intelligence in Student Assignments. Journal of Computing Sciences in Colleges, 39(8), 173-181.
Maruthi, S., Dodda, S. B., Yellu, R. R., Thuniki, P., and Reddy, S. R. B. (2021). Deconstructing the Semantics of Human-Centric AI: A Linguistic Analysis. Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research and Applications, 1(1), 11-30.
Mollick, E. (2023). The Homework Apocalypse: Fall is going to be very different this year. Educators need to be ready. Available at: https://www.oneusefulthing.org/p/the-homework-apocalypse (Site visited on 07/05/2024).
Pabba, C., and Kumar, P. (2022). An intelligent system for monitoring students' engagement in large classroom teaching through facial expression recognition. Expert Systems, 39(1), e12839.
Perks, S. (2020). AI could reduce teacher workload. Physics World, 33(8), 11.
Radulov, N. (2019). Artificial intelligence and security. Security 4.0. Security & Future, 3(1), 3-5.
Srivastava, A. P., and Agarwal, S. (Eds.). (2024). Utilizing AI Tools in Academic Research Writing. IGI Global.
Young, J.R. (2024). As More AI Tools Emerge in Education, so Does Concern Among Teachers About Being Replaced. Available at https://www.edsurge.com/news/2024-07-02-as-more-ai-tools-emerge-in-education-so-does-concern-among-teachers-about-being-replaced. (Site visited on 07/05/2024).
Yu, C. (2024). How Will AI Steal Our Elections?. Center for Open Science.