On 30 November 2022, OpenAI launched the program ChatGPT. Only two months after its launch, the number of its users reached more than 100 million users weekly, setting records in a short time. Despite this huge hype, especially in educational and academic communities, we wonder: Does ChatGPT pose a threat on education?
What is ChatGPT?
It is a very advanced chatbot based on artificial intelligence; you can talk to it or ask it questions that it will answer within a few moments. The program is designed to collect information, rephrase it, and summarize it. It can also write various texts, such as articles, emails, and social media posts; in addition to performing various tasks, such as translation, summarization, creating programmatic codes, answering questions, and brainstorming ideas.
Thanks to its advancement, the program has provoked plenty of debate in educational circles. While some teachers believe that the program has tremendous potential that benefit the educational process, others believe that students may use it to cheat or complete their tasks without making an effort, which affects the teaching and learning process, and reduces the students’ abilities to think critically. Additionally, the appearance of some incorrect information in the program’s answers is a major concern.
As a result, some schools resorted to blocking the site completely from the school’s Internet; as was the case in New York City and Seattle public schools. However, this did not prevent students from using it outside or inside school via a virtual private network (VPN). Some teachers used other applications, such as GPTZero, to detect artificial intelligence-generated texts, but it turned out to be unreliable because it can be reformulated using other programs and tricking the program.
As such, the ideal solution was to learn the advantages and disadvantages and act accordingly.
Advantages and Disadvantages
ChatGPT is a program with tremendous capabilities and has many features and benefits for both teachers and students. It is a tool that saves the teacher's time and takes away the hassle of writing emails to parents and preparing tests, exercises, and activities. The teacher can also use it to prepare lessons in a few minutes rather than spending hours designing educational content with creative ideas, coming up with new ideas to explain lessons, or preparing lesson plans designed according to the students’ levels and learning styles.
As for its advantages, there are many. The student can have a virtual personal teacher round the clock who helps each student learn according to their needs and identifies their strengths and weaknesses. The student can ask many questions related to the academic subject to receive an instant answer, instead of waiting for the teacher's response. Moreover, the program helps people learn languages due to its ability to correct language, evaluate pronunciation and interpretation, improve writing style, and prepare for exams.
On the other hand, the disadvantages of ChatGPT lie in introducing misinformation, or bias towards certain information, as well as redundant errors. Therefore, it is necessary to review and refine what the program produces and verify the accuracy of the information.
Exploiting Potentials and Risk Reduction
New technologies always face waves of refusal and acceptance among people due to a lack of knowledge about it. Accordingly, the best solution to exploit the capabilities of ChatGPT is to learn how to use it and find appropriate ways to avoid its disadvantages. Teachers should also guide students to intelligently use the program and evaluate its answers to enhance their critical thinking.
The program represents a threat to traditional systems in examinations and evaluation. It must develop to focus on analysis, critical thinking, creativity, asking the right questions, and verifying the validity of information. As the program saves much of teachers' time, it also allows them to focus on the students and build their skills instead of memorization and indoctrination.
In conclusion, ChatGPT is a tool that has many benefits for teachers and students; it will revolutionize education, but it replaces the teacher. Therefore, we must adapt to it and develop the educational system to prepare students for the future.
References
digitallearninginstitute.com
evalueserve.com
nea.org
nytimes.com
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