How to Reap the Benefits of Generative AI in Education — While Avoiding the Pitfalls
“Generative AI has caught educators in a riptide,” says Mary Kalantzis. “In a riptide between the anxieties and the possibilities, in a way that no other technology has ever done before in education.”
And, perhaps most frightening of all, many teachers fear being replaced altogether by generative AI. “This really sets a cat amongst the pigeons,” Cope says.
That’s the glass-half-empty view, but Cope and Kalantzis also see the positives of generative AI in education.
Here are a few of those beneficial uses of generative AI:
- It enables one-to-one teaching. With AI, there’s no reason you can’t do one AI to 1,000 students. This opens up the possibility of universal, mass one-to-one education.
- It frees up the teacher. Speaking of her own experience with generative AI, Kalantzis adds “By harnessing it, by figuring out how to make it work well, it actually has made a difference to the performance of our learners and made our lives easier as educators in the grading process.”
- It can provide students with tremendous feedback. Automating this provides a phenomenal amount of feedback that is surprisingly useful. Additionally, that feedback is well-rounded. “Because it’s regenerative, it’s always restating things, and sometimes the second or third response is more interesting and useful than the first,” Cope says.
- Its feedback is complementary to peer-to-peer feedback. “Students do the assignment, get feedback from the AI, revise the assignment, and get feedback from their peers,” Kalantzis says. “It’s a very collaborative process, and one of the collaborators is the AI,” Cope adds.
- It has the potential to increase the quality of education. “Does generative AI make our jobs as educators harder? No. It actually makes it easier to increase the quality,” Kalantzis says. “But we as researchers have had to figure out what do you put in place to ensure that quality.” “The future of creativity, knowledge, innovation, and so much else depends on harnessing the new affordances that Generative AI allows,” says Kalantzis.