Educators and ChatGPT:

Kalley Huang interviewed more than thirty students and educators for her New York Times piece Alarmed by A.I. Chatbots, Universities Start Revamping How They Teach. She tells us of Northern Michigan University Philosophy Professor Antony Aumann, who plans to make students write first drafts in the classroom, on monitored computers. Students will be asked to explain their revisions. He’s not the only one, Huang tells us. Other educators are including more oral exams, group work and handwritten assessments.

Why not ban the tool? Administers aren’t sure if that’s possible. So the teaching is changing instead, with essay questions focused more on personal and current events. Huang quotes University of Florida Provost Joe Glover:

We try to institute general policies that certainly back up the faculty member’s authority to run a class, instead of targeting specific methods of cheating. This isn’t going to be the last innovation we have to deal with.

The article’s comment section is rife with the expected hand-wringing—over the technology, but also over an educational system in which technology like ChatGPT works.  But there are also positive notes: for example, commenters note that people said the same thing about the internet and Wikipedia!

A related Times article by Katherine Schulten, “Lesson Plan: Teaching and Learning in the Era of ChatGPT,” suggests, among other things, simply playing with the tool:

ChatGPT: What is a Hot Dog?
ChatGPT: What is a Hot Dog?

She also presents ideas that include “see if you can spot the A.I. essay”, “reimagine school assignments to use ChatGPT” and “discuss the implications of A.I. for art and for the humanities.”

OpenAI has posted its own ideas on ChatGPT and education on its website.

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