Artificial Intelligence in Education

Last Thursday and Friday, my entire department and I travelled by bus to Hotel Neo+ in Penang. Instead of being a participant, the management slotted me in to present about the effect of ChatGPT in assessment and evaluation of students.

Being mostly early adopter of a lot of online tech – except LiveJournal and TikTok – the management thought it was up to me to tell my colleagues about how prevalent artificial intelligence (AI) will change — is changing — the education landscape.

The first workshop was about assessment and evaluation in general, ran by a person from UUM. My workshop was scheduled for after dinner.

I began by going through my AI-generated slides. A few days before, I used beautiful.ai, a site that uses the ChatGPT AI to help users automatically generate full slides! It was not perfect, but it was enough for a fake presentation. Then, I moved on to my actual slides that shows all the things you could do using ChatGPT. I also showed how ChatGPT worked live. The live presentation was not very time-efficient as I had to CTRL+F5 the browses every couple of minutes. This was because of the heavy usage of ChatGPT.

I also included some authentic ChatGPT text use by students, as in AI-generated text that my students used for actual class activity. I sent the form to my students who submitted their ChatGPT text anonymously.

Finally I had the participants split into four groups: General Studies, Foreign Languages, Bahasa Melayu and English Language. Each group was tasked with creating tests to be sent to other groups. The other groups would use AI to answer correctly, then present to everyone what AI, what prompts and the thought processes needed to do this. Finally, the original group (the one that created the question) must present their thoughts on how to develop effective assessment questions despite students having AI apps at their fingertips.

On a personal level, I think of ChatGPT as having the potential to evolve into Muses in Eclipse Phase, the AI embedded in everybody’s brain that helps them with communication, scheduling & planning, data mining & parsing, and limited mesh (Eclipse Phase‘s internet) research  (among other things). Having an AI helper like this would be beneficial.

The technology is here. Although it is not perfect and effective, the generative pre-trained transformer will develop even more in the future. Students will be using them. Professionals will be using them. Will there need to be a paradigm shift in how we study and work? I have no idea; I am just an early adopter of tech, not a CS or AI engineer.

It would be interesting to see where we all end up with artificial intelligence.

Posted in Teaching and tagged , .

Khairul Hisham J. is a tabletop RPG artist, writer, proofreader, translator, teacher, grad student and learner-in-general.

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