The veteran professor, who has become a celebrity on social media, has published a book on how to better understand and use artificial intelligence in everyday life
The article does say that AI is important to learn and to use.
I have been in teaching/training roles for a long time and the fear is that you are not learning if you use a generated answer, even if you edit the answer afterwards. What we need to do is teach students the right way to use AI and still learn. For years our education system in the US focuses on completing the grade or class rather than learning. So we get engineers with impressive degrees that know very little about engineering. This also coincides with companies not training/mentoring new hires properly so they have to learn by doing and in many cases learn by failing. Without proper mentoring and oversight some of these failures reach the market.
AI highlights an existing issue that is not unique to the US. “Get that piece of paper by any means necessary.” Even when I was in school and we walked uphill both ways in the snow people would pay English majors to write papers. Sometimes this was a simple edit and sometimes they wrote it entirely. AI is just a new tool that allows you to complete assignments designed to learn if you attained the appropriate knowledge without learning.
Wow, this is way longer than I intended, good on you if you held in this long in my semi-coherent ramblings…personally I think the fix is easy, and the same answer to all forms of cheating I have witnessed. Vital exams and checkpoints in education should be handwritten, proctored exams. Yes that is harder to grade, but this is really the only way to guarantee your students are learning.
TL;DR AI is a new and easy way to avoid learning, but that doesn’t mean AI is inherently bad, hand written exams are the easy solution (as they have always been for various technologies)
That’s the same issue we already had with calculators, PCs, let alone the Internet everywhere on tiny devices. Nothing is different from the learning perspective: If you use a tool that does everything without needing you to understand anything… then you won’t learn anything.
Absolutely! So from the academic side we have to adjust and we have to be better, which is a lot of what is discussed in this article. Pretending this technology doesn’t exist doesn’t help anyone. Teaching students how to use AI properly while removing their ability to use AI to cheat on tests is going to be key for the education system.
Except how to use AI, I suppose? That is going to be increasingly important.
“Students who use search engines to find stuff on the Internet do not learn how to find stuff in a library” or something?
The article does say that AI is important to learn and to use.
I have been in teaching/training roles for a long time and the fear is that you are not learning if you use a generated answer, even if you edit the answer afterwards. What we need to do is teach students the right way to use AI and still learn. For years our education system in the US focuses on completing the grade or class rather than learning. So we get engineers with impressive degrees that know very little about engineering. This also coincides with companies not training/mentoring new hires properly so they have to learn by doing and in many cases learn by failing. Without proper mentoring and oversight some of these failures reach the market.
AI highlights an existing issue that is not unique to the US. “Get that piece of paper by any means necessary.” Even when I was in school and we walked uphill both ways in the snow people would pay English majors to write papers. Sometimes this was a simple edit and sometimes they wrote it entirely. AI is just a new tool that allows you to complete assignments designed to learn if you attained the appropriate knowledge without learning.
Wow, this is way longer than I intended, good on you if you held in this long in my semi-coherent ramblings…personally I think the fix is easy, and the same answer to all forms of cheating I have witnessed. Vital exams and checkpoints in education should be handwritten, proctored exams. Yes that is harder to grade, but this is really the only way to guarantee your students are learning.
TL;DR AI is a new and easy way to avoid learning, but that doesn’t mean AI is inherently bad, hand written exams are the easy solution (as they have always been for various technologies)
That’s the same issue we already had with calculators, PCs, let alone the Internet everywhere on tiny devices. Nothing is different from the learning perspective: If you use a tool that does everything without needing you to understand anything… then you won’t learn anything.
Absolutely! So from the academic side we have to adjust and we have to be better, which is a lot of what is discussed in this article. Pretending this technology doesn’t exist doesn’t help anyone. Teaching students how to use AI properly while removing their ability to use AI to cheat on tests is going to be key for the education system.