Using AI to prepare for the new school year

The coming academic year will perhaps be the first time that artificial intelligence (AI) tools will be comprehensively used in some form or the other in schools and colleges. After all, it was only late in 2022 that ChatGPT became a household name, and with it, the consequences of using AI in education became controversial.

Teachers are apprehensive about students using such tools for assignments and students may be excited about the immense possibilities of such platforms to help, or actually do the work for them.

Rather than staying confused, this is the perfect time for teachers and policymakers to decide exactly how AI is going to be used at a personal and institutional level.

Already, online teacher forums have been discussing ways in which AI can be used to generate lesson plans and evaluation rubrics.

Times Higher Education, one of the most established public journals on higher education, for example, shows a lesson plan that is generated by GPT 3 deep learning language model, using a well defined prompt. The plan gives detailed outcomes, tasks and even reflection exercises. All this in less than 2 minutes.

While this may save much time, effort and thought on the part of teachers and student-teachers, it has huge consequences if used uncritically.

For example, AI generated output (in this case, strategies for a lesson), end us being generic, devoid of cultural sensitivities or awareness of how each classroom is unique. Even each EFL (English as a Foreign Language) context is different from each other. So is the level and type of each class.

It is this uniqueness that AI cannot sufficiently address, at least, as yet. Putting all fifth grade history students, for example, under a common umbrella is not going to generate targeted suggestions for lesson planning. It will only list out a generalized format that could be used in any part of the world.

This is where teachers still need to intervene. The most important questions we need to ask, are still the traditional ones: what do my students need? How will what I teach benefit my students? What do they need that AI generated content is not addressing?

The focus, in short, is on ground realities. Teachers know their students best, know where they come from, what challenges they face a what they respond to best. No amount of AI tools can address this personal knowledge.

Maximizing our awareness of student level, interest and background will help in making classes more targeted and beneficial. AI may help in creating a generic classroom model, but no two classes are the same. As educationist Jorge Valenzuela says, “...no matter how advanced AI models become, they will never replace the human touch. Therefore...embrace tech along with our human ingenuity”.

The rise of Artificial Intelligence is exciting and scary at the same time. For those in education, the challenge is in learning to use it but not let it be a substitute for teachers themselves.