It’s clear that regardless of how teachers wish for it to be gone, AI isn’t leaving anytime soon for students.
Currently, teachers are astounded at the great lengths students are willing to use generative Artificial Intelligence (AI) tools, whether it is for a day to day class activity, or a yearly assessment worth half the grade for the student’s report. Even group discussions have noticeably taken a more hushed tone in a setting traditionally filled with discussion and demands for students to keep noise levels down.
In fact, it is increasingly noticed that the entirety of submitted work was found to be completed with AI.
Simultaneously, as students enjoy their new freedom in offloading a perceived burden to be done by a computer, teachers still face it rough as they attempt to mark and review assessments and classwork increasingly utilising unnatural sentence structures or em dashes never used before by their students.
Combined with the need to prepare work beforehand and marking out of paid hours, already overburdened teachers find it increasingly hard to also cope with potential plagiarism and academic integrity issues by students using AI.
As ChatGPT was launched by OpenAI in November 2022, education departments across Australia swiftly banned its use by students. With the ability for AI to produce realistic, human-like content that has raised questions upon the impact of learning by students, the Australian government has introduced a framework that aims to “guide its responsible and ethical use in ways that benefit students, schools, and society.”
However, aside from either full on bans that aligned with the respective states and territories department’s decisions to fully restrict its use, it is now questioned whether such methods are successful in truly mitigating issues of plagiarism and academic misconduct, especially as teachers themselves find the effort to track or identify potential misuse as an effort nothing less than tiring.
Regardless of the current national policy, it could help to look towards other nation’s responses to AI in learning. Within the United States, Microsoft, OpenAI and Anthropic recently announced they were funding a $US23 million ($35 million) AI teaching hub in New York for educators, to help them learn how to better integrate AI tools in the classroom.
So rather than simply only fearing the risk of student misuse, what if we flipped the roles around, and used AI to give teachers the time they desperately needed to help deliver quality content?
As an ABC News Article had reported,
“RMIT computing professor Michael Cowling says we need to consider the opportunities these tools present as well.
“When we first started talking about generative AI, we were very focused on academic integrity … that's one component," he says.
"But another is teaching the teachers what they can use this tool for effectively. In doing so, you help them to understand what it's used for.
"And that means, ultimately, your students understand better what it's useful for as well."
(Source: ABC)
As such, for the sake of considering the goal of ensuring students can access the best learning experience, generative AI can be both a challenge and a new opportunity for levelling this up.
Not only as a tool to help mark or assist in lesson making, AI tools can also serve as a potential assistant for teachers to manage a large cohort of students as well as identify any personal needs for specific learning outcomes.
Of course, it is given to weigh in the potential risks, such as understanding the limitations and responses offered by AI, as well as avoiding developing an overreliance that limits a teacher's ability to connect with students just as a student may if they overuse AI for their classwork.
The issue of AI content potentially deviating from the peer reviewed, defined outlines of a school syllabus are clear as well, with potentially misleading or even harmful information a risk that teachers need to identify and be careful if they choose to integrate these tools.
Interestingly, an interim report by the Productivity Commission (linked here) recommended that AI integration in Australia needed to be concurrently done across departments nationwide. The report found that "A national approach would aid innovation, support equal access to high-quality tools, and spread the benefits to all," with a need to recognise that the technology is developing “faster than the expertise” needed to master it.
Regardless of how these tools are considered in the future of Australian education, it remains imperative that students and teachers recognise the risks and responsibilities that accompany the possibilities of these emerging technologies.
So how will this delicate balance be maintained? Not only is the need to preserve critical thinking and creativity as important as ever, the goal of ensuring students can distinguish and apply valid information, reliable sources or ethical and moral considerations will be the basis for high quality education, and must remain the forefront consideration of everyone involved.