Let’s not let A.I. steal the thunder!
Dr Pranit Anand, Business School, University of New South Wales
Teaching remains one of the most rewarding of careers. Comments such as “we are not doing it for the money” are common within teaching communities and reflect the genuine desire for many teachers to have a real impact on students’ lives. The Chinese word ‘Lǎoshī’ for teacher reflects the high regard students have for the teaching profession. Lǎoshī represents someone with wisdom, empathy and the foresight to help shape lives. The Hindi word for teacher – ‘guru’ – refers to someone who acts as a mentor, enabling students to develop and find their path. Teaching has always been about relationships, forging connections, setting challenges, and guiding students forward.
While the core values of teaching remain, it’s fair to say that how we go about it, especially in higher education, has been subject to constant change. We have been simultaneously challenged and advanced by factors such as massification of universities, technology affordances, budget cuts, academic integrity concerns and now artificial intelligence (A.I.). While higher education is relatively used to change, the rate of change to teaching, learning and assessments and other university tasks more broadly, and the challenges to academic integrity from A.I., have been relentless and pervasive.
Particularly, higher education is confronted with the need to provide meaningful opportunities to learn and develop skills to use and apply A.I. ethically and responsibly in life and future work, while at the same time assuring that students who are awarded a qualification have achieved the requisite program learning outcomes via secure, valid assessments that accurately certify they know and can independently apply their learning. Various reports about students engaging in unethical practices such as contract cheating before A.I., and the fact that many of the A.I. generated outputs are identical to or in some cases better than human generated outputs, are of concern.
To maintain academic integrity standards, there is a danger that we may end up ‘throwing the baby out with the bath water’. It’s never been more important to ‘know’ your students, and to know and develop their individual capabilities. This requires us to dig deeper into our teaching arsenal to get back to the reason why we continue to do what we do. While the COVID-19 pandemic enabled us to explore innovative teaching, learning and assessment approaches, it’s also pushed us into disconnecting from each other. As we unravel from the lockdown experiences, it’s critical that we explore relationship-rich pedagogies to help build connections between students, between students and teachers, and (cautiously) with A.I., all at the same time.
Conversations play an important role in cultivating these connections and, while many students may not be willing to talk to each other in class about social situations, or even about the subject content, they are more likely to discuss assessment and assessment expectations. Institutional tools and many other resources abound to facilitate these discussions. OpenAI has just released A Student’s Guide to Writing with ChatGPT. Research is now asking students how they use and experience A.I. over their higher education interactions. Students have developed resources to guide other students’ productive and responsible A.I. use.
Meaningful engagement with A.I., and access to tools such as these, help students navigate learning and assessment expectations, while opportunities to discuss issues with teachers and peers, either synchronously or asynchronously, enable students to feel more connected to their learning process. Along the way, it is possible also to develop critical competencies that support learners to make informed decisions and evaluative judgements in aid of productive lifelong learning. Moving on from deficit and punitive perspectives, assessment practices will continue to play an important role in this developmental process, providing students with opportunities and flexibility to demonstrate that learning has occurred in ways that validate our trust in their capabilities and encourage them to be creative.
While A.I. seems to be stealing all the attention at the moment, we should be careful, as we have been in the past, to not fall into the trap of thinking that the pedagogy needs to adapt to the technology. Longstanding good teaching characteristics that focus on developing relationships, on building belonging, on diversifying assessments for inclusivity, and on enhancing critical skills to make judgements, will help us cultivate student-teacher trust, and a resilient and capable workforce for the future.
Dr Pranit Anand, Business School, University of New South Wales