ChatGPT: Keegan launches call for evidence on AI in education

His entrepreneurial activities have been recognised  by winning the Inaugural Data Driven Entrepreneurship (DDE) Academic Entrepreneurship Award, and the Principal’s Award for Innovation. Outside of the academy, he is a founder of several companies and he is the Academic in Residence with Archangels Investors Ltd. Martin Whiteside, our Chief Information Officer, has written a very interesting piece on what generative AI tools can and can’t do. It includes some fascinating analysis about what ChatGPT can do in producing ‘assignments’ in Literature, Art, Science and Maths. Excessive reliance on AI may diminish face-to-face interactions and hinder holistic skill development.

The Department will use the responses from this call for evidence as well as continued engagement with the education and EdTech sectors to inform future policy work. The Department does not intend to follow this engagement with a formal consultation at this time. Nearly 60% of teachers say that interacting with AI systems will be a key skill required for jobs in the future, however many students don’t feel prepared with the skills required for the 21st century workforce. So these tools suddenly make it really easy to do all kinds of things, very quickly, that used to be hard and slow.

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Authentic assessments are designed to measure students’ knowledge and skills in a way that is relevant to their lives and future careers. As with any emerging technology, there are both opportunities and challenges that come with generative AI. With the right approach, these tools can accelerate learning and the development of higher-order thinking skills.

• These are no longer distant dreams but tangible possibilities brought to life by the remarkable capabilities of Generative AI.
• It should be explained to students why generative AI tools should be used to assist but not replace formal learning.
• An example of this is ChatLlama, an open source version of GPT that is intended to help users create customised assistants.
• The results of the call for evidence, including responses where appropriate will be published on GOV.UK in Autumn 2023.

We will find some pedagogical countermeasures (such as oral exams), but GPT3 will increase in sophistication, with newer iterations. Human cognitive processes, strategic knowledge, and emotional intelligence are everything now. Education systems around the world are already making moves to either accommodate or exclude generative AI tools such as ChatGPT from students’ day-to-day activities. Nearly half (48%) of secondary school teachers, for example, report that their schools have either blocked or restricted the tools’ use in one form or another. Other “early adopters” have been less restrictive in their approach with 19% saying that such tools have been allowed for specific use-cases, and 18% noting that they are still evaluating it for its applicability and usefulness in the classroom.

Advancing knowledge to transform lives

However, in writing an authentic assessment, the question to consider is ‘why are you asking a candidate to summarise, analyse or synthesise information available to them? A cursory search of the internet will show you hundreds of articles and videos explaining how to get the most out of generative AI. Before genrative ai we know it, generative AI will become second nature to all of us and our skills will improve in generating prompts, interpreting results and honing outputs to make this enthusiastic assistant work harder and smarter. Their Q4 performance review in 2024 will look significantly different to this Q4.

However, there have also been concerns raised about the ethical implications of using AI in education, including issues around data privacy, bias, and the impact on employment for human educators. Overall, the media coverage of generative AI in education has sparked important conversations about the future of learning and the role of technology in education. Generative artificial intelligence (AI) can process text, generate human-like responses and produce multimodal content (e.g. audio, images, simulations and videos).

The TTF Knowledge Platform has been developed with the financial support of the Hamdan Al Maktoum Foundation.

Do your learning outcomes need to be reviewed in order to consider how your assessments can be more authentic? That won’t be the case of every outcome, for every module, but a review will help identify the modules and programmes that could benefit from enhancement. At the outset, I acknowledge some assessments should absolutely not include generative AI. A diagnostic test to determine the knowledge, skills and understanding of a candidate, unless specifically targeted to their use of generative AI, should exclude the use of the tool.

Another way to use generative AI in early childhood education is to fine-tune other AI models. AI as a whole is one of the top emerging technologies in education, but it can be difficult to use effectively. Most machine learning models require extensive data sets, which aren’t always available, but generative AI can fill the gaps. The Department for Education has launched a consultation on the use of generative AI tools in education settings in England. The call is for evidence on the potential risks and benefits of using tools such as ChatGPT, Google Bard, Claude and Midjourney, within education.

Generative AI, like ChatGPT, is an artificial intelligence that can process text and generate human-like responses

Students should also be reminded that generative AI tools cannot be listed as a co-author in top academic journals. Traditional plagiarism detection tools are problematic for a number of reasons [1], but at least they are known to deliver their intended function of comparing submitted work against existing work. Unfortunately, the same cannot be said of tools for detecting the output from large language models. There is an as-yet un-peer-reviewed study claiming that as the distribution of words from large language models more closely approaches natural human output, the reliability of a successful detection falls to 50%, i.e. a coin-flip. Meanwhile, a number of other students using AI to generate their essays would have gone undetected. ChatGPT is just one of a number of a generative artificial intelligence tools.

Perceptions of AI use in Higher Education have been divisive across disciplines, educating and awarding bodies. Moreover, students are accountable for the originality of their assignments and should acknowledge all sources generated by AI tools. We have shared guidance on referencing ChatGPT and other generative artificial intelligence (AI) with our students. Generative AI will play a significant role in society and we encourage the responsible use of the technology in teaching, learning and assessment.

Student Counsellor

During the online discussion on 25 May 2023, UNESCO presented a roadmap on generative AI and education, including open multi-stakeholder dialogue. Generative AI, although not a novel concept, has experienced rapid advances in large language models (LLMS) in the past year with the public release of ChatGPT. These developments have been met genrative ai with mixed reception from across the HE sector, representing the complexity and lack of formalized guidance around the subject. The influence of GenAI on assessment and feedback has dominated headlines in the past months – with many research-intensive universities drawing up guiding principles on the use and implementation of GenAI tools.

Ideation can be an important stage early in a design process, however students rarely engage with it authentically and often fall into one of many pitfalls. These pitfalls include fixating on the first idea, having a preconceived notion of what a good solution should look like, and being reluctant to share ideas due to anxiety, embarrassment, or having strong ownership of ideas. On the other hand, the ability of ChatGPT and other generative AI tools to create highly specified new content quickly makes it a useful tool for ideation, both for generating alternative ideas and in avoiding some of these ideation pitfalls. This can be used for conceptual work, marketing, strategy development, and many other use-cases.