Montse Guitert, Teresa Romeu and Marc Romero present “Exploring and Reflecting on the Educational Potential of AI in Classroom: Revolution, Help or Danger?” at Centre d’Estudis Roca
Edul@b Researchers Montse Guitert, Teresa Romeu and Marc Romero presented last June 27th at Centre d’Estudis Roca the workshop “Exploring and Reflecting on the Educational Potential of AI in Classroom: Revolution, Help or Danger?”. In this session, participants had the opportunity to learn more about the meaning and implications of AI, as well as working with their colleagues on the benefits and risks of this technology. Previously, in order to know their general stand on AI, they had completed a number of Mentimeter questions regarding this topic.
More than half of the participants expressed that they use AI in their teaching activities and that they generally use it for research purposes, but also in a number of different areas. Nowadays, the usages of AI spread throughout many fields, such as communication, entertainment or cyber security, any imaginable area can be approached via Artificial Intelligence. Some of the most common examples of use are chatbots, voice recognition, streaming platforms and many more.
In this context, Generative AI plays a huge role, as it can currently generate text, create images, visual art, videogames and even compose a song. A number of Generative AI platforms are available for this purpose, like Albus for productivity or Krisp for audio. Text can also be generated through AI, ChatGPT, the most well-known generative AI platform, is one of them.
ChatGPT is a language model developed by OpenAI, an Artificial Intelligence research organization. It can generate fluent text in 95 languages and it’s based on “Prompts”, a fragment of text or information that serves as an instruction for the AI model. In order to get an adequate answer, it’s needed to ask precise questions. Only 25% of the participants had used ChatGPT as a teaching resource and less than 10% as a learning resource for students. ChatGPT can help in many related tasks, such as subject preparation, resources design, creation of assessment activities, assessment tools, feedback generation, among others in teaching. Plus, enforcing critical and creative thinking, communication, search of information, problem solving and self-regulated learning on the students.
The ethical guidelines are extremely important to create a responsible AI. It means to guarantee ethical, legal, beneficial and solid systems. Its implementation needs to be controlled and verified (UNICEF, 2021). The European Commission has released a series of ethical guidelines about the use of AI and data in education and formation of teachers. This report leads to taking action on the ethical use of AI and data. Some of the main guidelines are the following: capacity of action and human vigilance; transparency; diversity, no discrimination and equity; social and environmental welfare; privacy and data management; technical security and accountability.
During the session, a number of work groups were created to discuss the application of ChatGPT to several teaching areas, such as activity design, assessment tools, resources and subject preparation taking into consideration the previous information on AI and the opportunities and risks that are involved with the use of this technology.
All in all, ChatGPT can be a great tool to let us focus on more reflective and creative tasks and get rid of the mechanical work. Also, it can lead to the improvement of other technologies in many fields, but we must note the risks that come with a new technology, such as privacy and security issues, fake information (fake news and deep fake), it can be a tool that can diminished human originality with plagiarism and idea appropriation. The question remains open: is AI a revolution, a help or a danger?
