Having rushed back to “normalcy” after the pandemic, instead of seeing the challenge as a wake up call, educators are either scrambling or ignoring the challenge that ChatGPT and its kin presents to traditional education. In a New York Times podcast story, Suspicion, Cheating and Bans: A.I. Hits America’s Schools reported by Stella Tan, one teacher said when it dawned on him that students were using ChatGPT on their assignments, “It felt like all of my certainties about what teaching was going to be like were crumbling, because that was when I realized that, now, I can’t go to any student posts and know if I’m reading what a student wrote… every time now, I see a student post that looks like they know the material well, my first thought isn’t, aha, this is a good student who’s read the material. My first thought is, did a robot write this?” 

The problem that ChatGPT presents is somewhat related to the problems I saw when doing online education first as a student at Pepperdine and then as a teacher at Full Sail. The teachers I worked with and I knew that the traditional lecture/test factory model of education wasn’t going to work. Back in 2001, part of the problem was that the technology was very primitive, this being the era before easy-access live Internet video or handheld Internet apps, so we had to  approach things differently. The saying was, it’s about the journey, not the destination. I was in a fast paced one-year Masters program. Unlike the students quoted in the New York Times podcast, there were no “filler” courses that I was taking just because I needed the units. Every assignment of every course was an essential part of my learning journey. 

2008-11-26 Things I Never Thought I'd Hear at Work (Full Sail University)
2008-11-26 Things I Never Thought I’d Hear at Work (Full Sail University)

In 2008 when I became a professor at one of Full Sail’s fully online masters programs, the technology had advanced so that we had weekly online video classes with the professor discussing the week’s readings and discussions with students on their assignments. I can relate to something Professor Reeves said in The NY Times story, that one develops a sensitivity to a sense of a student’s voice in their work. In my media class, whether they were reading Zander’s Art of Possibility or Jenkin’s Convergence Culture, I didn’t want them to give me a recitation in their blogs of that week’s chapters. I had already read the books, I knew what was in the chapters. I needed them to reflect and comment on the reading. Where did they agree or disagree with the reading. From their experiences as an educator or trainer, what connections or expansion could they bring to what the authors were offering? The point of the assignment wasn’t for them to pass a test but to build their knowledge or skills in whatever area we were studying. I guess if I were teaching these course today I would have to be all the more observant of that their voice was genuinely theirs and not a robot facsimile. 

This is a wake up call that needs to be heard across the educational spectrum. Far too many of my middle school students couldn’t see that the purpose of their being in my robotics classes was not about a grade or even about passing that class. Their attitude is that if it doesn’t effect them moving to the next grade level then they aren’t going to put much if any effort into it. Period. This is middle school students. Far too many of them have completely lost the point of education or being at school. And holding on to vestigial relics of an irrelevant past educational era, like grades, is only making things worse. I tried to tell them that I do not care what grades my doctor or the guy working on my car got when they were training for their careers. All I care about is whether they have the skills and knowledge to help me with whatever problem I am dealing with. In my robotics classes they are expected to go from not knowing anything about robots to being able to work with others to build and program whatever robots we’re working with. I assume that if I’m taking a guitar class I should be expected to go from not being able to play guitar to some level of proficiency. ChatGPT is just the latest challenge because we’ve forgotten that the point isn’t getting a grade or a credential, but learning. It really is about the journey and not the destination. 

Sources: