How AI is shaping the education field
Jake Meyer, Contributing Writer
Since its launch in late 2022, ChatGPT, an advanced artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot, has become more integrated into everyday institutions, including education. Both educators and students have used it for various reasons, ranging from asking it to generate worksheets to having it read full essays for feedback.
Dr. Thomas Willoughby, associate professor of Christian studies at North Greenville University, is one of many educators who have used AI to enhance classroom activities. As part of this integration, many of the assignments and presentations he uses were created with assistance from AI, which helps organize and simplify the content he wants to teach.
For example, with how dense some concepts in biblical teaching can be, Willoughby has asked ChatGPT to simplify the content for presentations and assignments. He also uses it by giving it content to create into assignments and worksheets, something that would usually take hours to do manually. His usage of AI has helped reduce time working on assignments for his class and make the biblical content he teaches more accessible for all his students to learn.
“I find AI to be a positive thing to the degree that it takes an existing knowledge base and enhances it or helps build it,” said Willoughby..
Willoughby is just one of many educators across the United States using this modern technology in the classroom. According to the article “Here’s How Teachers Are Using AI to Save Time” by Madeline Will for the website Education Week, most teachers spend up to 29 hours a week working on nonteaching tasks like answering emails and creating learning resources for future classes. This demanding workload puts them at higher risk for burnout and intense stress, but AI might be able to ease these issues.
The EdWeek Research Center asked 990 educators about artificial intelligence usage in their classrooms, and those who did use it talked about how it has reworded emails to sound more professional, created worksheets from preexisting resources and modified content to fit class reading levels.
Luke Culbreth, a business major at NGU, is another person actively using AI technology for educational purposes. Being a student, his uses for AI in school differ from how educators use it, though he still places a great deal of emphasis on its capacity for organization. These uses include having ChatGPT create study guides, generate ideas for papers and check grammar on essays. However, he tries to use AI sparingly so he isn’t overreliant on it. When he does use it, it’s strictly as a tool to help with his work.
AI technology became very popular in early 2023, and when it did, many of Culbreth’s professors were hesitant about it due to its potential to be used for cheating. ChatGPT can easily generate entire essays, allowing a student to turn in work that isn’t theirs. In the following years, however, his professors have come to embrace it because it can be used as a tool for enhancing writing. For example, Culbreth says his professors encourage students to ask ChatGPT for tips on how to organize essays and make them flow better, though their endorsement is limited to using AI as a tool instead of a creator.
Given how AI has the ability to create as much as it can aid, there are still plenty of concerns with using it in the education field. Willoughby said that one of his biggest concerns with the technology is that it could replace everyday thinking in students. He acknowledged that it’s entirely possible for a student to use ChatGPT to generate essays or answer questions on assignments, meaning they’re turning in a product with little to no human input. He questioned what professor would want to read an AI-generated essay and why students wouldn’t want to help themselves expand their writing skills naturally.
He sais he thinks it all comes down to the internal motivation of students and whether they actually care about what they’re writing about. To him, students who turn in essays created solely by artificial intelligence are the ones who suffer, since they’re replacing internal motivation for writing with an overreliance on technology. He said he believes students won’t learn the importance of time management skills and hard work if they just give themselves easy ways to get out of doing assignments, which could be detrimental to their future. For this reason, he said he thinks AI should remain a tool to help humans instead of being something that can replace their thinking.
Culbreth agreed with these concerns. He considers the use of AI to complete assignments to be “cheating” and a violation of the creativity every person has the ability to use.
“Once you’re putting in a prompt, you’re just trying to get it done,” he said about AI-generated assignments. “So it’s not like you actually care about your schoolwork.”
Despite his persistent use of it for his studies, Culbreth still has mixed feelings about AI due to the negative impact it could have on student work ethic. He said he’s worried that his fellow students won’t care about their work if they become too reliant on technology to generate it for them.
The general consensus on AI in education seems to be that its usage should be centered around aiding, not creating. As ChatGPT becomes more advanced and intelligent, only time will tell if it remains a tool or becomes something greater in the realm of education and beyond.
