Page 15 - Can AI take education to a new level

AI IN EDUCATION

Harnessing LLms umours of the death of homework may have been

exaggerated. Large language models (LLMs) such as
ChatGPT are disrupting some of the ways in which
fOr educatiOn Reducators assess the progress of pupils and stu-

dents, but they are also being used for new methods of assess-
ment, teaching and support that aim to enhance education rather
SA Mathieson looks at how large language models are than compromise it.
“It was always a bad idea to say, ‘Go write me a five-paragraph
being used to teach, support and assess students, essay about this topic and turn it in tomorrow’,” says Robert
enhancing education rather than impairing it Harrison, director of education and integrated technology at
ACS International Schools, a charity that runs four independent
schools in Greater London and Doha, Qatar. “Now, it’s a terrible
idea, because you can write it in five minutes on your way home
from school on your laptop.”
Using short essays to check if pupils have absorbed information
has always been open to abuse, whether this involved asking an
older sibling, copying from an encyclopaedia or using a search
engine. To get pupils thinking about how LLMs work, ACS has
asked some students to use ChatGPT to draft an essay on a
topic, then fact-check it for “hallucinations” (factual errors), then
rewrite the text to correct it.
Harrison says educators could attempt to train people to work
as “AI [artificial intelligence] whisperers” who are good at writing
good prompt queries for LLM systems, but such jobs could be as
transient as people being paid to design searches when search
engines were a novelty. Instead, employers tell ACS they want
AVIAN/ADOBE to hire people who can adopt new technologies intelligently as
they appear.

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