The emergence of Artificial Intelligence bodes a new era in education. Thinking of my own past, both as a student and as a professor, I am agog at the changes AI is bringing forth. I had a traditional education and I taught as my predecessors had done from times long past.
When I lectured, students did not have cell phones to distract me from what I was trying to say, nor could they look up answers to questions I posed to test the knowledge they had mastered. Unless the class was a seminar, I required silence, lest chatting would interrupt the attention other students were giving to what I was saying.
I would assign book reports and term papers to see how well the students could express what they had learned and I graded papers for grammar as well as for content. The onslaught of computers presented its own challenges. I would find repetitive errors that the students would blame on the computer not having caught the mistakes. Such excuses did not set well with me.
One unforgettable conversation I had with an older, married student, who was returning to education after a lapse of many years, concerned his not being able to get a book report in on time. He apologized for the delay, saying that his wife had been busy with her own job that week and she had not been able to get through reading the book.
In shock over the innocence of his explanation, I retorted that the book report had been assigned to show how much he had learned from reading the volume and how well he could express what he had obtained from the exercise. He clearly thought that all he had to do was to check the relevant boxes to get through the course.
I further told him that the purpose of the assignment had been to direct him through the process of reading a book and understanding the material it contained, and most of all, inculcating in him a love of learning. Apparently, he had thought the exercise had been something akin to making a purchase at the store—having a book report was all that mattered, regardless of who had written it, or worse, who had read the book.
Recently, a friend told me about using AI to provide a talk he was giving, obviously with no academic connection and with no subsequent grading of the presentation. In such a situation, AI can be a time-saving tool that frees the speaker to be able to undertake other pursuits.
More importantly, in areas of critical significance, such as medicine, public safety, legal matters and finance, AI has the potential to provide essential information, but, as with human intelligence, no guarantees exist that it never will be in error. Here we come to the question of plagiarism, the bane of every teacher’s time in academe.
In today’s world, how does a teacher determine the authenticity of a student’s work? In the past, we had to be certain that papers submitted had not been “lifted” from other sources. With written tests administered in the classroom, the teachers have more control, assuming students are not using their phones to get answers to the questions. Unfortunately, AI affords new and broader opportunities for the practice of plagiarism.
In the end, the lasting question remains as to how AI will transform a student’s learning experience across the course of an academic career, ultimately leading to the more abiding question of what the role of education will come to be. As a proponent of the “old school,” I hope the future will not demean the students to being robots devoid of the thrill of learning.
