Time for AI in education: A transformative revolution akin to printing era

“Teachers: AI is coming for your job!” says one news headline. “Will AI kill meaningless jobs in universities?” asks another headline. “Students use AI to cheat in university exam,” says a third. Every day, nowadays, headlines like these are thrown at us, not just by online newspapers but by journals from some of the most reputed educational institutions in the world. How to make sense of all that is being said about the role AI, artificial intelligence, is going to play in the world of school, college, and postgraduate education?

 

If you reflect for a while, what is being said is that the field of education is on its way to a revolutionary makeover and my worry as a person strongly anchored in the Indian middle-class belief that a good education system is the most important driver of progress as well as economic well-being, is this: Are we as a country doing the right thing with AI in our schools, colleges, Indian Institutes of Management (IIMs), Indian Institutes of Technology, and medical colleges?

 

Till now, one has lived calmly in the belief that AI, like other technology innovations of the recent past such as computers and the internet, functions as a useful tool to assist the current education system we live with. But what is facing us now is that the time-tested methods of human learning and teaching, our institutions of schools and colleges and universities, and systems of exams and tests may have to be fundamentally changed, thanks to AI.

 

My personal view as a person who spends four-five hours a day on python programming, testing many of the emerging algorithms for my entertainment (for me, the equivalent of what most of my friends do, watching cricket matches on TV or mobile phones), so far has been that a lot of the headlines about AI are hype and astonishing news such as Microsoft paying $14 billion for a stake in OpenAI (the company behind ChatGPT) was merely an attempt to get technology that would help them beat Google in search (that business which gushes billions of dollars in revenue), but now I am starting to worry that there is more at stake in AI technology than just market share and revenue, particularly in crucial areas like education.

 

I myself use ChatGPT many times a day for things that occasionally befuddle me, for example my question: “How many minutes does an adult man have to walk in the evening to keep good health?”And ChatGPT’s answer: “An adult man should aim for 30 to 60 minutes of brisk walking in the evening to maintain good health. Walking at a pace that raises your heart rate but still allows conversation is ideal for cardiovascular health, weight management, and stress relief.” That comforted me because it confirmed what I had been doing based on my doctor’s recommendation was on the right track.

 

If I had asked a similar question to a search engine, it would have given me an unending set of links to websites, which I would then have to open, read, and absorb. Human-conversation mode, I guess, is one key reason we all run to ChatGPT and similar AI tools often.

 

Then there are questions I don’t even know who to ask, for example: “Please tell me why there are so many unoccupied high-rise buildings in Bombay?” ChatGPT’s answer: “Unoccupied high-rise buildings in Bombay result from high property prices, regulatory delays, unsold inventory, developer bankruptcies, and limited affordability for middle-class buyers amidst urban challenges.”

 

Such an answer helps me understand the basic underlying issues.

 

Today, the worry the world over is that students, at school or college, can use ChatGPT or tools like that on their mobile phones to beat any type of exam questions, be they essays to be written, or multiple-choice questions, or computer programming puzzles posed. As a result of this, carrying mobile phones into exam rooms has been prohibited by law for practically all levels of exam in India, be it the exams of the Central Board of Secondary Education or IIM entrance tests.

 

But all this is making me wonder whether a more fundamental change is needed in the way we “teach” and “examine” in schools and colleges. The current system is that students sit passively in classes for many hours each day and go do active academic work like reading and writing at home (“homework”). There have been suggestions from many quarters (among others from Sai Khan, the founder chief executive officer of the California-based Khan Academy in his recent book Brave New Words) that this be “flipped”, that is to say, students should do what used to be homework in class and watch recorded lectures on their own time at home.

 

Ashok Goel, a distinguished professor of computer science at the Georgia Institute of Technology, developed “Jill Watson”, an AI-based virtual teaching assistant designed to answer student queries in online courses. This innovation, it is believed, has significantly enhanced the scalability and effectiveness of online education, particularly within Georgia Tech’s “Online Master of Science in Computer Science” programme.

 

Is today a moment like 1448, when the Gutenberg Press was invented, when knowledge and learning became available to all through affordable books unlike earlier times, when book copies had to be hand-written by human scribes?

 

The author (ajitb@rediffmail.com) is devoting his life to unravel the connection between society and technology