PART – 1
A technology company, Kodak, once dominated the photography film market in the 20th century but miserably failed because it did not adapt to the change. Perhaps many people may not be aware that Kodak had actually invented Digital Camera in 1975 but because they were so much obsessed with their traditional film photography, they failed to recognize and foresee the market changes and turned a blind eye to their own innovation that eventually led to their downfall. The same been the case with many be it Nokia, Yahoo, Xerox, Blackberry, Hindustan Motors, Fiat, Hitachi, Toshiba, Motorola, IBM and many more. These companies also experienced turbulent times, and some of them miserably failed while some were able to pull themselves out.
Nokia and Yahoo is known to all of us and how they dominated mobile and advertisement markets. Perhaps, failure to understand the market changes, customer tastes and technological shifts led to their exit. The emergence of Artificial Intelligence is significantly revolutionising education sector. Its usage is un-precedented and is severely impacting the way we create, customize, and automate our tasks.
ChatGpt is yet another such Artificial Intelligence technology that is going to disrupt the way we do our teaching and learning and unless we understand it and adapt to it faster with clarity, we may have to face unimaginable consequences. The role of teaching institutions, communities also run a risk of becoming irrelevant in future, unless they adapt to the fast-growing changes and expectations of learners and market forces. In this article, lets understand what ChatGPT is and its advantages and disadvantages for the entire educational ecosystem.
ChatGpt also called Chat Generative Pre-Trained Transformer, is a chatbot developed by OpenAI and launched a year back in 2022 that is based on a large language model that enables users to refine and steer a conversation towards a desired length, format, style, level of detail, and language.
Advantages
- Unlike Google browser, Chat GPT can provide students with instant access to customized information and feedback on various topics and subjects. Students can tailor questions, request explanations, or seek guidance from Chat GPT at any time and place, without relying on teachers, tutors, or peers.
- It can be used to create virtual tutors that will not only be used for seeking answers and clarifications but also for improving conversational and communication skills. Chat GPT bots can facilitate real life conversations and can provide instant feedback on student’s ability and skills.
- Teachers can create their own ChatGPT and develop their intelligence that is customised to their own or multidisciplinary fields. In fact, many teachers who prepare and go for their physical recordings for MOOCS lectures can now easily outsource that task to ChatGPTvedio maker. The content and delivery and imagery is far superior with a very creative instructional design input. No need to go to studios for recording any more.
- The interactive power of Chat GPT also facilitates student engagement and can even use humour, creativity and emotions to keep students interest and motivation.
- Given that Chat GPT has access to wide spread knowledge, culture, information, languages, it can make students more creative by challenging their beliefs, biases and assumptions.
- The dependence of students on teachers will get reduced as the access to right bots can help students to clarify their doubts, seek clarifications, explanations and seek guidance without depending on teachers, tutors, peers etc. These interactive bots can leave teachers to think to do higher cognitive level functions that can take overall learning to next level.
- Students can use Chat GPT as a brainstorming tool and improve on the generation of qualitative ideas. The ChatGPT intelligence can be developed to such extent and depth that can bring more insightful, purposeful and need based analytical and holistic ideas and reports.
- Teachers can use ChatGPT for customising lesson plans to the individual needs and requirements of the students based on unique student profiles. The tool can be used to feed with student data and information including their learning preferences, abilities, choices, likes and dislikes and ChatGPT can analyse and provide reports and actionable plans that are customised to every student learning requirement. It can be used by teachers as precision and predictive modelling of their teaching and skilling plans.
- ChatGPT can also be used for assessments and grading of students work and assignments. It can help teachers and trainers on saving their time by automating various tasks including assessments and giving feedback.
- Teachers can use this technology for stimulating group work and discussions and also keep an eye on the progress of the groups with ChatGPT helping to customise reports and keep feedback dynamic.
- ChatGPT can be used by teachers for creating effective presentations, designing of case studies, assignments, simulations that can trigger students thinking. Teachers can ask ChatGPT to support in identifying gaps in the lesson delivery thereby improve gaps in student understanding and learning effectiveness. It can further help teachers to develop and align with Program Outcomes, Learning Outcomes and Course Outcomes with precision and higher quality.
Recently during an international conference of AI and ChatGPT, Elon Musk said “that for those with learning disabilities or having trouble making friends, an AI friend could be a great asset”.
A lot of data analytics work, multiple input analysis, idea generation, report preparation and innovation can be improved through an effective engagement with ChatGPT.
(To be continued…)
(The Author is Vice Chancellor, Shri Vishwakarma Skill University)
