What my classes learned about the ChatGPT revolution – MinnPost
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It is supposed to be the next big thing to revolutionize education. Maybe at some point it will. But based on my students’ comments, ChatGPT/AI is less than a revolution.
At the beginning of 2023, ChatGPT/AI took higher education by storm. It was heralded as the next big thing to change teaching and learning. It was going to be the savior or demise of higher education as we know it. Yet as we know, the road to educational reform is littered with educational technology failures and overhypes.
In the fall 2023, I incorporated ChatGPT into my three undergraduate classes. For all three classes ChatGPT was used in a variety of ways. For each class, a ChatGPT question was listed in the syllabus for each day, serving as a prompt for discussion. I used ChatGPT to encourage student discussion. If I asked a question and no one was willing to answer I told the class to look it up in ChatGPT and tell me what it said.
I encouraged students in all three classes to use ChatGPT to help them generate preliminary answers for their take-home essay tests or papers. They could use it for research, to generate outlines, or for summaries of lectures. They could use it any way they wanted.
Finally, I generated several lesson plans on topics to be covered in class. I did this after already preparing my own so that I could compare them.
What did we learn?
My students were underwhelmed or generally unimpressed with ChatGPT as a teaching and learning tool. I chose not to use any of the ChatGPT generated lesson plans. They were simply not well organized, superficial, or got critical facts or issues wrong.
Several students remarked how they had been using it even before my classes. They found it mildly useful to generate some preliminary ideas for research or a paper, such as perhaps producing a preliminary outline that identified key issues or points. They were extremely critical that ChatGPT did not provide sources or references to books or articles. They all told me that they did not think ChatGPT did not do anything that Google did not already do, or the latter did better. Several said that using Google or another search engine along with ChatGPT helped them.
My students were highly aware and critical of the biases and inaccuracies in ChatGPT and how it makes up facts. They all knew the now near legendary story of a New York attorney using it to write a brief and how it made up cases. As several students stated, ChatGPT operated on the principle of “garbage in, garbage out.”
We ended the classes unimpressed for now with the ChatGPT revolution, but we did come up with ten rules that may be useful to teachers and students as they experiment with AI in the classroom:
David Schultz is a distinguished professor at Hamline University. He teaches in political science, legal studies and environmental studies.
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