AI in Education: Academic Integrity and Eating the Menu
As soon as ChatGPT made its surprise irruption into our lives, with its almost omniscient capabilities, education´s collective reaction was as immediate as it was predictable: concern with whether students were going to use this tool to copy, to cheat on school assignments.
Challenged in our sense of worth, once more, as with the opening up of knowledge through the Internet, voices were raised to call for its banning at schools, applications futilely developed to detect AI-based plagiarism and we even came up with a fancy phrase for our rallying cry to protect the status quo: academic integrity.
Even though we should not be surprised at these antibodies that have logically sprung up in defense of the traditional learning model, it is still, with a sense of déjà vu, that we witness another missed opportunity. Our perennial exacerbated focus on assessment makes us lose sight of that the real objective of schooling is not to evaluate, but for students to learn, and that assessment is a mere instrument to provide feedback and even motivate students to achieve their learning objectives.
Faced with the perfect storm of generative AI applications meeting education, we are missing the mark by worrying about whether students will use AI to cheat. We should, much rather, be concerned with the real risk of its indiscriminate use hindering the acquisition of some cognitive abilities, and maybe, as we should have done long ago, profoundly question whether our assessment instruments are really conducive to learning for today and the future, and reassess them (pun intended) accordingly.
ChatGPT and a whole family of generative AI applications can, indeed, decisively and positively transform the learning landscape. We finally have the tools to make learning personalized, exciting, interactive, flexible, and engaging, to develop learning environments that foster creative project development, ne media, collaboration and innovation.
Using a restaurant metaphor, we have gotten to the point to where we end up eating the menu instead of the food. We can still change education, but, contrary to other previous technological revolutions, this one will not wait for us. Our students will utilize these tools whether we give them permission or not, and it is our ethical imperative to learn about them, and use them to improve learning which is, ultimately, what should be our main objective and fuel our own sense of purpose as educators.
