How university courses are changing in the wake of AI

Some universities have changed as much as 20 per cent of coursework after ChatGPT’s public launch. Others see enrolments up as much as five times.

AI courses are booming at Australian universities and coursework has changed as much as 20 per cent since ChatGPT’s public launch. Picture: Bianca De Marchi/NCA NewsWire

Coursework at one of Australia’s most prestigious universities has changed as much as 20 per cent in the wake of ChatGPT.

The public availability of OpenAI’s technology, launched less than two years ago in November 2022, has put a spotlight on the technology.

Now student enrolment in relevant courses is booming.

Students in majors such as computer science are switching courses to focus on ChatGPT-style technology, according to AI course directors of three major Australian tertiary institutions.

At the University of Sydney, AI coursework had already undergone a massive change and was as much as 20 per cent different following ChatGPT’s release, said Jonathan Kummerfeld, a senior lecturer in the school of computer science.

The “biggest changes” had taken place within the university’s natural language processing unit “which literally teaches the methods that make ChatGPT work”, Dr Kummerfeld said.

“Two lectures are essentially completely new and they are there because of ChatGPT and how influential it has been,” he said.

ChatGPT’s popularity, reaching 100 million users in just two months after launch, inspired great interest in large language models – machine learning models that can interpret, understand and generate text as a person would – among computer science students, Dr Kummerfield said.

“Another aspect (which became popular) is the training process which is one of reinforcement learning,” he said. “It has been around for decades but previously I didn’t cover it in natural language processing because it wasn’t that widely used. I didn’t teach it because it wasn’t sort of fundamental.”

The university had also put together a new task force to understand and regulate how generative AI tools like ChatGPT changed how students completed coursework and assessments.

“Broadly speaking, and stepping back from specific courses, there have been changes in the university at a few different levels. One is the establishment of the Education Innovations Unit that has been thinking about what this means to university as a whole, what it means for assessment and for what it means for how you deliver content,” Dr Kummerfield said.

At the University of Technology Sydney, enrolments in its Bachelor of AI course have increased five times, Associate Professor Nabin Sharma told The Australian.

There had also been three times the number of enrolments in the Master of AI degree, said Professor Sharma, who is course director of AI programs in the Faculty of Engineering and IT.

The university had some luck with the timing of its course, launching its Master of AI February 2022 and its Bachelor of AI in August that same year.

“The influence of ChatGPT is still not clear because we haven’t conducted a study (of our students) yet but we did see a major growth in numbers,” Professor Sharma said.

Professor Sharma said that while UTS already had subjects that covered technology like ChatGPT, the university was considering bringing in industry leaders in the generative AI space to give lectures.

At the University of New South Wales, Maurice Pagnucco, the Deputy Dean of Engineering and former head of computer science, said the changes since ChatGPT’s launch were obvious.

“Even long before ChatGPT came along there was a significant increase in AI courses,” Professor Pagnucco said.

“But just with AI in general right now with different machine learning techniques and your different AI techniques and so on, there’s definitely been a really massive increase in interest in those sorts of courses.”

While universities were always adjusting courses, much of the research into ChatGPT was likely to flow into UNSW’s AI courses soon, Professor Pagnucco said.