AI platforms aren’t all bad, they have the potential to ‘liberate’ learning

ChatGPT and other AI platforms open up new exciting possibilities for teaching and learning.

ChatGPT and other AI platforms open up new exciting possibilities for teaching and learning.

Artificial intelligence offers universities a major opportunity to reform assessment and teaching which will improve education, according to university leaders.

A symposium on “robot writing” was told on Tuesday that, as well as posing a threat to traditional assessment, AI platforms such as ChatGPT opened the way to new forms of personalised teaching and assessment.

University of Wollongong deputy vice-chancellor (academic and student life) Theo Farrell said Australian universities faced the problem of large classes, and AI platforms could help academics manage the workload this caused.

“There are multiple applications of AI that enable us to offer personalised experiences to students at scale, and that’s revolutionising the behind-the-scenes support that universities can provide to students,” he said.

Professor Farrell said AI could power a different learning experience for students in which they could choose from many more learning options.

Many educators have already noticed that ChatGPT is effective in being able to create learning materials in many subjects and Professor Farrell urged that these qualities be explored.

“Can we imagine a future where we empower student choice and liberate students to create their own learning journeys?” he asked.

“The thing that will slow us down is bureaucratic structure and regulation,” Professor Farrell said. He said there would be obstacles both inside universities and through external regulation, including from professional bodies that accredit courses.

Giselle Byrnes, provost and assistant vice-chancellor at Massey University in New Zealand, said universities had to face the reality that AI was now “with us in every aspect of our lives”.

She and other speakers at the Studiosity symposium, titled Higher education’s thoughtful response to robot writing, said assessment needed to change in response to AI but urged against the “easy option” of going to back to in-person exams.

Rowena Harper, deputy vice-chancellor (education) at Edith Cowan University, said she hoped universities would look at programmatic assessment – in which teachers incorporate monitoring of a student’s knowledge and capability into the course – as an answer to the problem of students using AI tools for assignments.

She said traditional assessment tasks were already becoming unsustainable because the advent of contract cheating meant academics had stepped up security measures, creating an “enormous amount of work” that had not been “explicitly recognised” by universities.

Professor Harper said ECU would allow students to use ChatGPT in assignments but they were required to acknowledge it.

“We keep reminding staff that if students do use ChatGPT it doesn’t mean that it’s a high-quality assignment, it doesn’t mean they have to pass,” she said.

Professor Farrell said that “as academic leaders we have to recognise the burden which is now falling on academic labour and support our staff”. But he also said universities were in an “exciting moment” where it was possible to “leverage the opportunities which AI can provide”.

Professor Farrell said there was an opportunity to innovate around “authentic assessment”, which tests students in skills they are expected to do in real-world settings. While students can’t use AI to perform authentic assessment tasks, he conceded they were “resource intensive”.