Will these tools change education?

It is completely reasonable to ask questions about the impact these tools may have on higher education. In order to make a convincing argument, for yourself or for others, you need to be very  clear about what higher education should be like and how it might be affected. 

Let's take the example of lectures. One discussion that has been happening since the turn of the 21st century is about whether lectures are important for student learning in their traditional form: that is, a lecturer standing at the front of the room and making a presentation to the students, usually for around an hour, although it could be longer. Actually this topic has probably been discussed since the printing press was invented, but the discussion has become more lively since the internet arrived to provide even easier ways to transmit knowledge. Over the last few decades there has been a move to making lectures slightly more interactive (Huxham 2005) and there are plenty of people who defend the lecture as an event which brings students together (French and Kennedy 2016, Nordmann, Hutchinson and MacKay 2022, Loughlin and Lindberg 2023). How might GenAI tools affect lectures? As with everything to do with education, you might quickly think of both positives and negatives. 

Negatively:

Teachers using them to generate lecture material which they possibly don't understand so well

Students deciding to miss the lecture and use a GenAI tool to learn about the topic instead. 

Positively:

Teachers using GenAI tools to create ideas for interaction or find unusual stories to illustrate their subject 

Students might use GenAI tools to explore further and ask and answer questions about the topic

In relation to students' work outside the class, whether it is formative or summative, there may well be dangers with students taking shortcuts, something we will look at in module 4, on this page if you want to jump to it. But there is also a possibility that they may find opportunities for creative thinking and alternative views from the use of these tools. It is right to be think carefully about these issues. A recent paper by Bastani et al (2024) Links to an external site. suggests that students may use GenAI as a substitute for learning something, and struggle when it is removed. This could mean that they are not learning essential skills - but some people will argue that they will always have access to these tools, so it doesn't matter any more. This is the calculator introduction argument - that we don't need to know how to, say, calculate exponentials any more, since a calculator can always now do it for us. What you need to do, in discussion with your colleagues, is to talk about what really is essential in your subject area and make sure that students can do it without GenAI tools if necessary. 

There is no simple answer here - teaching is about building relationships between teachers and students and everyone does it differently. If lectures are important to you, and you want them to stay the same, then discuss why you have them and how you expect students to make use of them. If you have objections to the use of GenAI tools then you can make some rules about their use, but make them realistic. We will cover this on the next page.