ChatGPT: Challenge or blessing for teachers?

ChatGPT has taken the world, particularly academia, by storm. Technological advances have constantly impacted the field of education, and the popularization of ChatGPT, an artificial language model, has occupied a significant space in discussions within academia. Teachers have argued for and against using this latest technological advancement within academic institutions. In this brief write-up, I explore both sides of the argument based on my personal engagements with ChaptGPT as a teacher and a rapid review of the experiences of other academicians. A prominent argument against ChatGPT in education is that it will challenge teaching and learning as it is currently practiced. This tool has access to large volumes of information and can provide instant responses to educational queries: It can swiftly answer questions that might take considerable time and effort using a traditional approach of going through available materials. ChaptGPT can write coherent and flawless essays within the given world limit; it can help students prepare for exams or conduct research. This feature provides the base for teachers’ fear concerning ChaptGPT. They fear that since the app is readily available and user-friendly, students might not put in the effort to work on assignments, given that it can work for them. They fear that undue reliance on ChatGPT could severely limit students’ abilities to look for, organize, analyze, and present relevant information and think critically or creatively. This loss of non-negotiable skills in education can be a significant educational challenge we cannot overlook. For example, ChatGPT can write personalized codes in a few seconds that traditionally require significant training and practice, profoundly changing how people work. Hence, workplaces and employees cannot function as they did until recently. From this example in the IT field, it is clear that training employees to work with ChatGPT to produce better outcomes will be more helpful than banning it. This indicates similar challenges for many other disciplines.

I have experienced significant changes in student engagement and evaluation of teaching and learning over a decade as a higher education faculty. When I started teaching in 2010, my students were happy to be handed over notes or linked to guidebooks and guess papers that would prepare them for the final examinations; they had minimal expectations from teachers. However, today, students often complain that a teacher does not provide enough stimulation in the classroom, does not provide access to adequate study materials, including reference books and articles, and does not use inclusive languages and behaviors, to name a few. Students’ expectations have significantly changed. However, teachers have to rely largely upon materials from the past that might not be as relevant in the current context as they were a decade back or might not be sensitive to diverse students. For example, as a student of ‘community organization’ in 2010, I only learned about communities of geography and communities of interest. However, as a teacher of community organization in 2023, I cannot overlook the emerging communities of identities; for example, the sexual and gender minorities community. The textbooks and reference materials that were current and adequate a decade ago need significant revisions and additions today. ChaptGPT can support teachers with current and wide-ranging resources in this fast-changing context.

ChatGPT can be an advantageous tool for greater accessibility and inclusion in education. The Nepali education system disproportionately focuses on content and largely evaluates student performance based on their written responses in the final exams. Academic programs and institutions that practice continued assessments or assign internal grades also largely rely on written performances from students in the form of assignments or examinations. However, we know students have diverse aptitudes and learning abilities, including visual, auditory, reading and writing, or kinesthetic learners. ChatGPT could help diversify the content to cater to each kind of learner, thus creating opportunities for all learners. Weimer (2002) underscores that although we are all in favor of learning, just as we all aspire to be thin, we have not changed what we cook and serve students. My view is that working with ChatGPT can push us to rethink learning: To change what we cook and serve students, and ChatGPT can provide recipes for that. However, teachers need to take ChaptGPT’s contents with a grain of salt since the app “is more confident that it is competent” (Hardman, 2023). In its own words, a concern with ChatGPT “is the potential for bias and inaccuracies in the information provided by ChatGPT. While the technology is designed to be as accurate and unbiased as possible, it is not infallible, and there is always the possibility of errors or inaccuracies creeping in.” To conclude this brief discussion, I believe that education should aim at teaching students to think, reflect and form opinions and not merely store information so that they prepare themselves for life and not just examinations. And this thinking and reflecting could include what ChatGPT—the state-of-the-art language processing model—brings forth. Hence, rather than looking at ChatGPT as a challenge in education or shying away from it, teachers could benefit from integrating it into their educational engagements, including research, curriculum development, and crafting diverse assignments catering to diverse students. The author is a social work faculty at Thames International College, Kathmandu, pursuing a PhD in Social Work at Boston College, USA. He can be contacted at [email protected]