To teach in the era of ChatGPT is to know pain

ckemere

The title really should specify “to teach remotely”. And I think more broadly the context is the dream that widespread internet would make it easier to educate people “at scale” (meaning for less money per student). So maybe the real question is why we ever expected “teaching at scale” to be effective. I think that it’s quite clear that for an individual, curious student, the ability to use modern LLMs probably makes the ability to be 1-1 tutored (by a human!) cheaper/better. But I don’t think anyone claims that watching random videos on the internet will be as effective for LeBron James as having a personal trainer focused on him. It seems like the overriding issue is to understand whether students need to take courses they’re not interested in. If the answer is yes, perhaps we need find ways of having these topics be taught by tutorial…

IChooseY0u

> They may view an instructor as an opponent standing in the way of the grade they want. And they see “getting the right answers” as the goal of education because that’s how you secure that grade. But that’s no more true than thinking that logging a count of reps is the goal of bodybuilding. The author is essentially saying "you're doing education wrong" to students who never signed up for the author's version of what education is for. Students are making a rational economic calculation: they need a degree to get a job.

jdalgetty

I'm in an online course right now (teachers college) that requires weekly discussions. I feel like every discussion is just AI responding to AI. As a student I think it's lame, I'm sure the profs do too. I'm not totally against AI usage as it is incredibly helpful with spelling and grammar, what I hate is reading meaningless, vague and uninteresting discussion posts week after week. There is nothing personal or interesting about anything anyone posts because its all done by AI.

networkOne

And it's ironic since the LLM will most likely have used previous students work to train itself.

lacker

ChatGPT is a great resource for learning things, if you really want to learn. I hope that this leads us to shift education towards helping people learn things, when they do want to learn. Instead of forcing people to learn things that they do not want to learn.

musicale

> For the last few years, I’ve been exclusively teaching asynchronous online courses, meaning recorded videos rather than live sessions This seems like the root issue. In the ChatGPT era, remote student assessments cannot (remotely) be trusted. Since you cannot trust the assessment, it should probably be optional, and not used for credentialing purposes.

pants2

Grading systems in school are and have always been broken, ChatGPT is only making these issues more apparent. Students are great "reward hackers" and are incentivized to find the most efficient solution to getting good grades regardless of whether they're actually learning. Learning takes a back seat to getting good grades. There's a reason you're only hearing this from schools and not companies. I haven't seen any corporate execs complaining that they don't know who their good and bad employees are because of AI.