A SWOT analysis of ChatGPT: Implications for educational practice and research

TLDR

ChatGPT is an AI tool sparking debate over its educational implications. The study employs a SWOT analysis to map ChatGPT’s strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats, and to propose an agenda for educational practice and research. The authors applied a SWOT analysis framework to evaluate ChatGPT’s impact on education. ChatGPT’s strengths—advanced language modeling, self‑improvement, and personalized real‑time responses—boost access, learning, and teacher efficiency, whereas its weaknesses and threats—limited deep understanding, quality assessment challenges, bias, discrimination, academic integrity risks, and erosion of higher‑order cognitive skills—pose significant challenges.

Abstract

ChatGPT is an AI tool that has sparked debates about its potential implications for education. We used the SWOT analysis framework to outline ChatGPT's strengths and weaknesses and to discuss its opportunities for and threats to education. The strengths include using a sophisticated natural language model to generate plausible answers, self-improving capability, and providing personalised and real-time responses. As such, ChatGPT can increase access to information, facilitate personalised and complex learning, and decrease teaching workload, thereby making key processes and tasks more efficient. The weaknesses are a lack of deep understanding, difficulty in evaluating the quality of responses, a risk of bias and discrimination, and a lack of higher-order thinking skills. Threats to education include a lack of understanding of the context, threatening academic integrity, perpetuating discrimination in education, democratising plagiarism, and declining high-order cognitive skills. We provide agenda for educational practice and research in times of ChatGPT.