ChatGPT for Education and Research: Opportunities, Threats, and Strategies

TLDR

Advanced AI, exemplified by OpenAI’s ChatGPT, is reshaping education and research by offering personalized feedback, enhanced accessibility, interactive learning, and new teaching methods, while also raising concerns about cheating, diminished critical thinking, and challenges in assessing AI‑generated content. The study investigates how ChatGPT affects education from students’ and educators’ perspectives, focusing on its potential to improve programming learning. Researchers conducted coding experiments—code generation, pseudocode creation, and code correction—validated by an online judge, and surveyed students and teachers to assess ChatGPT’s support for programming education. The survey results and analysis demonstrate that ChatGPT is perceived as a beneficial tool for programming learning by both students and teachers.

Abstract

In recent years, the rise of advanced artificial intelligence technologies has had a profound impact on many fields, including education and research. One such technology is ChatGPT, a powerful large language model developed by OpenAI. This technology offers exciting opportunities for students and educators, including personalized feedback, increased accessibility, interactive conversations, lesson preparation, evaluation, and new ways to teach complex concepts. However, ChatGPT poses different threats to the traditional education and research system, including the possibility of cheating on online exams, human-like text generation, diminished critical thinking skills, and difficulties in evaluating information generated by ChatGPT. This study explores the potential opportunities and threats that ChatGPT poses to overall education from the perspective of students and educators. Furthermore, for programming learning, we explore how ChatGPT helps students improve their programming skills. To demonstrate this, we conducted different coding-related experiments with ChatGPT, including code generation from problem descriptions, pseudocode generation of algorithms from texts, and code correction. The generated codes are validated with an online judge system to evaluate their accuracy. In addition, we conducted several surveys with students and teachers to find out how ChatGPT supports programming learning and teaching. Finally, we present the survey results and analysis.