Education in the Era of Generative Artificial Intelligence (AI): Understanding the Potential Benefits of ChatGPT in Promoting Teaching and Learning

TLDR

ChatGPT, released in November 2022, quickly amassed over a million users and demonstrated sophisticated capabilities that have sparked mixed reactions among educators by potentially revolutionizing educational practice. This review synthesizes recent literature to identify and recommend ways to leverage ChatGPT for enhancing teaching and learning. The authors discuss how ChatGPT can personalize and interactively support learning, generate formative assessment prompts with ongoing feedback, while also noting risks such as misinformation, bias, and privacy concerns. They recommend collaborative efforts among policymakers, researchers, educators, and technologists to safely and constructively integrate generative AI tools like ChatGPT to improve education and support student learning.

Abstract

Since its maiden release into the public domain on November 30, 2022, ChatGPT garnered morethan one million subscribers within a week. The generative AI tool ⎼ChatGPT took the world bysurprise with it sophisticated capacity to carry out remarkably complex tasks. The extraordinaryabilities of ChatGPT to perform complex tasks within the field of education has caused mixedfeelings among educators as this advancement in AI seems to revolutionize existing educationalpraxis. This review article synthesizes recent extant literature to offer some potential benefits ofChatGPT in promoting teaching and learning. Benefits of ChatGPT include but are not limited topromotion of personalized and interactive learning, generating prompts for formative assessmentactivities that provide ongoing feedback to inform teaching and learning etc. The paper alsohighlights some inherent limitations in the ChatGPT such as generating wrong information,biases in data training which may augment existing biases, privacy issues etc. The study offersrecommendations on how ChatGPT could be leveraged to maximize teaching and learning.Policy makers, researchers, educators and technology experts could work together and startconversations on how these evolving generative AI tools could be used safely and constructivelyto improve education and support students' learning.