Generative AI in Education: Past, Present, and Future EDUCAUSE Review

While there are many issues surrounding generative AI, such as ethical concerns, copyright and intellectual property questions, and biases within the training data, this article will focus on the integration of generative AI into higher education teaching and learning. Shana White, a former teacher who leads a tech justice and ethics project at the Kapor Center, a nonprofit focused on closing equity gaps in technology, says teachers must learn not to take what AI gives them at face value. One other way AI is different from past classroom technologies is that it can bring along some problems not found in more conventional software.

To support teaching staff to facilitate a discussion with students on GenAI we have produced a template student-facing slide deck. The slides introduce GenAI, guidance on its use in assessments, and include prompts for discussions and interactive teaching moments. The slides are merely a template and should be adapted for use with your department or programme. Yet the education sector is largely unprepared for the ethical and pedagogical integration of these rapidly evolving tools. A recent UNESCO global survey of over 450 schools and universities showed that less than 10% of them had institutional policies and/or formal guidance concerning the use of generative AI applications, largely due to the absence of national regulations.

Bibliographic and Citation Tools

“Just to see the joy that it brought to a family … and it probably took me less than 60 seconds to do that.” KIPP Chicago plans to begin getting feedback from parents and rolling out use of MagicSchool to more teachers in October. Learn below Yakov Livshits what UNSW academics are thinking and doing in this interesting, fast-developing space. Interfaces that leverage AI can offer constructive feedback that does not carry the same stakes or cause the same self-consciousness as a human’s response.

However, the real question is how to leverage generative AI to benefit learner skill development from now to the next 10 years. When introducing AI products into the classroom, care must be taken to ensure the technology does not hinder students’ development of critical thinking and problem-solving skills or undermine the integrity of student work. While has numerous benefits, we must also remain aware and vigilant for potential drawbacks. One concern is the potential for bias in generated educational content, as the algorithms are only as unbiased as the data they are trained on. It is not impossible for a generative AI program that was created to be utilized by a particular group of students based on their race, gender or socioeconomic status could reinforce negative stereotypes and negatively impact their learning experience.

Ideas & Impact

While highlighting that AI tools create new prospects for learning, she underscores that regulations can only be built once the proper research has been conducted. Across the world, faculty and institutions acknowledge that banning generative AI is a transient response to change. Major technology vendors have integrated AI interfaces alongside search and have incorporated generative AI into writing, presentation, and communication tools. Institutional policies are evolving to reflect this—moving from banning ChatGPT to cautiously encouraging the appropriate use of generative AI tools within academic activities. Anti-plagiarism software targeting AI-generated content continues to evolve in response to results, faculty feedback, and student behaviors. In parallel, those students seeking to use generative AI for disreputable purposes continue to challenge assessment models through various tools and products designed to deliberately disguise or mask the embedded patterns of generative AI.

Yakov Livshits
Founder of the DevEducation project
A prolific businessman and investor, and the founder of several large companies in Israel, the USA and the UAE, Yakov’s corporation comprises over 2,000 employees all over the world. He graduated from the University of Oxford in the UK and Technion in Israel, before moving on to study complex systems science at NECSI in the USA. Yakov has a Masters in Software Development.

ChatGPT’s research release was trained on over 570 GB of data (from books and the internet) and was refined by human feedback. That said, the timing of that training (up to 2021) and the veracity of the data were factors to take into account when evaluating ChatGPT’s outputs. Video Generation involves deep learning methods such as GANs and Video Diffusion to generate new videos by predicting frames based on previous frames. Video Generation can be used in various fields, such as entertainment, sports analysis, and autonomous driving. Speech Generation can be used in text-to-speech conversion, virtual assistants, and voice cloning.

Thus, the participant concluded, it is important that students are able to use AI tools to complement rather than substitute their writing and that they are  encouraged to continue to cultivate all of their digital literacies in the current age. At the time of the workshop, students were beginning to grapple with how to use LLMs and, in particular, how text-generating ones impact both their writing outputs and the educational purpose of writing. Based on a humanistic vision, the Guidance proposes key steps to the regulation of GenAI tool, including mandating the protection of data privacy, and setting an age limit for the independent conversations with GenAI platforms.

Option 3 (slides 17-21) provides two examples, one from History and one from Physics, on how to critique an AI-generated output (critical discussion is in the notes box). The first section (slides 4-11) provides a general introduction to genAI and includes mentimeter discussion prompts on its limitations and ethical considerations. The mentimeter Yakov Livshits slides are available as a template from mentimeter.com (login with your UCL SSO and search AI and You). The paper argues that investment in schools and teachers, is the only way to solve the problem that today, at the dawn of the AI Era, 244 million children and youth are out of school and more than 770 million people are non-literate.

The Charter School Growth Fund, which helps charter schools open new campuses, formed working groups to advise schools on AI policy after a survey of school leaders found the technology was a top concern. Ian Connell, the fund’s head of innovation, says that in addition to understanding the benefits of AI tools, schools must also monitor the quality of content created by the tools. Joseph South, chief learning officer at the International Society for Technology in Education (ISTE), whose backers include Meta and Walmart, says educators are used to gritting their teeth and waiting for the latest education technology fad to pass. There’s no sitting out AI in education.” ISTE recently partnered with education nonprofits Code.org and Khan Academy to release an AI 101 video series. Additionally, while generative AI systems may have seemingly endless applications in education, they may lack the creativity and originality human teachers and educators can provide.

• This is bullshit at its finest, an exceptional counterfeit of thought and intuition currently undetectable.
• But what AI can do is to create a situation where a human being can play three people at once.
• It includes subfields such as machine learning which uses algorithms to analyse huge amounts of data.
• During our workshop, participants reflected on the following topics, primarily in the context of the United States.

People also are realizing that this is going to change a lot of things in a hurry. AI and creativity are a source of equal amounts of wonder and fear right now. For a detailed discussion on the ethical challenges of generative AI, you can check our article.