Before the 2022-2023 academic year began, ChatGPT was likely not on the radar for many college professors and students. But less than a year later, many in higher education say they can’t imagine life without it.
Launched in November 2022 by San Francisco-based startup OpenAI, ChatGPT can craft essays, solve math equations, write or check the accuracy of HTML code and brainstorm ideas for graphic design, as well as complete other tasks. The artificial intelligence tool can generate readable text on demand in a wide range of styles and voices and for a variety of purposes.
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It’s been described as “revolutionary” by Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates, but opinions on its place in education vary. Some K-12 educators are skeptical, citing ethical concerns and the potential for students to use it to cheat. Those concerns and others exist in higher education as well, but there’s also a sense of optimism and willingness among some college educators to engage with ChatGPT’s vast capabilities. Many see it having a permanent place in the professional world students will enter into.
“With artificial intelligence and ChatGPT, knowledge is ever more readily available to anyone who knows how to search it,” says Andrew Hsu, president of the College of Charleston in South Carolina. “So how do we teach students in the future to prepare themselves for this rapidly changing world?” I think that’s something higher education has to contend with in the next few years.”
From January to March 2023, ChatGPT registered more than 3.3 billion users worldwide, according to data from similarweb, which tracks web traffic. ChatGPT saw more than 1.6 billion users in March alone, nearly a 56% increase from the month before.
Experts in educational technology say students and educators are using the tool at a rate they’ve rarely seen with other innovations. As ChatGPT continues to stake its claim in higher education, here are some ways educators say it can be useful.
Helping Students Develop Marketable Skills
ChatGPT can do a lot, but it still requires a human to use it effectively. Plenty of professions are starting to look for people who can do that, experts say, and hiring managers will expect applicants to display proficiency in tools like ChatGPT.
That includes skills like fact-checking and editing, as some of what ChatGPT generates is not factual or grammatically correct. Being able to judge whether something that came from ChatGPT is fact or misinformation will become essential, experts say, as will knowing how to prompt AI tools to get the best results.
“In computer science or any computing-related discipline, we always say garbage in, garbage out,” Hsu says. “That’s also true for any AI algorithm. If you feed it enough misinformation, it’s going to generate misinformation. That’s where human knowledge is needed.”
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The market is changing rapidly, and companies who don’t adopt AI tools like ChatGPT could be left behind, says Rajesh Talpade, senior vice president of product at D2L, an education technology company that creates learning management platforms.
This is why Diane Gayeski, a professor of strategic communications at Ithaca College in New York, says she’s requiring its use in her class.
“It is already a tool in our industry, so for people who are writing content marketing, they’re already using tools like ChatGPT to help them with at least some first drafts,” she says. “It’s a tool that I feel (is) necessary to teach.”
Enabling New Teaching Opportunities
While some educators have expressed concern over the potential for students to use ChatGPT to plagiarize and cheat, others say the tool poses a unique opportunity for professors to reevaluate their assessments in a way that benefits both them and students.
“I think it will force us to teach differently, or at least teach writing differently,” Hsu says. “But to me, I think we need to embrace these types of technologies because, in the future, I think we’re going to use it on a regular basis, whether we like it or not.”
It’s on professors to design course content and assessments that can’t be completed or accessed easily through ChatGPT, experts say. This creates an opportunity for professors to focus on a student’s application and understanding of the content rather than just their writing, Gayeski says.
Ultimately, it’s the skill of researching and displaying the information that professors are most interested in seeing from students, educators say.
A wise way forward would be for professors to assess students in a way that both parties can engage with in real time, Gayeski says. What that looks like in her class is allowing students to use ChatGPT to gather basic background knowledge on topics, but having the real meat of the assessment come from presentations or essays that require students to draw directly from content that was only delivered in class.
In other words, it’s still on students to do the heavy lifting.
“If I require my students to write an essay incorporating discussions that we had in class or examples that I provided in class, that has to be original work,” she says. “ChatGPT can’t find what I spoke about two weeks ago.”
Boosting Productivity
A major function of AI is automating certain tasks. Professors are using ChatGPT to build assessments, assist with grading, create syllabi or complete other time-consuming or mundane tasks.
Professors are also using it to generate questions or assignments for specific students based on what they need. It’s a way of customizing or tailoring their lessons, but efficiently.
“There’s a lot of very innovative work going on around making life easier for the professors,” Talpade says. “There are other things going on at the student level as well.”
Students can use it to complete practice math problems and check their process of solving an equation. It can also be used as a tutoring tool for students, especially those studying a foreign language, says Melissa Loble, chief customer experience officer at Instructure, an education technology company that creates learning management systems for colleges.
Loble, who also teaches an e-learning certificate program at the University of California, Irvine, notes that ChatGPT can translate precisely, even in certain dialects. Meanwhile, students in computer science classes can check their code on ChatGPT, and those in marketing classes can workshop pitches to potential clients.
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ChatGPT also has the ability to craft writing in a variety of tones or voices.
“Sometimes that’s a difficult concept to teach because students tend to write in a very generic tone or in their own voice,” Gayeski says. When it comes to tasks like adapting a message for five different audiences, “ChatGPT will at least take a crack at it.”
Supporting Students in Their Learning
For some students, one stumbling block to productivity is getting started. Others might hit a hurdle midway through a project. Wherever they struggle, ChatGPT can help fill in the gap to move past the part of a project that typically holds them up, experts say.
“Additionally, ChatGPT can level the playing field for students with distinct needs, such as students who are neurodivergent and learn in their own unique way, or students who are learning in a second language,” Ashley Chiampo, chief learning officer at education technology company Emeritus, wrote in an email. “It has the possibility of making learning more efficient and more effective by providing customized experiences for learners tailored to their ability and needs. By delivering learning support right when the learner is stuck or needs added help, it reduces frustration and increases the probability of course completion.”
As the education world grappled with how to respond to the rise of ChatGPT, Edward Tian, a senior at Princeton University in New Jersey, launched GPTZero in January 2023 — an app that allows professors and teachers to check the originality of someone’s work and detect any ChatGPT-generated text. In the first month, the app saw 500,000 users, he says. Now more than 6 million people have used it, and almost 90,000 use it daily, he says.
He says some of his professors at Princeton have taken “a laissez-faire approach” to ChatGPT, while others are more guarded. He has his concerns, just like others, particularly that overreliance on it could prevent students from doing original work or that users might not exhibit caution about its propensity to deliver misinformation.
But ultimately, he says, colleges should embrace the technology if they haven’t already.
“These AI tools are the future, and students deserve the chance to be exposed to them in our education, especially as we’re entering an AI world,” he says.
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