ChatGPT and the need for educational restructuring

The emergence of ChatGPT presents a unique opportunity to evaluate and redefine the dynamics of education.

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Every few years, the need arises in our educational systems to restructure and reinvent teaching plans and, therefore, forms of assessment. Generally, poor learning outcomes drive this transformation; examples of such reforms include the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) in the United States in the early 2000s, or the "Blanquer" law, which the French government proposed in 2018.  

The common factor among these initiatives is their focus: the systematic evaluation of teachers and their teaching abilities, as well as standardized evaluation methods with increased demands and high expectations.  

If previous experiences have taught us anything, it is that it is the focus that needs to change. On this occasion, it is not the unsatisfactory results, but ChatGPT, a technological advance that makes conventional teaching and assessment methods almost obsolete, that defines the need for a new educational reform and a rethinking of the link between students and teachers. 

The new calculator 

There is an example that can help us better understand the situation in which we find ourselves: the introduction of the calculator in educational spaces. At the beginning, it was seen as a great threat to learning, since it made many mathematical problems trivial. It was thought that its use could reduce students' ability to solve mathematical problems independently and diminish their conceptual understanding of mathematics. 

Educational institutions see ChatGPT in the same way. What is it about? It is an online chatbot that, based on a request or question about any topic, delivers the answers or solutions that the person wants. This is an attack on the way teaching is conceptualized in most educational settings. 

How are schools dealing with ChatGPT? 

There are already cases of students who have used ChatGPT to do homework, as happened in the Netherlands with high school students, but its potential is much greater than that, since it can write reports, solve questionnaires and tests. It is even capable of writing scientific documentation or research reports, as a researcher in Sweden found when, as an experiment, she got ChatGPT to write a scientific article complete with references and citations, practically ready for publication.  

The almost infinite capabilities of the chat bot to solve problems and write texts has generated panic among educational institutions, to such an extent that several of them are taking drastic actions. The largest school district in the United States (New York City Schools) decided to block access to ChatGPT on all its devices and networks, as well as to prohibit its use in educational spaces.  

Along these lines, the Seattle Public School District has also announced a temporary block on the site. Even StackOverflow, the Q&A site for programmers, has banned responding on forums using ChatGPT-generated answers

But how much promise do these prohibition measures hold? At the end of the day, no matter how much the institutions decide to block it on their computers and networks, anyone can access it from their cell phones with mobile data. We can consider these measures as attempts to cover the sun with a finger. 

What does the future hold? 

Despite the panic and negative reactions to this new technology, we must recognize that it is only a phase. We do not have to go too far back in time to see the commotion generated in the educational system by the appearance of sites such as Wikipedia and Google translator. Although at the beginning there was some resentment towards their use, after a while the educational system incorporated them as tools and today they are quite natural to us.  

ChatGPT poses no threat to learning, as long as the education system has the flexibility to adapt and adopt it to empower itself, and this paradigm shift must start with the role of the educator in the classroom. 

The role of a teacher or professor can no longer be that of an unquestioned source of knowledge to which students turn. The new challenge is for teachers to become guides who accompany students in their search for information and understanding of different disciplines. 

Like the sites mentioned above, the use of this technology will become widespread in the near future, even integrated into other everyday tools such as browsers, search engines and virtual assistants. For this reason, it is essential that students learn to use ChatGPT and, above all, to exercise in the critical analysis of the answers they receive. The chatbot is not infallible; it is still under development and continuous improvement, with an estimated accuracy of 67% of the answers to trivia questions or logic problems. 

However, this advance also brings good news for educators, since it can assist them in mechanical tasks related to lesson planning or assessment development. For example, ChatGPT can be used to generate quizzes from a reference text, which speeds up the creation of tests, or it can be asked to return a summary of key concepts in a text to be presented to students as an introduction. It can also be used to define different formatted assignments customized for each learner. 

In its current state, ChatGPT will render obsolete certain problem-solving approaches, such as multiple-choice tests or practical exercises. Therefore, the time has come to look for more creative alternatives, such as in-person presentations or peer-to-peer discussions. 

Another option could be for students to try to evaluate the veracity and correctness of the answers ChatGPT provides, which would encourage them to practice critical thinking, or to generate a paragraph or statement as a kick-off for students to expand on in class. In addition to exercising their analytical skills, these practices would help improve the chatbot with real feedback.  

How to get out of our comfort zone 

In short, as has happened before, we are in a period of introduction to this technology, in which its scope and potential are still unknown. Whenever new and unknown things appear, as a defense mechanism, initial reactions tend to be negative and, in some cases, exaggerated. 

The shock of encountering something that takes us out of our comfort zone will pass, and this new technology will be integrated along with the rest of the web tools we use every day to learn, work and achieve our goals. 

Today more than ever Albert Einstein's words resonate: Why does this magnificent scientific technology, which saves work and makes our lives easier, bring us so little happiness? The answer is simply this: because we have not yet learned to use it wisely. 


By Martin Piriz, Research & Development Assistant Quantik Labs

Martin is an advanced student of Communication Systems Engineering, with a profile focused on signal processing and machine learning.
Since 2022 he is part of QuantikLabs assisting in the research and development of projects and products.


About Quantik Lab

Quantik Lab is the area of the Quantik Group dedicated to research and development (R&D). Its objective is to foster and mature the creation of new products and technologies, which can then be scaled. Ideas for exploring new topics come from both customers and partners.

Today, he conducts research on metaverse, internet of things, electric mobility, customer experience and smart cities.

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