Pros and cons of AI in education

AI is almost certainly going to change the way we teach and learn; it holds both threats and opportunities for education. CTU Training Solutions held a webinar recently at which a panel of corporate, academic and related experts unpacked the impact of AI on the future of education.

Facilitator Brendon de Meyer, ICT Manager at CTU Training Solutions, opened the conversation: “With the potential impact of AI as a topic of conversation in every sphere of influence, what is its impact going to be on education?”

Professor Bhaso Ndzendze, Head of Department and Associate Professor: Politics and International Relations, University of Johannesburg, said: “This is the dawn of AI; there’s still quite a lot it can’t do. In the higher education space, the most visible form has been natural language processing. We’ve seen a lot of trepidation and caution around AI and concerns that it’ll be used by students to cut corners. I feel it will absolutely change the way that learning happens, but we need to figure out how to incorporate AI into the classroom.”

Prof Manoj Chiba, Associate Professor at the Gordon Institute of Business Science, agreed that AI is at its dawn and that it’s going to have significant impact on both society and education. “There’s no field that probably won’t be touched by this.”

Prof Ndzendze continued: “The big challenge is that Africa has a lot of languages and NLP isn’t yet able to meet that challenge. There have been efforts to bring AI up to speed with African languages, but we saw a similar challenge with Google Translate being biased towards certain languages, with African languages underrepresented. The question is what – if anything – is being done to solve the problem of NLP having a natural English bias?”

Agreeing with the above, Professor Johan Steyn, Founder of AIforBusiness.net, said: “With up to 3 000 languages and dialects in Africa, the challenge is immense and we, as Africans, have to create these datasets ourselves.”

Gerhard Dippenaar, AI in Education Consultant, Input/Output AI Consulting, said: “We see very qualified teachers who struggle to send an e-mail, attach a file or change a file type. In situations where people have limited access to or understanding of technologies, the introduction of AI is going to be a very different experience for them. While it’s early days for AI in education, the impact is not going to be the same everywhere; we just know that it’s going to be big.”

Prof Steyn said he has some controversial views about the future of education. “I think if especially tertiary educational institutions don’t embrace AI technology, they face the risk of losing its relevance. If you go to university as an undergraduate, will what you’ve been taught still be relevant in three to four years? We have to consider how tertiary education will have to pivot and adapt to remain relevant in this fast-changing world. In the age of AI, craftsmanship-affiliated careers such as plumbing will become a highly-paid job because it can’t be automated. I think in the future, we’ll see training cut up into specific little qualifications to build a career trajectory rather than a three- or four-year course.”

Emile Ormond, a Researcher with a PhD in AI Ethics and Governance, added: “AI presents risks and opportunities, both generally and in academia. There’s been a lot of focus on the risk, but I think it presents great opportunities. There are concerns that it will decrease the quality of education. I’d like to see a more balanced conversation about it, without undermining the risk of plagiarism, etc, particularly in the education field.”

“We’ve already seen some of the negative effects of AI, so we tend to be risk averse, but we also need to consider whether AI presents a huge amount of opportunity in certain areas,” commented Prof Chiba. “ChatGPT has really pushed this technology over the boundary. It has an easy user interface – and usability always makes things grow.

“From an educational perspective, we’d be remiss if we didn’t incorporate it into our learning. These are the tools that are available to people once they’re in the business world and in their everyday lives. We can’t stop people from using it, that would defeat the purpose of what we’re doing as educators.”

He believes that educators across all levels of education are often more concerned about assessments and whether students can pass a test. “We’ve lost sight of the fact that our primary job is teaching. Education is about learning, not about passing a test or exam. If we lose sight of that, we miss out on opportunities such as this. What does AI mean for our courses? We have to incorporate it. We need guidelines around the ethical and unethical use of it. The onus is on educators to say how do we enable students to use this as part of the learning pathway. Instead of seeing AI as replacing our jobs, we must see it as making us more efficient.”

Dr Taskeen Adam, Co-Director for Open Development and Education, believes AI can almost be a Trojan horse that comes into education and shakes it up. “We’ve been using the same material for decades, but until now, nothing has forced us to change. I think AI is that tool that can help change come into play. The push is also coming from students, who are starting to use ChatGPT in their assignments. The onus falls on educators to rethink how they want to educate. It also shifts the focus from learning for a specific purpose to learning from a lifelong perspective. AI pushes the boundaries of what learning is. It can reduce the time teachers spend on doing automated tasks, such as marking, giving them more time to give personalised learning and support.”

She does, however, caution about potential inequalities, such as some people having access to premium models while others only have access to the free version. Another potential negative could be people being unable to use AI because of load-shedding.

“Learning is being transformed by the global adoption of technology in education.” Dr Archana Pandita, Senior Faculty and Course Leader at Westford University College in Dubai, said we should let teachers do what they’re best at and allow AI to do what it’s best at. “Yes, students will always be tempted to use AI tools to write essays. ChatGPT can be a great starting point to writing an assignment, but it is the teacher’s responsibility to help the students critically and develop their own ideas. We need to work together to ensure AI is used in a safe and responsible manner in the classroom and beyond.”

“AI has great benefits for personalised learning in lower grades and foundational learning,” according to Dr Adam, “especially for teachers with large classes. My primary concern would be, if we use AI to do redundant tasks, will the learner still understand the basics before progressing to the next level. We can’t use AI to replace learning a skill.”

Prof Chiba agrees that he’s seen AI enabling greater personalised learning at the lower grades. “The onus shifts to the user to realise that they need foundational skills. You can’t separate what’s happening in a learner’s environment from what’s happening in education – people want to use trending technology, it’s where they engage and it shapes how they think and the information they receive. It’s just not viable to say that because the learner is in a lower grade, they may not use it. We need to engage, identify the risks and opportunities and see how we can use it.”

Prof Abejide Ade-Ibijola, Artificial Intelligence and Applications at Johannesburg Business School, believes that by subscribing to AI, we become much less involved in technology creation, ie, we drop the fundamentals because technology can do it for us. “We should focus on technology education, specifically innovation, with an aim to solving for society, specifically for the African context. You need to have a core knowledge base so that when technology changes, you can keep pace with the knowledge of the day.”

Ormond said we need to look at it from a societal level. “We don’t really know what the implications are of AI in general, but especially in education. We don’t know what the impact will be. What a technology does and what its impact is isn’t the same thing. So we need to be aware of not knowing and constantly be aware of the ethical risks. Does it exacerbate the digital divide especially in countries like SA with massive inequality? We forget that most AI apps are developed by companies for commercial purposes. We need the humility to know that we don’t know what we’re dealing with and that we have to monitor it and realise that the entity that put it out might not have motives that align with ours.”

One of big ethical questions around AI is the impact it will have on young minds, said Prof Ndzendze. “It’s a huge ethical dilemma, deciding how soon people should be allowed to use this technology because they’re going to go into a world where they need to be able to use it, but we don’t know the potential impact on neural development.”

Dr Adam elaborated: “We also need to consider creators versus consumers and take control of our own learning and development in our own country. Consider what it means for learners to live their entire lives through an algorithm. By personalising learning using an algorithm that identifies correct behaviour and deviant behaviour, we funnel a learner’s experience. However, deviant thinking might be creative, so we could potentially stifle creativity.”

Grover Abrahams, MD of Verve Digital, agrees that AI has the potential to assist with creating a personalised learning journey. “However, considerable learning is still needed from a machine perspective before it can get to that point. Human oversight is still required to ensure that the AI is doing what it’s meant to, at this stage.”

Students cheat because institutions value grades more than learning, according to Prof Steyn. “The end goal of education is to empower people to make a living and to exercise their talents and interests. If we expect students to repeat information like parrots, they’ll cheat. We should instead assess whether they can understand and apply the information we give them and grade them on that. The conversation about ChatGPT and cheating might force us to change how we assess whether we’re successful at teaching.”

Prof Chiba said the core job of a teacher is to ensure the learner understands the theory and can apply it. “Cheating is always going to be there. People are always looking for the shortest route to success. The learner has to ask him or herself what value they’re getting out of cheating.

“If certification is your ticket to success, you’ll possibly be caught out down the line if you achieved it by cheating because you won’t have the necessary skills for the role. I believe that policing learners is the wrong approach. Are we teaching our students to regurgitate information or to apply the learning?”

He suggested a shift of onus. “It’s not the teachers’ responsibility, it’s an individual’s responsibility to choose.”

Dippenaar agreed: “A student who cheats isn’t just doing themselves out of an opportunity to learn; they’re also impacting students who don’t cheat by potentially earning a university seat or bursary that they haven’t actually worked for.”

“Good artists copy, great artists steal. The laziest people know how to take shortcuts and get things done quicker,” said Prof Steyn. “Students can use AI to do their homework faster by, for instance, using it to spellcheck.”

Prof Ndzendze concluded by making a profound point: “The greatest insurance is for knowledge to be retained in human minds. We shouldn’t outsource all of our thinking to these technologies – should a freak accident turn off the lights, all knowledge will be lost.”