this post was submitted on 01 Sep 2023
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Education has a fundamental incentive problem. I want to embrace AI in my classroom. I've been studying ways of using AI for personalized education since I was in grade school. I wanted personalized education, the ability to learn off of any tangent I wanted, to have tools to help me discover what I don't know so I could go learn it.
The problem is, I'm the minority. Many of my students don't want to be there. They want a job in the field, but don't want to do the work. Your required course isn't important to them, because they aren't instructional designers who recognize that this mandatory tangent is scaffolding the next four years of their degree. They have a scholarship, and can't afford to fail your assignment to get feedback. They have too many courses, and have to budget which courses to ignore. The university holds a duty to validate that those passing the courses met a level of standards and can reproduce their knowledge outside of a classroom environment. They have a strict timeline - every year they don't certify their knowledge to satisfaction is a year of tuition and random other fees to pay.
If students were going to university to learn, or going to highschool to learn, instead of being forced there by societal pressures - if they were allowed to learn at their own pace without fear of financial ruin - if they were allowed to explore the topics they love instead of the topics that are financially sound - then there would be no issue with any of these tools. But the truth is much bleaker.
Great students are using these tools in astounding ways to learn, to grow, to explore. Other students - not bad necessarily, but ones with pressures that make education motivated purely by extrinsic factors than intrinsic - have a perfect crutch available to accidentally bypass the necessary steps of learning. Because learning can be hard, and tedious, and expensive, and if you don't love it, you'll take the path of least resistance.
In game design, we talk about not giving the player the tools to optimize their fun away. I love the new wave of AI, I've been waiting for this level of natural language processing and generation capability for a very long time, but these are the tools for students to optimize the learning away. We need to reframe learning and education. We need to bring learning front and center instead of certification. Employers need to recognize this, universities need to recognize this, highschools and students and parents need to recognize this.
This is fine and all and you have a point, but in the current system many times the subject isn't about the subject it's about the auxiliary skills you pick up along the way. My history classes in high schopl weren't really about history. I mean if I retained those facts, fantastic, they were more about analyzing given evidence and multiple references to make a point. I'm an engineer and I use that skill all the time. Facts about the Civil War not so much.
Even in college I had classes like that. It's why just programming the answer wasn't always allowed although literally everyone in the university took a programming class freshmen year. That wasn't always the point.
To always allow AI is like never taking the time to teach kids how to do arithmetic by hand. I mean, sure, we could do that, but learning arithmetic is not really about memorizing times tables and more about understanding the concept of a number and internalizing counting and so much stuff people don't realize they use all the time the existence of a calculator or not.
I think there is some value in not allowing AI usage sometimes. Before you use a calculator you should learn how to do it by hand so you can have a sense of when you've keyed something in wrong. AI has entered my workplace and it's so annoying. People who never knew how to write the things they ask AI to do can't vet the AI output and the result is somehow worse to me than if they'd bumbled something by hand. That's kind of what I'm afraid of in the future. I don't think that AI is ever going to be perfect and kids have to know what output they're looking for before they're taking this shortcut.
100%, and this is really my main point. Because it should be hard and tedious, a student who doesn't really want to learn - or doesn't have trust in their education - will bypass those tedious bits with the AI rather than going through those tedious, auxiliary skills that you're expected to pick up, and use the AI was a personal tutor - not a replacement for those skills.
So often students are concerned about getting a final grade, a final result, and think that was the point, thus, "If ChatGPT can just give me the answer what was the point", but no, there were a bunch of skills along the way that are part of the scaffolding and you've bypassed them through improper use of available tools. For example, in some of our programming classes we intentionally make you use worse tools early to provide a fundamental understanding of the evolution of the language ergonomics or to understand the underlying processes that power the more advanced, but easier to use, concepts. It helps you generalize later, so that you don't just learn how to solve this problem in this programming language, but you learn how to solve the problem in a messy way that translates to many languages before you learn the powerful tools of this language. As a student, you may get upset you're using something tedious or out of date, but as a mentor I know it's a beneficial step in your learning career.
Maybe it would help to teach students about learning early, and how learning works.
I'm 100% in agreement. I think that our school system fails deeply in expressing the point. What I liked about college was what even if it was tedious, etc my professors took the time to explain why I needed to do it this way first and what the dangerous of not having some of these skills were. Did I always believe them? No, but now that I'm out in the world working I definitely know they were always right and I'm glad I did it anyway even if I didn't always believe them.
Grade school is a different beast and I spent so much time frustrated and bored and not knowing what the point was. If it wasn't for the fact that I just really wanted to be a roboticist and there was only one school in my state I could so that at, I probably would have done the least effort thing all the time.
I did appreciate my calculus teacher who gave us word problems. It really helped me understand the point of calculus. Those words problems showed me there were scenarios where algebra was not gonna cut it. I wish more of my grade school classes explained the point of it all after it became less obvious from middle school onwards.
The core issue here is we don't know how to measure the skill of learning directly.