Education experts available for ChatGPT, AI language model stories and background

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Penn GSE, the No. 1-ranked graduate school of education, has faculty experts available who can provide perspectives on AI language models like ChatGPT … how teachers can embrace this and other new technologies, the ethical considerations of using these new tools and the impact on students.

Dr. Ross Aikins: studying how chatbots can help master’s students crack open-response writing assignments

• Aikins specializes in collegiate substance abuse and student health research. In October, he submitted a research proposal to essentially “crack” Penn GSE’s semesterly take-home MSEd comprehensive exam, which is a 2,000-word open-response paper based on two brief prompts. It is a graduation requirement, making it precisely the type of high-stakes writing assignment students could find tempting to use with an AI chatbot. It did a pretty good job, he says. “It took some training, and it wasn’t perfect, but I could see one of our students saving a LOT of time and passing with a lot less original’ writing on their own." The study is under IRB review; he anticipates initial data in Spring 2023.

Dr. Ryan Baker: piloting a new syllabus policy because he sees AI systems as changing the future of work

• "AI systems like ChatGPT are likely to change the future of work, and teaching needs to change alongside it. That's why I'm teaching about it in my classes, and why I've released a syllabus policy that allows students to use these tools as part of their learning and am piloting it in colleagues' classes this semester,” says Baker, a leader in the study of big data in education. At Penn GSE, he studies how students use – and learn from – educational games, intelligent tutors, and other kinds of educational software.

Dr. Sigal Ben-Porath: new technology is an opportunity – not a threat

• “This new technology can help us rethink our goals and reevaluate our classroom practices. It is an opportunity, not a threat, for educators,” says ethics and political philosophy professor Ben-Porath. For her, the ethical implications of tools like ChatGPT are one of the most exciting aspects. Is this the new calculator?

Dr. Betty Chandy: advice for teachers on how they can put ChatGPT to use in their classrooms

• ChatGPT is one of the world's most advanced machine learning and language processing models. It can read, understand in context, and respond in a human-like way.   What some educators fear with ChatGPT - plagiarism, cheating, and misinformation - are the same fears from the past with the use of the internet and Google in classrooms, she says. But there are some key differences – namely that ChatGPT gives human-like responses based on data it was trained on, while Google’s algorithms crawl the web to provide links to relevant pages. Chandy elaborates in a recent Educator’s Playbook article on five ways teachers can embrace the new technology in their classrooms.

Dr. Bodong Chen: there’s potential to integrate AI into knowledge building

• Generative AI applications such as GPT-3, DALL-E, and Github Copilot are powerful and playful. And they’re here to stay. A learning scientist and educational technologist, Chen has been playing with GPT-3 in various contexts and reflecting on the interplay between learning and generative AI. In a recent blog post, he writes that for generative AI to do good – rather than cause more harm – we need to ask three critical questions: What is learning, and how does it happen? How to properly position machine intelligence? What surrounding infrastructures need to change?

Dr. Ann Tiao: how do tools like ChatGPT impact student work in grad school?

• As the head of the Office of Student Success at the top-ranked graduate school of education, Tiao is working to understand how AI technology like ChatGPT impacts student work, what faculty can do to minimize adverse effects, and how faculty can use take advantage of the technology for educating. As someone who has dedicated most of her adult life to teaching and mentoring others, Tiao is particularly interested in “how to teach our students to use it in their classrooms and the pitfalls to watch out for.”

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