Campus Technology Insider Podcast February 2023
Listen: AI in Education: Will We Need Humans Anymore?
00:08
Rhea Kelly: Hello and welcome to the Campus Technology Insider podcast. I'm Rhea Kelly, editor in chief of Campus Technology, and your host.
ChatGPT is groundbreaking, but it's also merely the first in what will likely be a series of innovations built on foundational developments in artificial intelligence, machine learning, and natural language processing that are going to change the world. Higher education is already feeling the impact of generative AI technology in terms of plagiarism and instructional design concerns, but these challenges also come with immense opportunities to personalize learning and streamline time-consuming tasks. For this episode of the podcast, I spoke with Mark Schneider, director of the U.S. Department of Education's Institute of Education Sciences, about how AI is transforming education and the evolving role of humans in an AI-powered future. Here's our chat.
Hi, Mark, welcome to the podcast.
Mark Schneider: Thank you for having me.
Kelly: So I thought maybe I should have you kind of introduce yourself and your role at the IES.
01:24
Schneider: So I'm Mark Schneider, I'm the director of the Institute of Education Sciences. It's a science agency housed within the U.S. Department of Education. It, it does research, we have two research centers, the National Center for Education Research and the National Center for Special Education Research. We have the National Center for Education Statistics, and NCES, that's the National Center for Education Statistics, also runs the National Assessment for Education Progress. In higher ed, it also runs the IPEDs integrated post-secondary education data system, which probably your readership may have had some familiarity with it. And the fourth center is the National Center for Education Evaluation and Regional Assistance, and that runs things like the What Works Clearinghouse, which maybe some of you know about, and also ERIC, which is a repository of education publications.
02:26
Kelly: Yeah, those are all very familiar sources of great information and research, and data. So you recently published a blog post about Open AI's ChatGPT natural language chatbot, titled, "Do We Need Humans Anymore?" And that's a provocative question, especially kind of coming out of the, you know, Department of Education. So that seems like a good place to start, you know, with these developments in AI and machine learning, are we going to need humans anymore?
02:57
Schneider: Well, of course, one chooses a title to provoke interest, right? I hope we need humans, but the question is, what's the role of humans in, in this new world? So I, along with probably thousands of other people, have now written about, played with, blogged about ChatGPT. It's very interesting. So let me answer this in a couple of ways. So the first one is, like everybody else has been playing with ChatGPT, there's an incredible awe factor, right? I can't believe that this works this way and it can do this, right? And then the second one is like, wow, this is really boring prose and there are mistakes in it. So, so right now, I mean, it's gonna get better. This is the way AI works, it's gonna get better. But it's really, so what it's going to transform the role of humans, clearly. It's not going to make them go away, but it's going to transform it. And for me, the question is, like, what does literacy mean? What does reading and writing mean in a world in which this chatbot is like the first of many generations that we're going to be living through that in the next couple, three years? So, so here, for example, is, so the boring prose thing is, is grammatically correct and no spelling errors, right? So that's a major step forward for a lot of writing. But then the next question, though, is, there are errors built into it. So let's say, I don't know what the real percentage is, but let's say 20% of the things that it generates are wrong. But you don't know, unless you're a human with an installed database and experience, you don't know what that 20% is, right? And that's, and that's the challenge. So we can't rely on it, maybe anytime, but we certainly can't rely on it now to produce factually correct, factually correct material 100% of the time, which means that we need, humans need different kinds of skills in order to parse this information and say, "Well, that didn't work. That's not, I don't think that's true." And then what would you do? Well, you go to Google now, which is, which is really funny, right? So the chatbot may be eliminating the, sooner or later may eliminate that "I'm gonna go to Google to find out what the real thing is." But it's, so it's an interesting, interesting thing. So the other thing that I find really challenging is that we've been working on improving writing. We've been trying to figure out how to run competitions and prizes, to invent AI-assisted tutors, writing tutors for kids in, you know, high school, middle school, in part because their teachers cannot give …. The art of writing is the art of rewriting. But if you're a middle school or high school teacher, you might have a hundred kids, and it's just literally too time consuming to actually do, you know, the kind of hands-on editing feedback. So we were, we were going to work, we started about a year ago, thinking about what kind of competition we could run, like an XPRIZE kind of thing, to develop a, an online AI-assisted writing tutor. Well, guess what, on November 30th, when ChatGPT came out, that whole plan is like, whoa, back to the drawing board. You know, what do we need to do in a world where ChatGPT is going to be a potential writing tutor. So we have to rethink that. It's a lovely place to be, we had, you know, we thought we were gonna make breakthroughs, someone beat us to it by a longshot. And now we gotta go back and think well, this is a new development, and we need to do something to update our prior, update our direction, update our goals, because there's this major AI breakthrough that's probably a hell of a lot better than, than what we were gonna get in our, in our competition.