AI’s impact on education

A reflection on the question: What are your thoughts about AI’s impact on education? Written as if I were responding at a fireside chat.

I’d ask ‘what are people already stitching together that a company hasn’t built’ and I think the answer is ChatGPT pairing with YouTube. Youtube is to lectures as chatgpt is to office hours. And if we don’t think about education as a system and think about it as a simplified term for increase knowledge of the human, this does the job. You can test yourself with ChatGPT. I frequently ask it to give me programming problems and I work through them, submit my answer and get feedback. I could arguably do this without ChatGPT via a textbook and its practice problems but that’s in a static state where the “tutoring” is already in the textbook and it’s not changing. ChatGPT is in an active state because the “tutoring” evolves as I ask more questions and go deeper on a concept I missed. More importantly, ChatGPT allows me to ask why and get an answer instead of asking why and writing in the course forum or googling. Online courses haven’t worked for several reasons but I think the inability to contact a teacher through an OH session is one of the non-obvious reasons.

The question could arise, how do we credential this learning? It’s happening off-campus so isn’t it impossible to award credit hours that contribute to a degree. Youtube is changing this (https://bit.ly/3XVpdfS) and the concept of crypto credentials or authority verification or peer-to-peer verification also exist. They’re non-traditional forms of…