Publish at March 10 2024 Updated March 10 2024
Almost all e-learning platforms and authoring tools now include generative A.I. tools for writing lesson plans, lessons, quizzes or assessments. These tools are impressive, and their suggestions are more often than not interesting, richer and more complete than those most teachers produce themselves. Of course, a conscientious teacher completes the work by adapting and adding his or her personal touch, if only by the kind of primers he or she submits to the A.I. For the bulk of the work, the A.I. represents a considerable gain in time and quality for teachers.
If the teacher thinks this is great, the students are not to be outdone. Doing homework is no longer the same. The A.I. can do most of the work, but as its proposals quickly go beyond the scope of the assignment, they become unusable without any real work of comprehension and synthesis. A teacher won't spend much time rereading the same poorly mastered information, and it's easy to spot what's been written by an A.I. if you know the subject and its students. In the end, the result will be inefficient and unsatisfactory for everyone.
On the other hand, preventing the use of A.I. is tantamount to denying the future. We're going to use it anyway, so what are we going to do about it? Students will soon tire of these "augmented" lessons in which they don't participate. I wouldn't bet too much on these platforms with these options alone. The future isn't there.
Without any change in pedagogy, you get a teacher who has an A.I. produce a course and an assessment, and a student who meets the requirements, assisted by an A.I. The brightest ones get away with it, and the assessment measures not knowledge but the ability to obtain knowledge, to use information tools. The real result is the equivalent of a bookish culture, now digital and pumped up on steroids. The evaluation of knowledge becomes irrelevant to real mastery of the subject.
The objective value of knowledge is determined by the way it is related and used. The best content is worth nothing if it remains to age in a library, on a hard drive or in your head. Whether it's learned or accessed via an A.I., what counts is the ability to use it in practice, with the expected results.
The future of teaching is logically and necessarily on the practical side, and that of the teacher too.
Teaching with a view to an activity gives meaning to knowledge. To philosophize, you learn to carry out a philosophical approach with increasing rigor and scope. If we need to organize knowledge so that people who heal or philosophize can find it, let's learn how to do it... the question is to know what we want to do.
Students believe they can access knowledge easily. They're right, but accessing knowledge and mastering it are two very different levels of knowledge. I know a few well-informed entrepreneurs who claim to be specialists, but who don't actually know very much. What's their value? That of an I.A.... Which is quite limited in practice.
A trainer friend of mine told me how he came to integrate A.I. into his workshops. When a student asked him what he could teach him that wasn't in A.I., he told him to ask the A.I. what the course was about. And so he did.
Whereas normally students would have taken hours to find and develop the subject satisfactorily, in a few minutes the A.I. had presented the gist of it. It was as if there was a super-bright student in the classroom who knew practically everything, but had no experience. He nicknamed him the 13th student.
The rest of the course consisted of applying, enriching and complementing what the A.I. had brought to the table in a dynamic and applied way. The course was unlike anything the students had experienced before, but they all appreciated the level of activity and exchange that resulted. Since then, he has never given a workshop without the participation of the "13th student".
In practice, an A.I. can cover any topic, in a general or specific way. You can always ask, "How do I solve a quadratic equation?", but if you ask what they're for, you'll get a series of applications, some of which you can use as a pretext for learning how to solve them.
This applies to any field: How do you assemble an amplifier circuit? How do you write a film script? How do you prepare a chart of accounts?
In practice, the teacher poses the question to the students, who in turn pose it to an A.I. (Chat GPT, Gemini, Claude 2, Mixtral, etc.).
The A.I. indicates the parameters to be determined, the information to be collected, the components to be considered, gives the formulas, the steps, what to read, what to measure, what you need to know to be able to do it, and so on.
From there, you can teach and learn to use the knowledge imparted. As the concepts are understood and integrated, the activities can be made more complex, with guidance from the A.I. Each time. From the simple to the complex, this is what teachers have always done, and what the A.I. proposes if given the right context.
What teachers have been able to produce in the way of methods is accessible to AIs, who can transmit it in a flexible way, adapted to different contexts. This is the great advantage: adaptation to each context.
The new role of the teacher is to make use of this assistant, which knows practically everything but can't make sense unless a large number of parameters are detailed. Teachers and students can do this, and what comes out will be adapted to what has been communicated. This is the closest we've ever come to teaching that's adapted to each context, environment, group or individual. Everyone can participate and will be involved in learning to the extent that they can.
It's about learning to use the potential of artificial intelligence, just as we did before with the abacus, the slide rule, then the calculator, the pen, the word processor, then the computer and markers and now A.I. We're there, now.
Illustration: VisualGeneration - DepositPhotos
References
e-learning platforms - Course authoring software
I.A. directory
Artificial intelligences tested in this article
You might also like:
Puzzle classes to integrate minorities in schools
When the laws of racial segregation disappeared in the United States, social homogenization did not take place as easily as hoped, especially in schools. An American pedagogue then imagined a new way of organizing learning, breaking radically with the competitive practices in force at the time. His method is still relevant in increasingly heterogeneous school environments.
The keys to interactive storytelling: information, satisfaction and control
Interactive storytelling is likely to be more successful in training than in entertainment, as training requires information to be processed and placed in context. Interactivity is all the more interesting when you feel in control and moving towards your goal.
Spontaneous learning from a model: adjustment and reinforcement.
All possible behaviors quickly become too complex to analyze. Using a model, we can compare and adjust, taking advantage of the experience we or others have accumulated in the past.
Two forms of apprehension intersect today: correlative thinking and resonance. The former mechanizes us, the latter brings us to life. What is the result? The future of pedagogy is taking shape.
Adopt the essential tools for learning English!
If all we had to take with us to a desert island were a few small tools - and these days, all desert islands have ADSL - what bookmarks would we keep so that one day we could speak English fluently?
