[dtnewman]

Maybe AI is going to save education, but the next few years are going to be very rough. I built a plugin for Chrome that helps detect cheating [1] so I've been talking to a bunch of teachers lately and pretty much everyone acknowledges that ChatGPT is a game changer for how schools will need to run. Plagiarism, tutors and parent help have been around for a while, but they still required most students to put in some effort. Now, any student can have chatGPT generate a book report for Lord of the Flies in less than 5 minutes. The common theme I hear from teachers is that the education model will need to flip, where students do more writing in class and more learning outside of class. It sounds simple, but it's actually a massive change to implement and things are gonna be very tricky over the next few years until the dust settles more.

[1] https://www.revisionhistory.com, which I originally thought would be most useful for cheating, but interestingly, many teachers are more interested in using it to help students work through revisions. I've gotten feedback from teachers that they plan to have students use ChatGPT to start their assignments and then task them with updating, modifying and annotating them, so I'm trying to figure out which features to build to support that.

[somsak2]

The "flipped classroom" model has been around for quite a while https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flipped_classroom

[moonchrome]

Is the cheat detection searching for "as a virtual chat bot assistant" text students don't bother to remove ?

Otherwise seems like snake oil thing.

[dtnewman]

No. There’s no “AI detection”, just a way to look at the history of revisions and let teachers decide for themselves

[tru1ock]

I hope it will force the current system which favours a specific subset of learners to change. I hope it will evolve towards a collaborative system where learners are not tested as specimens in a vacuum. The current system is all about making it easier for the system to do its thing instead of the user(learner) getting something valuable out of it.

[mcpackieh]

> I hope it will force the current system which favours a specific subset of learners to change. I hope it will evolve towards a collaborative system where learners are not tested as specimens in a vacuum.

That will also favor a specific subset of learners.

[tru1ock]

Perhaps, but learners that are good in the current system will do well regardless imo. They are good at self directed, isolated learning which I think is the minority.

[mcpackieh]

Those same 'independent' learners end up carrying the groups they're placed in. In the best case they're essentially drafted as unpaid tutors for the rest of the group, but often they end doing most of the work themselves while sharing the credit with the others. In either case they end up overworked, but particularly in the later case it becomes a system for gaming statistics to make the whole class look like it's performing better than it really is. Teachers like setting up this kind of system when their compensation/advancement is tied to student performance, a manifestation of Goodhart's Law. The sort of equality that you can achieve by giving student the average grade of a group is just a trick with numbers. Why not grade the whole class as one single group? Average every test score together and give every student that average score. Now you have excellent equality as the whole class performs adequately... but only on paper.

Anyway, there's no "one size fits all" in education, any scheme will favor some students more than others.