I heard something in a meeting recently that I haven’t heard in a while. It was in a meeting with some online educational leaders across the province and the topic of Chat GPT and AI came up. It’s really challenging in an online course, with limited opportunities for supervised work or tests, to know if a student is doing the work, or a parent or tutor, or Artificial Intelligence tools. That’s when a conversation came up that I’ve heard before. It was a bit of a stand on a soapbox diatribe, “If an assignment can be done by Chat GPT, then maybe the problem is in the assignment.”

That’s almost the exact line we started to hear about 15 years ago about Google… I might even have said it, “If you can just Google the answer to the question, then how good is the question?” Back then, this prompted some good discussions about assessment and what we valued in learning. But this is far more relevant to Google than it is to AI.

I can easily create a question that would be hard to Google. It is significantly harder to do the same with LLM’s – Large Language Models like Chat GPT. If I do a Google search I can’t find critical thinking challenges not already shared by someone else. However, I can ask Chat GPT to create answers to almost anything. Furthermore, I can ask it to create things like pro’s & con’s lists, then put those in point form, then do a rough draft of an essay, then improve on the essay. I can even ask it to use the vocabulary of a Grade 9 student. I can also give it a writing sample and ask it to write the essay in the same style.

LLM’s are not just a better Google, they are a paradigm shift. If we are trying to have conversations about how to catch cheaters, students using Chat GPT to do their work, we are stuck in the old paradigm. That said, I openly admit this is a much bigger problem in online learning where we don’t see and work closely with students in front of us. And we are heading into an era where there will be no way to verify what’s student work and what’s not, so it’s time to recognize the paradigm shift and start asking ourselves new questions…

The biggest questions we need to ask ourselves are how can we teach students to effectively use AI to help them learn, and what assignments can we create that ask them to use AI effectively to help them develop and share ideas and new learning?

Back when some teachers were saying, “Wikipedia is not a valid website to use as research and to cite.” Many more progressive educators were saying, “Wikipedia is a great place to start your research,” and, “Make sure you include the date you quoted the Wikipedia page because the page changes over time.” The new paradigm will see some teachers making students write essays in class on paper or on wifi-less internet-less computers, and other teachers will be sending students to Chat GPT and helping them understand how to write better prompts.

That’s the difference between old and new paradigm thinking and learning. The transition is going to be messy. Mistakes are going to be made, both by students and teachers. Where I’m excited is in thinking about how learning experiences are going to change. The thing about a paradigm shift is that it’s not just a slow transition but a leap into new territory. The learning experiences of the future will not be the same, and we can either try to hold on to the past, or we can get excited about the possibilities of the future.