Today’s education has shifted towards the digital domain, using tablets and digital applications.
Now chatbots such as ChatGPT are making their presence felt and schools and experts nationwide spoke about their policies and how the digital world influenced their curriculum.
Executive principal of St Mary’s DSG in Kloof, Jonathan Manley, said artificial intelligence was a useful tool, but not a replacement for teachers, and that teachers were the most powerful form of technology in the classroom.
He said: “Teachers have empathy, creativity, morals and initiative. They are aware of the community and world context within which the children exist and always incorporate these nuanced elements into their lessons and classroom environment. They bring curiosity and passion into a learning relationship which AI cannot do (yet).”
He added that AI should not replace the relationship between teacher, parent and pupil, but should rather be used to amplify the teacher’s abilities and help them analyse and personalise their response in teaching without creating more work or using more of their valuable time.
Manley said their school was exploring using AI because it helped with lesson planning, revision, preparing resources for assignments and to stimulate curiosity.
He warned, though, that it should not lead pupils into the temptation to plagiarise work and stressed the importance of emotional intelligence and ethics.
“The main challenge is that unless expertise levels remain high, how will the engineers, doctors etc, know if their information is accurate and appropriate? The accreditation process of professionals will need to remain robust and become even more sophisticated or we run the risk of not being able to detect errors, bias, inappropriate solutions or the long-term consequences or abuse of this technology,” Manley said.
“This is why it’s important to still have individuals like teachers who aren’t reliant on technology and AI.”
South African universities have previously shared their thoughts on ChatGPT within education.
In February, the City Press interviewed senior director of academic affairs at Wits University, Diane Grayson.
She said: “If students choose to use ChatGPT to help with an assignment, they need to reference it, and make clear which parts were generated by ChatGPT and which were their own writing.”
Grayson also said ChatGPT could give answers that were factually incorrect or controversial.