Generative AI (GenAI) has gained a significant foothold in the academic world. The impressive capabilities of GenAI tools, like ChatGPT, have surprised academia by clearing freshman year at Harvard and surpassing second-year medical students of Stanford in clinical reasoning assignments.
The potential benefits of Generative AI in higher education span across various aspects of learning, teaching, and research. Emerging studies have identified its diverse capabilities, including facilitating personalized learning, automating assessments, simplifying learning processes, providing student support, offering personalized feedback, and more.
While many universities initially adopted a cautious, wait-and-see approach, surveys fielded by individual institutions have found that approximately 50 to 65 percent of students and teachers have used GenAI tools like ChatGPT for academic work.
Generative AI tools are designed for natural language understanding and communication in conversational contexts. They can be used in higher education for various purposes, including idea creation and design, facilitating student discussions, assisting in qualitative or technological research, and more.
AI applications can analyze student’s learning patterns and tailor study material to individual needs. They can help students learn according to their interests and learning styles, boosting engagement and optimizing learning experiences. AI-powered learning can address students’ strengths and weaknesses, adjust explanations and feedback to their preferences, and provide personalized recommendations for improvement.
The potential of AI to provide personalized learning experiences and improve student outcomes is still an ongoing research topic.
AI-powered applications can streamline and bring consistency to grading by automating the grading of assignments, tests, and quizzes. Moreover, they can provide quick, comprehensive feedback to students, freeing up tutors to concentrate on more in-depth and personalized feedback. AI models can create adaptive assessments based on a student’s performance to ensure they are appropriately challenged. By analyzing feedback from students and educators, AI can identify areas for improvement in the course.
Generative AI models like ChatGPT and Gemini can generate conversational educational material (e.g., creating questions, summarizing texts, generating quizzes) in real time, saving educators’ time. Sophisticated AI models produce grammatically sound and coherent text, transforming human-machine interaction. They can produce written drafts, autocomplete users’ sentences, and generate a list of ideas during brainstorming using user inputs.
AI models like Curie, Writefull, and Trinka are proficient at understanding the terminology and structure of academic writing.
The role of Generative AI in education goes beyond text generation. Tools such as DALL-E, Midjourney, Craiyon, and Adobe Firefly allow users to create and manipulate images in response to text prompts. Certain products like OpenAI’s Sora create sound effects and videos. Educators and students can also use tools that generate programming code. For example, Meta’s Code Llama produces code, and GitHub Copilot assists programmers by suggesting code based on the information about the problems they are trying to solve.
AI-powered language learning apps and translation tools can be valuable resources for overcoming language barriers and cultural differences, making education more accessible to international students from diverse linguistic backgrounds. AI translation tools (like QuillBot’s AI translator, Wordvice AI, and DeepL) provide real-time translation across different languages and are useful for students and educators needing translation for academic tasks. However, these chatbots can’t replace human tutors’ expertise.
Large language models like ChaGPT and Gemini can also assist students in polishing their language skills more effectively by offering grammar corrections, vocabulary suggestions, and proofreading.
Generative AI has impressed users with its ability to simplify complex technical jargon into more understandable language, making it accessible to a broader audience. This innovation is particularly instrumental in fields where specialized terminology can curtail comprehension, such as healthcare, finance, and judiciary.
Here is an example of a ChatGPT-simplified paragraph about "Antisense Technology" from the article Principles of Early Drug Discovery, published by NCBI (The National Center for Biotechnology Information).
Prompt:
Answers:
AI tools are reshaping academic research by assisting tutors and students in text generation, data analysis, and other research activities. For example, by creating diverse content formats like text, images and videos, and by processing and analyzing huge amounts of data and literature, AI-powered tools are making research more accessible to students and tutors with limited resources.
With massive amounts of information, foundation and large language models (LLMs) empower researchers by enhancing their efficiency to gain valuable insights, automate routine tasks, and ultimately enable them to produce high-quality work. This streamlines the research process, allowing for deeper analysis and creative output.
AI has the potential to promote inclusivity and equity in higher education by offering online courses to students with limited access to traditional higher educational institutions. AI-powered language translation tools facilitate access to study materials in students’ native languages. Furthermore, students with learning disabilities can benefit from AI models using alternative content formats, such as text-to-speech or speech-to-text functionalities.
Generative AI is poised to transform the educational landscape by offering personalized learning, generating creative text and images, translating and simplifying languages, and addressing the issues of inclusivity and accessibility in education. However, to maximize benefits, it is crucial to explore its limitations and potential risks, such as hallucination, ethical considerations, and biases, along with their implications for pedagogical practices in academic settings.
Author Bio
Matthew Mcmullen is the SVP of Cogito Tech (16 Horseshoe Ln, Levittown, NY 11756) an AI training data company offering human-in-the-loop workforce solutions for AI and ML companies.