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by Caroline Chun
It’s no longer news that one of the first professional sectors threatened by the rapid adoption of ChatGPT and generative AI is education – universities and colleges around the country convened emergency meetings to discuss what to do about the risk of students using AI to cheat on their work. There’s another side to that evolving AI story. Recent research from professors at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, New York University and Princeton suggests that educators should be just as worried about their own jobs.
In an analysis of professions “most exposed” to the latest advances in large language models like ChatGPT, eight of the top 10 are teaching positions.
“When we ran our analysis, I was surprised to find that educational occupations come out close to the top in many cases,” said Robert Seamans, co-author of the new research study and professor at NYU.
Post-secondary teachers in English language and literature, foreign language, and history topped the list among educators.
The table shows the jobs that are most likely to encounter generative A.I. as part of their responsibilities.
| 1. | Telemarketers |
|---|---|
| 2. | English language and literature teachers |
| 3. | Foreign language and literature teachers |
| 4. | History teachers |
| 5. | Law teachers |
| 6. | Philosophy and religion teachers |
| 7. | Sociology teachers |
| 8. | Political science teachers |
| 9. | Criminal justice and law enforcement teachers |
| 10. | Sociologists |
Note: All teaching positions listed are at post-secondary institutions.Source: How will Language Modelers like ChatGPT Affect Occupations and Industries? Authors: Ed Felten (Princeton), Manav Raj (University of Pennsylvania) and Robert Seamans (New York University)
While evidence has been growing in recent years that work within highly skilled professions — for example, lawyers — may be influenced by AI, typically the jobs expected to be most affected by technology are routine or rote jobs, while highly-skilled labor is considered more protected.
But this study finds the opposite to be the case.
“Highly-skilled jobs may be more affected than others,” said Manav Raj, co-author and professor at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School.
But affected jobs – or as the study officially describes it, jobs most “exposed to AI” – does not necessarily mean the human positions will be replaced.
“ChatGPT can be used to help professors generate syllabi or to recommend readings that are relevant to a given topic,” said Raj, who is not currently concerned about the fear of replacement. It can also design educational slides and in-class exercises. And for topics that are very dense, “ChatGPT can even help educators translate some of those lessons or takeaways in simpler language,” he said.
Education technology company Udemy has been selling language learning modules made with ChatGPT to help language teachers design their courses.
Duolingo, the popular online language learning company, is relying on AI technology to power its Duolingo English Test (DET), an English proficiency exam available online, on demand. The test utilizes ChatGPT to generate text passages for reading comprehension and AI for supporting human proctors in spotting suspicious test-taking behavior.
It is also working with teachers to generate lesson content and speed up the process and scale of adding advanced materials to the platform. “Since not everyone in the world has equal access to great teachers and favorable learning conditions, AI gives us the best chance to scale quality education to everyone who needs it,” said Klinton Bicknell, Duolingo’s head of AI.
Some professors are wary of ChatGPT and its capabilities.
Kristina Reardon, an English professor at Amherst College, says there is a line to draw when using ChatGPT as a professor and considering ChatGPT’s role of co-authorship in writing.
“No matter how good Chat GPT gets, I believe we can gain a lot from learning to pre-write, draft, revise, edit, etc. Writing is a process, and it’s an iterative one, and one that helps us think through ideas,” she said.
Many universities have sent out guidance to professors for use of ChatGPT and how they can augment their students’ experiences while still maintaining academic integrity.
Princeton advises professors to be explicit in the uses of ChatGPT in their syllabi; use it to enhance smaller group discussions, and use it as a tool to compare students’ own drafts of essays with a ChatGPT version.
At Cornell University, regardless of general university guidelines, every instructor will be free to make their own decision on what works best for their area of teaching, says Morten Christiansen, psychology professor at the school.
Many professors are starting to use ChatGPT in the classroom.
Laurent Dubreuil, professor in French and comparative literature at Cornell, is currently having his students assess the boundaries of academic freedom and censorship, as the most recent versions of ChatGPT are “now coming with set parameters about what is socially and politically acceptable to say — and what should not be uttered.”
Christiansen says ChatGPT can help level the playing field among students. “It can be used as a personal tutor to help them, and there’s an opportunity for students to evaluate what ChatGPT produces,” he said.
In fact, the technology’s imperfections are an opportunity to teach and learn in new ways, honing students’ critical analysis skills by prompting them to ask ChatGPT specific questions related to course content and critique the answers given back to them. Many current generative AI language models produce what AI experts have deemed “hallucinations.”
“ChatGPT will make things up and it will look like it is really confident in what it is saying, including adding references that don’t actually exist,” Christiansen said.
Ethan Mollick, entrepreneurship professor at Wharton, who has become an evangelist within the education world for generative AI experimentation, expects his students to use ChatGPT in every document they produce, whether this is for marketing materials, graphics, blog posts or even new working apps.
“I think we have to realize it’s part of our lives, and we have to figure out how to work with that,” he said.
Mollick does not think exposure means eventual replacement.
“We have to recognize that we need to change how we approach things and embrace this new technology,” he said. “We’ve adapted to other technological changes, and I think this one we will adapt to as well.”
The “Philosophy, Ethics, and Academia” blog PEA Soup was taken over last fall by the University of Warwick’s Centre for Ethics, Law, and Public Affairs (CELPA) and has now resumed regular posting.
Beginning today, PEA Soup is serving up a discussion of “Refusing Protection” by David J. Clark (USC), an article which appeared recently in Philosophy & Public Affairs. You can check that out the post by Kimberly Ferzan (Penn) about it here.
Next week, the special will be a discussion of “Moral Worth and Moral Belief” by James Grant (Oxford), which was published this past January in Ethics.
There will also be forthcoming threads on books, other articles, public philosophy, and cross-cultural philosophy. You can subscribe to the site by email to be kept up to date on new posts (scroll to the bottom of the home page to see where to enter your email address for that).
Victor Tadros (Warwick), one of the editors of PEA Soup, writes, “We encourage everyone to participate, especially including grad students and early career scholars—PEA Soup is a great way of getting involved in terrific philosophical discussion with a wide community of excellent people.”
In my earlier post I was trying to sell the idea that (higher ed related) blogging is experiencing a resurgence. This is partly a justification for myself (and to my line managers), because I’ve been on study leave for 2 weeks. Study leave basically means you have a reason to say no to about 50% of the usual meetings. I’ve been writing a research bid, but I’ve also been using that clearer space in the calendar to update my online presence.
This has included:
I’m not sure if any of these make much difference, but I would argue (vigorously even) that it is a good use of anyone’s time in higher ed to regularly do an online presence health check and try out new avenues. Mainly for all the reasons I mentioned in the post on blogs, having an effective online presence is an entirely respectable and valid aspect of an overall academic identity and like any other aspect it requires some tending every now and then.
My post about blogging prompted some comments on RSS. I loved RSS, it seemed like magic, you could just pull stuff in from different places, subscribe easily, aggregate feeds. Your blog reader was a little daily newspaper of quality content. It was the essence of what the web was made for.
I blame Twitter for killing this magic, increasingly people didn’t promote, or even know their RSS feeds, and social media became a much more effective way to distribute content. RSS often operated in the background still but you rarely saw the little RSS icon on people’s sites any more. Various RSS readers failed or were killed off, and the convenience of inbuilt reshare buttons took over. Back in 2018 people were saying it was time to head back to RSS, and it didn’t happen then, so I expect it won’t now either in a hurry.
But with social media fragmenting and people either turning away from it completely or using it less, the absence of RSS awareness leaves us with a problem – how do we get all this lovely blog content out there? I know some hardcore people will still adhere to their blog readers, and I salute you. It’s possible that RSS will have a relabelling and a resurgence as I’m arguing blogging is experiencing. But until then, all that precious blog content is going unread.
One approach is simply to blitz it. I’ve taken to sharing blog posts on Twitter, Mastodon, LinkedIn and Facebook. I know, it must be very annoying for people who follow me in all those places. But it does get some reach. I regret to inform you that LinkedIn is proving to be quite good for engagement. And the app is not a total mess like the site.
Another approach which I’ve come round to is the Newsletter. I installed the Newsletter plug-in, and one option it provides is to create a newsletter from recent posts. You can automate this if you upgrade to a subscription account. I’m going to do it manually for now and see how it goes. I don’t intend to add extra content, just a monthly email of recent posts. That way you can just sit back and know that this quality (ahem) content will pop in your mailbox once a month. So pop over and subscribe if you feel that, on reflection, you really could do with some more email.
Progress is a funny old thing isn’t it? While I like my newsletter plug-in, it’s odd to move from the creative possibilities of RSS to, erm, email. And, yes I am very late to Newsletters What next you ask? Podcasts? Well, it’s funny you should say that…
There’s an adage that goes something like if you stay still long enough, you’ll come back into fashion. I think that time is coming for blogs. And if it isn’t I’m going to pretend it is anyway. My rather vague reasoning for this is based on the following thoughts. These are not researched, just my impressions and I’m very aware that in social media impressions can vary wildly.
Twitter is a mess. The trolls are back in, it’s run by a temperamental man-baby, they are talking about changing the free nature, there are technical issues and doubts about its long term viability. Even if all this pans out, a certain amount of damage has been done – people have migrated elsewhere, but perhaps more significantly, my sense is that a lot of people have just started engaging with it less.
There is a social media rethink occurring. I think precipitated by the above, but something that has been growing for years is a reframing of our relationship to social media. Is it a healthy or useful relationship? Is it a good return on investment in terms of time? Is it fun anymore? The danger for social media sites like Twitter and Facebook is not so much the deliberate rejection, but rather just the slow fade of enthusiasm. And once people start asking these types of questions more regularly, that fade gains momentum.
A recognition of the value of online identity. When I used to write about digital scholarship around 2010, it was often in the context of ‘why won’t those suits recognise the impact of us blogging kids?” Sort of Footloose with RSS. Now the impact of online identity is widely valued, recognised, utilised, exploited by all sorts of institutions then investing in some reliable online identity is not something that is frowned upon.
Blogging always suited education. There have been fantastically inventive uses of Twitter, podcasts, YouTube etc for education, but I always felt that blogging was the closest cousin to standard academic practice. It gives time to expand on thoughts as much as needed, to break free from the confines of formal academic publishing and engage in thoughtful dialogue.
Everyday work is often a bit rubbish. I’m not sure this has changed much, but the sense is that (in higher ed anyway) that work has often become more constrained, less creative, more precarious and less rewarding. A place to call your own is a welcome refuge in such a context.
The conclusion I take from all this (which I carefully assembled so I could draw the conclusion I want), is that there is a desire to have a core place on the net, that is not subject to the whims of billionaires, institutions or markets, where you can engage in a range of dialogue, from personal to professional, and that you enjoy revisiting. Ladies and gentleman, I give you, the blog.
(Look, even Brian has said he’s going to start blogging more frequently, that’s the sign we’ve been waiting for, assemble your blogging hordes now).
by Glenn Sacks
On her first day in office, Arkansas governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders signed an executive order banning “indoctrination and critical race theory” in schools.
She’s far from alone: a recent Education Week analysis found that over the past two years, bills, executive orders, or other means that would ban “divisive concepts,” particularly critical race theory, have appeared in 42 states.
With an eye to enforcing such measures, Fox News host Tucker Carlson calls for cameras in classrooms and a “civilian review board in every town” to root out teacher bias. Since I began teaching high school social studies in 1990, I’ve never seen such scrutiny of what we teach.
I believe that educators, particularly social studies teachers, should teach controversial subjects. How? My high school social studies teacher showed me.
He didn’t pontificate upon the controversies of the day—he stuck to the curriculum and the textbook. In other words, he taught me exactly what not to do. As teachers, it isn’t enough to present the material; we need to make the subject engaging.
Yes, it was my fault that I gained little from his class. My friend, a self-described “robotically efficient” student, was able to learn a lot from this teacher. I squandered the opportunity. But many of my classmates also found his class boring. Occasionally, someone would ask the teacher his opinion about a current issue, and I’d perk up from my daydreams. He’d only say, “Now’s not the time for that,” and, disappointed, I would start to fade out again.
Largely because of social media, more than in any other recent generation, our students’ lives are steeped in politics. Students want to know what their teachers think of the videos and posts they see about current controversies.
When we social studies teachers pretend that we don’t have an opinion, our students feel that we’re holding out on them, and that they’re being shortchanged. How could a teacher not have an opinion about the types of issues they’ve spent their lives studying?
Sometimes I think, “the material I’m teaching is interesting—how did my teacher make it so boring?” Often, it was because it was drained of any sense of controversy, of battle, of drama, of people fighting for a cause.
Critics confuse being opinionated with being partisan. Having a viewpoint doesn’t mean you can’t credit the other side when they’re correct. I oppose Donald Trump, but I do explain to my students that the Left sometimes criticizes him for silly reasons and puts him in double binds.
For example, when Trump was friendly to North Korea, he was accused of cozying up to dictators. When he was adversarial, he was labeled a warmonger.
Having a viewpoint doesn’t mean that you can’t explain the other side’s view. When speaking of an environmental law, for example, I might add, “conservative opponents contend it would drive up businesses’ costs and deter further investment—and sometimes that happens.”
When a student challenges me, I say, “I’ll tell you why you’re right, then explain the problems with your argument.” If a student fervently disagrees on an issue, I might toss him my marker, sit in back, and say, “OK, educate us.” And yes, this will be on the test—I hold the other students responsible for anything this student teaches, just as if I had taught it.
When a controversy is being debated, the teacher should modulate the political angle to encourage further discussion. A few months ago, I invited a conservative former student to give a presentation supporting the Republican Party in the November 2022 elections.
He did a creditable job, but a few students aggressively challenged him. I then explained some of the flaws in the arguments leveled against the conservative student, using them to demonstrate curriculum concepts.
For example, when one student linked a moderate California Republican congressman to the events of January 6, 2021, I explained that this was a “guilt by association” tactic and provided some other cases in which it was used by both Democrats and Republicans.
Some conservative critics are unconsciously lumping two distinct issues together. Yes, the (rare) instances when a teacher personally attacks or disparages students for their political beliefs are a problem. But the vastly more common scenario is when students or parents are unhappy because political views that they agree with are being criticized.
Critics have the right to demand we treat those who disagree with us respectfully. They don’t have the right to demand that we always agree with them.
I can’t promise that no student ever walks out of my class annoyed, and no teacher could contend that their students are never bored. But the further a class gets from what is happening in the real world, the less engaged students will be. If a teacher is opinionated but fair, the various sides of an argument will emerge in a productive, compelling way.
FreshRSS 