ChatGPT for Good? On Opportunities and Challenges of Large Language Models for Education — 3/12
They can also generate questions and prompts that encourage
learners to think critically about their work and to analyze and
interpret the information presented to them.
In conclusion, large language models have the potential to
provide a wide range of benefits and opportunities for students
and professionals at all stages of education. They can assist
in the development of reading, writing, math, science, and
language skills, as well as providing students with personal-
ized practice materials, summaries and explanations, which
can help to improve student performance and contribute to en-
hanced learning experiences. Additionally, large language
models can also assist in research, writing, and problem-
solving tasks, and provide domain-specific language skills
and other skills for professional training. However, as pre-
viously mentioned, the use of these models should be done
with caution, as they also have limitations such as lack of
interpretability and potential for bias, unexpected brittleness
in relatively simple tasks [9] which need to be addressed.
1.2 Opportunities for Teaching
Large language models, such as ChatGPT, have the potential
to revolutionize teaching and assist in teaching processes.
Below we provide only a few examples of how these models
can benefit teachers:
For personalized learning, teachers can use large lan-
guage models to create personalized learning experiences for
their students. These models can analyze student’s writing
and responses, and provide tailored feedback and suggest ma-
terials that align with the student’s specific learning needs.
Such support can save teachers’ time and effort in creating
personalized materials and feedback, and also allow them to
focus on other aspects of teaching, such as creating engaging
and interactive lessons.
For lesson planning, large language models can also as-
sist teachers in the creation of (inclusive) lesson plans and
activities. Teachers can input to the models the corpus of
document based on which they want to build a course. The
output can be a course syllabus with short description of each
topic. Language models can also generate questions and
prompts that encourage the participation of people at different
knowledge and ability levels, and elicit critical thinking and
problem-solving. Moreover, they can be used to generate tar-
geted and personalized practice problems and quizzes, which
can help to ensure that students are mastering the material.
For language learning, teachers of language classes can
use large language models in an assistive way, e.g., to high-
light important phrases, generate summaries and translations,
provide explanations of grammar and vocabulary, suggest
grammatical or style improvements and assist in conversation
practice. Language models can also provide teachers with
adaptive and personalized means to assist students in their
language learning journey, which can make language learning
more engaging and effective for students.
For research and writing, large language models can
assist teachers of university and high school classes to com-
plete research and writing tasks (e.g., in seminar works, paper
writing, and feedback to students) more efficiently and effec-
tively. The most basic help can happen at a syntactic level,
i.e., identifying and correcting typos. At a semantic level,
large language models can be used to highlight (potential)
grammatical inconsistencies and suggest adequate and person-
alized improvement strategies. Going further, these models
can be used to identify possibilities for topic-specific style
improvement. They can also be used to generate summaries
and outlines of challenging texts, which can help teachers and
researchers to highlight the main points of a text in a way
that is helpful for further deep dive and understanding of the
content in question.
For professional development, large language models
can also assist teachers by providing them with resources,
summaries, and explanations of new teaching methodologies,
technologies, and materials. This can help teachers stay up-to-
date with the latest developments and techniques in education,
and contribute to the effectiveness of their teaching. They can
be used to improve the clarity of the teaching materials, locate
information or resources that professionals may be in need for
as they learn on the job, as well as used for on-the-job training
modules that require presentation and communication skills.
For assessment and evaluation, teachers can use large
language models to semi-automate the grading of student work
by highlighting potential strengths and weakness of the work
in question, e.g., essays, research papers, and other writing
assignments. This can save teachers a significant amount of
time for tasks related to individualized feedback to students.
Furthermore, large language models can also be used to check
for plagiarism, which can help to prevent cheating. Hence,
large language models can help teachers to identify areas
where students are struggling, which adds to a more accurate
assessments of student learning development and challenges.
Targeted instruction provided by the models can be used to
help students excel and to provide opportunities for further
development.
The acquaintance of students with AI challenges related
to the potential bias in the output, the need for continuous hu-
man oversight, and the potential for misuse of large language
models are not unique to education. In fact, these challenges
are inherent to transformative digital technologies. Thus, we
believe that, if handled sensibly by the teacher, these chal-
lenges can be insightful in learning and education scenarios to
acquaint students early on with potential societal biases, and
risks of AI application.
In conclusion, large language models have the potential
to revolutionize teaching from a teacher’s perspective by pro-
viding teachers with a wide range of tools and resources that
can assist with lesson planning, personalized content creation,
differentiation and personalized instruction, assessment, and
professional development. Overall, large language models
have the potential to be a powerful tool in education, and
there are a number of ongoing research efforts exploring its
potential applications in this area.