On 11th July 2024 Grant Douglas gave a talk explaining the impact that Artificial Intelligence is having, and will have, on higher education. Grant is a senior professor of practice, and the intercultural track coordinator at IÉSEG School of Management. one of the top international Management schools in the world with 2 campuses in France and 1400 students. He is vice-president of SIETAR France, a board member of SIETAR Europa, and an elected member of the IACCM council.
What is AI and how is it changing things?
Copilot gives references to it sources of information but is basically the same as ChatGPT from Microsoft. The learning process of LLMs is based on recognising and predicting patterms in language.
It can take a while before the interaction with an AI tool starts to give useful results. The key is in the prompts. Firstly you have to tell the AI who it is e.g. “You are an expert in International Management, planning to do a course with third year students based in ETC ….”
One of the problems of tools like ChatGPT is that it can hallucinate “facts” such as false citations in court cases.
Another danger of AI is that its view of the user and their requests is biased based on its own knowledge-base and what it knows about the user.
Artificial Intelligence can be defined as “.. the simulation of human intelligence in machines that are programmed to think, learn and perform tasks that typically require human intelligence. AI system can process large amounts of data , recognise patterns, make decisions and improve over time through experience”
The algorithms can be trained by Machine Learning often using neural networks for tasks like speech recognition and language translation. Speech recognition and emulation is one of the problem areas of AI, especially during election campaigns for instance.
AI in Higher Education
AI is both helping to improve and potentially threatening jobs in many areas, including Healthcare, Finance, Retail, Customer Service, Entertainment, Manufacturing, Agriculture, Transportation.
In Education, AI can:
- provide personalised learning, adapting the learning speed to individual skill sets
- Suggest courses and content
- aid administrative tasks such as scheduling and grading
- enhance students focus by providing individual interactive teaching
- provide intelligent tutoring, answering questions and offering explanations
- Many classes now use interactive tools like Wooclap
Potential misuses of AI in Higher Education
Cheating ! Need to create and test cheat-proof exams. Anti-plagiarism software is no longer sufficient. Need to be able to prove when cheating has occurred. A further problem is that when the exam take place, AI will have evolved even further, making detection more difficult, and the assessor needs to be able to prove when AI has been used.
Like other education they are experiencing a rise in failure rates and a decrease in grades. This is mainly because online evaluations have been stopped and they are reverting to pen and paper in invigilated rooms. Also continuous assessments had been stopped because the online students could not be monitored. This removed the incentive to keep working throughout the year.
The use of AI can lead to a reduction in critical thinking skills
Future uses of AI in Higher Education
In future we might see more personalised education using Adaptive Learning Platforms.
We can expect to see standards emerge for the responsible use of AI. All teachers and administrators have to be trained in the use of AI.
Demonstrated a tutorial video, created very quickly by combining a text script with a previously created avatar cloned from the appearance and voice of a teacher.
There is a new platform https://live.nolej.io/ for converting static (text,video) knowledge into interactive learning lessons and also translate these into other languages (NB ChrisBJ) without specialist computer skills and a great deal of time.
We are still learning how to use tools like ChatGPT but they can save a lot of time on large, time consuming tasks if you prompt the AI to give you the best output it can and then critically assess that, removing or correcting sections as necessary.
For education, AI is going to revolutionise what we teach where we teach it when we teach it so good luck to the future generation of teachers.
For International Management institutions, AI might be able to help to balance the need for diversity and intercultural training with the new aim to be environmentally responsible with regard to airline travel.
Note. At the request of several members who were unable to attend the presentation, Grant kindly allowed Ross Ord to record it on video. Please contact us if you would like to view the video.