ChatGPT's new approach to empowering digital transformation in education

A new generation of artificial intelligence technologies such as ChatGPT has broken through the barriers between time and space and individuals, connecting learning networks in various fields in ancient and modern China and abroad, indicating the unlimited application prospects of large language models. The digital transformation of education should closely combine the mechanism and practical challenges of artificial intelligence technologies such as ChatGPT to promote the transformation of all fields and ecosystems with technology. Technologies such as ChatGPT will play a huge role in many teaching scenarios such as learning, teaching, management, and evaluation, and promote the improvement of teaching and learning efficiency and the innovation of education methods. At the same time, technologies such as ChatGPT also bring challenges to educational ethics and data security. In the face of opportunities and challenges, this study proposes to extend the "application is king" technology and education integration thinking, develop a "high-awareness" generative learning paradigm, create a "collective intelligence" smart education ecosystem, and build a new strategy of "human-machine goodness" digital moral education system.

Mechanism of action

Based on the core capabilities of current generative artificial intelligence, such as innovative content generation, dialogue context understanding, and logical language processing, this paper divides the positive impact of ChatGPT to empower the digital transformation of education into four dimensions: student learning, teacher teaching, education management, and learning evaluation.

• First, ChatGPT can be used to accurately analyze students' learning situations, learning needs and knowledge mastery, create adaptive learning systems, enhance students' learning experience, and provide students with personalized feedback and guidance.
• Second, ChatGPT can assist teachers to create innovative and personalized teaching processes and activity organization methods, complete tasks such as pre-class preparation, data collection, design outline, innovative teaching activities, display knowledge points, enrich teaching content, simulate classrooms, etc., and can be used as tutors or teaching assistants to provide teachers and students with interactive support and advanced teaching materials based on real-time teaching situations.
• Third, ChatGPT promotes data-driven scientific decision-making.
• Fourth, ChatGPT empowers students' knowledge assessment and ability assessment to be process-based, dynamic, high-order and comprehensive, and promotes the practical exploration of process-based evaluation, value-added evaluation and comprehensive evaluation.

Real-world challenges

The risks of AI technologies such as ChatGPT mainly focus on educational ethics and data security. In terms of educational ethical risks, ChatGPT may weaken students' autonomy, creativity and critical thinking in learning, resulting in irrational dependence, students' rational thinking, questioning spirit, imagination ability, emotional experience and creative ability may be squeezed and inhibited, deep learning, concentration time and memory mode may be negatively affected, and the ability to make independent choices may be weakened. On the other hand, the value tendencies and biases brought about by algorithmic discrimination and information cocoons may bring ethical risks. The process of ChatGPT giving answers is like some kind of "technical black box", which is opaque and uninterpretable, resulting in more deceptive generated text.

In terms of data security, ChatGPT needs the support of massive data. These data often contain sensitive information such as students' personal information and behavior habits, and if they are not properly protected, they may be obtained by hackers, malware and other attackers, resulting in data leakage and personal privacy violations. ChatGPT also carries the risk of being exploited with malicious data that affects its training process and generated results.

Practice strategy

This paper builds a new strategy for the digital transformation of education (see Figure 1).

Figure 1 Four strategies for the digital transformation of education

01

Extend the idea of "application is king" technology and education integration

Digital products such as ChatGPT should be used as important application technologies to promote educational equity, improve education quality, improve education governance, and lead educational concept innovation and practical change. The idea of extending "application is king" includes five aspects: life-oriented value orientation, diversified transformation of application mode, promoting the sustainable development of education with innovation, and application supervision and evaluation.

• Eliminate people's resistance to the application of artificial intelligence education and help people understand the essence of technology.
• Closely follow the application value orientation of "life-oriented". Nurturing future-oriented and leading social development is the goal of education, and it is also the purpose of digital transformation of education.
• Diversified development technology application models. ChatGPT brings about the application mode change to the integration of technology and education, and its large model base can be accurately adapted with a small amount of field data.
• Innovation for sustainable development of education. The core meaning of "application is king" is innovation.
• Strengthen the supervision and evaluation of technology applications, and promote human development through human-machine collaboration on the basis of following ethical norms.

02

Develop a "high-awareness" generative learning paradigm

This study defines high-consciousness generative learning as learners who think and explore independently based on the high-consciousness level based on the relationship between old and new knowledge. First of all, learners should be able to ask questions, set topics, use technology and tools to investigate problem space, solution space, etc., then be able to identify and screen information, and finally reorganize and create knowledge through innovative consciousness and thinking skills (such as logic, divergence, criticism, design thinking, etc.) to build their own knowledge works.

03

Create a smart education ecosystem of "collective intelligence"

Realizing smart education is an important goal of the digital transformation of education, and it is necessary to upgrade from "collective intelligence" to "collective intelligence", and continuously create a smart education ecosystem of "collective intelligence" based on the needs of education inspired by human wisdom and the cultivation of talents in a smart society.

04

Build a digital moral education system of "human-machine goodness"

The core content of digital moral education is to cultivate students' sense of moral self-discipline and reshape moral personality. To build a digital moral education system of "human-machine goodness", we can start from the following aspects:

• Formulate policies and digital moral education standards on digital moral education, establish digital moral education standards suitable for different ages and identities, including online ethics, information literacy, security awareness, etc., and incorporate them into the education and training system.
• Artificial intelligence ethics and moral education courses are set up, integrating knowledge such as digital ethics, cyber security, and information literacy into subject teaching, so that students can understand the moral norms and codes of conduct in the digital world, and guide them to form correct digital ethics and moral values.
• Give full play to the advantages of artificial intelligence to generate resources, and with the advantages of rich and diverse digital resources and convenient interaction, the concept of moral education will penetrate into every detail of learning life.
• Improve the evaluation standards, methods and supervision mechanisms of digital moral education, and improve students' awareness of self-management.
• Create a digital moral education exchange platform, improve the joint cultivation mechanism of parents, schools and communities, nurture a beautiful picture of human-machine symbiosis through a series of wisdom contributions and achievement sharing, continue to give full play to the moral education community effect of schools, families and society, and promote the healthy and orderly development of the digital moral education system.
• To create a workforce proficient in moral education and digital technology.
• Build a group of "digital moral education" carriers with radiation and wide coverage, and promote the promotion and popularization of digital moral education.

Source: Open Education Research

From: Educational Technology

Author: Dai Ling, Hu Jiao, Zhu Zhiting

References: Dai Ling, Hu Jiao, Zhu Zhiting. ChatGPT's new strategy for empowering the digital transformation of education[J].Open Education Research,2023,29(04):41-48.)