Having suddenly arrived one day last November a fully-formed, free-to-the-entire-world revolution in artificial intelligence (AI), ChatGPT has understandably elicited strong reactions. In education, its ability to produce clear, detailed writing for just about any topic and task has many worried that students will use it to circumvent the learning process; some schools have banned it, others have called it “The End of High School English.”

Our greatest fears about ChatGPT probably won’t be realized (they rarely are with new technologies), but given its immediate accessibility and capability, instructors should start thinking about how it might impact their work. Here are some of the top things to know now.

It won’t be going away. 

ChatGPT is not only here to stay, but with companies like Microsoft investing billions in it, we can likely expect its integration into major productivity software such as Word in the next few years. Long term, AI like ChatGPT may well become part of the fabric of everyday work, much like spell check is today. In addition to providing easier access to this technology, such a development would also increase the legitimacy of its use.

It will likely de-emphasize a focus on content in the classroom…

At one time, higher education’s value was partly due to exclusive access to content: textbooks, lectures, and other materials students couldn’t get anywhere else. Today, Internet search engines can curate this (or similar) content and make it available to anyone. ChatGPT goes even further by neatly presenting such content in clear, organized explanations that don’t require the effort of searching for and integrating information from multiple sources. Thus, higher education as an avenue to content access will hold much less value and students may increasingly realize that classes organized mostly around delivering content are a poor investment of their time and money.

…and increase the need for personal, relevant, engaging educational experiences.

Just as simple content delivery will be devalued in the classroom, assignments that stay too close to content regurgitation will also lose value, as it is the easiest type of work replicated by ChatGPT and similar technologies. Educators will have to push assignments and activities further, asking students to apply content knowledge to new situations, integrate their personal experiences and thoughts into their work, and complete coursework of direct relevance to their personal and professional lives. In general, classes will have to move students towards higher-order thinking processes, and higher education will increasingly create its value from offering these richer, more engaging educational experiences.

It necessitates a conversation about how to use it well.

ChatGPT is a tool, and like all tools, it can be used well or used poorly. We highlight some good use cases below, but it’s worth noting that ChatGPT does raise one concern we haven’t seen with previous tech: a way for students to circumvent critical thinking processes. Even in the best designed educational experiences, ChatGPT and its future iterations will likely allow students to produce some amount of passable work without having to put in the cognitive effort that produces true competency. And while so much of the immediate focus has been on its implications for writing, ChatGPT is also great at coding and problem-solving, so the effects could be felt across the humanities, social sciences, and STEM fields alike. At the individual, course, and institutional levels, then, we need to talk with students about the potential learning losses that an over reliance on ChatGPT could cause.

We need to be proactive.

Though the future of this technology is uncertain, we can start preparing ourselves and our students for it today with a few steps:

1. If you haven’t yet, experiment with ChatGPT while it’s still free. It’s probably the only way to appreciate what it can do, and that familiarity will allow you to have more informed discussions with students.
2. Evaluate to what degree your current assignments ask students to reproduce content. Then, try running your assignments through ChatGPT and see how well the program can produce a passing assignment. If it can, start thinking about how you might be able to redesign this work. Can you have students apply the content to a new, novel, or contemporary situation? Can you have students reflect on how the content might apply to their own lives? Can you have students do something creative—even visual—with the content?
3. Explore the upsides of ChatGPT and use it for your own work. ChatGPT can help create new cases and situations for students to respond to, can jump-start lesson planning, can provide the outline for lectures, and more. Visit this site to review more examples of instructor use cases.
4. Have students use it as well. It can feel counterintuitive to “advertise” ChatGPT, but keep in mind that students already know about it and are using it. Show them some ways they can use it well while remaining in the bounds of academic integrity and so it doesn’t lead to learning loss. Visit this site to find some good examples of how students can productively use ChatGPT, and visit this site to find even more examples of student use of ChatGPT.
5. No matter how you use it (or not), have a conversation with students about ChatGPT and technologies like it. ChatGPT is so new that no one is exactly sure what to do with it yet. What do you think about it? What do they think about it? How could they use it well, and how could they use it poorly? When is using it hurting their skill and knowledge development? How can it be used to catalyze their learning?
   
   Whatever you think of ChatGPT, know that it’s not going anywhere and it won’t be rendered moot by policy. Get to know it now and how you can use it well.