As an innovations instructor for Kern High School District teachers, Cory Olague continually researches the latest trends and tools in the world of educational technology.
What has been the most talked-about topic for the past four months?
ChatGPT.
It is an artificial intelligence chatbot. GPT stands for generative pre-trained transformer. It’s a type of large language model neural network that can answer questions and perform various language processing tasks. It can even generate lines of code.
While the AI chatbot doesn’t seem to have fully arrived in Kern County with regard to usage, the expectation is that it’s coming. And with that there are two main thoughts, said Olague, also an English teacher at Golden Valley High School.
“ChatGPT is the harbinger of doom for writing and creativity, all things school, where students can use it to cheat,” Olague said as one line of thinking of ChatGPT. “That school of thought has teachers wanting students to go back to notebooks and handwritten essays.”
Some reports of ChatGPT — including that it can pass a law bar exam — detail that its results have been so effective that it could lead to widespread cheating and transform traditional classroom teaching methods.
The other main thought on ChatGPT, and Olague includes himself in this group, is that the chatbot is similar to a smartphone or even a calculator. It can be a helpful tool for students and teachers. Teachers can use ChatGPT for help with lesson plans and provide essay samples for students, Olague said.
“We’re kind of on the precipice of an event like the invention of the internet, the personal computer or the calculator,” Olague said. “We’re going to have to rethink how we teach and ChatGPT is going to have to be a tool, whether we like it or not, because it’s just going to be that prevalent.”
The emergence of AI chatbots is inevitable, Olague said, because he doesn’t expect the source to be solely ChatGPT. Google and Microsoft have AI software. DALL-E 2 and Midjourney are AI programs for images.
Policies on use
There are no specific KHSD policies in place regarding the use of ChatGPT, but there are standard restrictions against plagiarism and cheating, Olague said. Many students receive Chromebooks, which have OpenAI — the home of ChatGPT — blocked, Olague said. That site is also blocked for other computers that students use.
Olague also said he has not heard of any instances in which students have used ChatGPT to cheat in the KHSD.
At Cal State Bakersfield, there are also no policies specific to ChatGPT and no instances of using the chatbot to cheat, said Faust Gorham, associate vice president of information and technology services and chief information officer at CSUB.
Gorham said he’s “super optimistic” about ChatGPT but cautioned that it’s best used as a research tool for students.
ChatGPT does not attribute source information, Gorham said. He has told students to attribute ChatGPT if that is a source.
“We want original thought, but so much of it is assembled,” Gorham said. “It’s OK to assemble it as long as you validate that it’s true and you’re pulling it from a source.”
Gorham said cheating/plagiarism detectors, such as Turnitin, are helpful but not foolproof to catch those using ChatGPT. But both Olague and Gorham expect there will be improvements in the detection department in the near future.
GPTZero has become a common GPT detector and it is viewed as accurate.
'Large panic in education'
Bill Moseley, professor of computer science at Bakersfield College, said he’s aware of the “large panic in education right now because people are worried that students will use it to write their term papers and otherwise cheat on assignments.”
But he’s not worried about that. He’s not even concerned that ChatGPT can write code.
“I actually show them up front: ‘Look you can have it write programming code for you and it looks fabulous, works just fine and it runs great,’” said Moseley, who's been at BC for 22 years. “But if you’re here to learn, that's not going to help you.”
He said that ChatGPT has pressed the issue for educators to use “authentic assessment with students.”
“I’m kind of thankful that we’ve reached an age where cheating is so easy on some of these assessments that we’re using because I think it sort of pushes us as educators to think differently and to think in an advanced way about how we’re teaching our students and how we’re assessing what they’ve learned,” he said. “There are plenty of ways to assess student knowledge in ways that are more difficult for a ChatGPT to be a problem.”
Embracing the technology
Moseley doesn’t think AI chatbots should be banned at schools, but rather they should be embraced.
“With a computer in everyone’s pocket these days, it’s hard to ban any sort of access to software inside a school building no matter how hard we try,” he said. “It's a better strategy to embrace it and figure out how to make it useful.”
Recently, there was an instance of a student using ChatGPT and getting caught for plagiarism at the Career and Technical Education Center, said Brian Miller, the principal of CTEC and the Regional Occupational Center. He said the incident became a learning experience for teachers and students. Miller said it was the first instance that had been brought to his attention this year.
A CTEC instructor recognized that a written assignment from a student read much differently than the work the student had been turning in all year, Miller said. The instructor used a detector that estimated that 15 percent of the work was used by a human, Miller said. That caused a red flag, he said.
"I think it’s inevitable that it’s going to be a part of education," Miller said of AI chatbots. "It’s definitely something that’s coming. Just like anything, it’s new technology and we’re going to have to figure out how to use it, how to navigate it. Hopefully use it for good."
KHSD is preparing for ChatGPT by instructing teachers how to use it, which is where Olague steps in. KHSD also has a Computer Using Educators affiliate, KernCUE, available for teachers to learn about the latest in technology ($40 for membership).
Olague provides training sessions to help teachers detect when students are using ChatGPT to cheat. He also has another training session for teachers to use ChatGPT to help develop lesson plans, as well as to develop teaching materials.
Not too many teachers are using ChatGPT just yet, he said. Nearly 200 teachers have taken the instruction.
Olague said he’s been using ChatGPT to help with his lesson planning.
“It’s really good at brainstorming ideas for lessons,” Olague said. “As far as quality, it’s middling. I’m not in the group of teachers that think it’s a godsend at the moment. Its quality is not what I consider my quality of work. It will get there I imagine.”
