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Half Of Teachers Believe AI Will Change Education For The Better

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Half of secondary-level teachers believe AI will change education for the better, according to a new survey.

But a similar proportion say their schools have either blocked or restricted access to AI in one form or another, reflecting the level of turmoil it has already prompted in the education sector.

Students using the technology to cheat in assessments and coursework was quickly identified as one of the risks to education when OpenAI released ChatGPT late last year.

This was one of the concerns, alongside the impact on student mental health, identified by school leaders earlier this month, who warned that AI posed a “real and present” danger to education.

Fears over the impact of AI are far from confined to the classroom. Experts including Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, have signed a letter warning that the technology could lead to the “extinction” of humanity.

The signatories also included Professors Geoffrey Hinton and Yoshua Bengio, two of the triumvirate described as the “godfathers” of AI, with Prof Bengio expressing regret over not giving safety a higher priority.

The third “godfather”, Professor Yann LeCunn, has said that apocalyptic warnings are overblown, however.

But a global survey of teachers has found that, while many harbor doubts over the impact of AI, a majority feel that the potential benefits outweigh the risks.

More than half - 52% - of the secondary-level teachers surveyed said they believed AI would change the teaching profession for the better.

Among the perceived benefits were using AI to teach students how to interact with and understand AI models (backed by 60%), teaching critical thinking (56%) and as a tool to edit students' work (52%).

More than half (56%) said that the school curriculum and assessments had to be adapted to account for students using AI-generated content.

But deep divisions over the use of AI are illustrated by the level of concern among educators, according to the survey of 1,800 secondary-level teachers, across Australia, Finland, France, Germany, Japan, the Netherlands, Singapore, the U.K. and the U.S.

More than three quarters (78%) said they shared concerns over the negative impact of AI on learning outcomes, with two thirds (66%) saying both that they feared the value of writings as a skill would be diminished, and that it would limit student creativity.

And almost half (48%) of teachers said their schools had already blocked or restricted the use of AI in the classroom.

Teachers in the U.K., U.S., Germany and Finland were more likely to have positive feelings about AI than their counterparts in Singapore, Japan and France.

Secondary-level teachers were also convinced of the importance of students learning digital skills, according to the survey, carried out for consultancy firm Capgemini.

More than eight in 10 (82%) said education in digital skills should be compulsory, and 64% said digital skills were important to help students become job-ready.

But while 70% of teachers said they believed students possessed the necessary skills, that confidence was not shared by their students, with only 55% of 16-18-year-olds agreeing.

Teachers in large cities were more likely to have confidence in their students' digital skills than those in rural areas (83% vs 40%), while urban teachers were more likely than their rural counterparts to believe digital skills were important (94% vs 67%).

“It is our conviction that as technologies like Generative AI increasingly shape our world and amplify the criticality of foundational digital skills, they also hold the key to bridging gaps through self-paced learning, hyper-personalization and other such capabilities, said Shobha Meera, chief corporate responsibility officer at Capgemini.

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