ChatGPT User Experience: Implications for Education

ChatGPT, a general-purpose conversation chatbot released on November 30, 2022, by OpenAI, is expected to impact every aspect of society. However, the potential impacts of this NLP tool on education remain unknown. Such impact can be enormous as the capacity of ChatGPT may drive changes to educational learning goals, learning activities, and assessment and evaluation practices. This study was conducted by piloting ChatGPT to write an academic paper, titled Artificial Intelligence for Education (see Appendix A). The piloting result suggests that ChatGPT is able to help researchers write a paper that is coherent, (partially) accurate, informative, and systematic. The writing is extremely efficient (2-3 hours) and involves very limited professional knowledge from the author. Drawing upon the user experience, I reflect on the potential impacts of ChatGPT, as well as similar AI tools, on education. The paper concludes by suggesting adjusting learning goals—students should be able to use AI tools to conduct subject-domain tasks and education should focus on improving students' creativity and critical thinking rather than general skills. To accomplish the learning goals, researchers should design AI-involved learning tasks to engage students in solving real-world problems. ChatGPT also raises concerns that students may outsource assessment tasks. This paper concludes that new formats of assessments are needed to focus on creativity and critical thinking that AI cannot substitute.