The schools and universities in Germany should not only see artificial intelligence as a threat, but also see it as an incentive, says the President of Frankfurt’s Goethe University, Prof. Dr. Enrico Schleiff. An AI chatbot like ChatGPT, for example, could even help to improve education, said Schleiff to the German Press Agency. “We should face up to this challenge and use it in a didactically meaningful way. Because the type and form of university education is changing: away from imparting knowledge towards supporting information evaluation.”
According to Schleiff, in the future teachers and lecturers will no longer be able to tell whether students wrote their homework or students their research papers themselves, or whether they wrote them or at least had them help them. However, the consequence of this situation cannot be to ban the use of AI. Rather, the consequence should be to develop new teaching and examination formats with which the individual level of performance can be evaluated.
Assess student performance orally – and insist on sources
There are many ways to do this, on the one hand the oral conversation: the lecturer checks whether the student can summarize the text in their own words. Lecturers would have to deal more personally with their students – and that’s a good development, said Schleiff. However, this requires a significantly better supervision ratio, i.e. fewer students per professorship than there are at German universities today.
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The second way of assessing the level of proficiency is to set the task in such a way that it cannot be answered adequately simply by searching for content from the Internet. The need to cite sources and evidence guarantees this anyway. And ChatGPT does not provide this information – at least not yet.
According to dpa, the Goethe University in Frankfurt/Main wants to open an institute called “Center for Critical Computational Studies”. According to the university president, the sociological, social and legal consequences of digital technologies should be researched there and transformation processes made comprehensible. One element will therefore also be the development of new teaching formats for the digital age.
(tiw)
