From Enigma to a Generative AI Teaching–learning Paradigm
摘要
Everybody is talking about artificial intelligence (AI), and generative artificial intelligence (GAI) has created most of the recent buzz. It seems to be this century’s magic bullet. However, AI is nothing new; it has been around in concept for centuries. In this chapter, we describe the origins of GAI and how it came to be used in the modern large language models that are transforming almost every activity taking place in today’s societies. Our focus of interest is on university education. Specifically, we seek to (i) answer the question of whether the AI spring is sparking a radical transformation in education in Spain; (ii) propose a restructuring of the teaching–learning partnership in light of the developments in GAI; and (iii) reveal the results of a pilot experiment involving the use of Copilot as a coding assistant, carried out in the Business Statistics course of the bachelor’s degree in Business Administration and Management at the Faculty of Law and Social Sciences (University of Castilla-La Mancha at Toledo, Spain). The feedback from the students was encouraging, but the results of the experiment less so: after a few weeks, the students said that the effort they had to devote to this initiative (which did not directly affect their grade but only translated into benefits in terms of learning) meant they had less time to study other subjects delivered via traditional teaching methods. Therefore, we conclude that individual teachers should not be the ones tasked with incorporating new AI developments into the teaching–learning process. It should be the institutions, working in coordination, that address the challenge of integrating AI into educational processes when designing new curricula, thus ensuring that these subjects are not vying for students’ study time.