What is our main task? I reached out to our new partner to briefly articulate that “the primary purpose of higher education is to provide advanced learning opportunities beyond the high school level, with the aim of developing a highly skilled and educated workforce, advancing research, knowledge and critical thinking promote and personal development”. That was the guiding principle of ChatGPT Plus on February 18, 2023, which used standard parameters to answer the question “What is the primary purpose of higher education?”.
The Generative Artificial Intelligence app further noted, “Higher education institutions such as universities, colleges and trade schools offer various degrees, certifications and training opportunities that provide students with the knowledge, skills and experience they need to succeed in their chosen ones.” Fields.” To fulfill this lofty mission, we face the daunting new challenge of preparing our learners to integrate and optimize AI into their careers and vision for the future. We would be remiss if we didn’t prepare learners for what Stanford professor, innovator, and CEO of Udacity Sebastian Thrun calls “the greatest single piece we’ll ever see in our lives.”
This is not a task for next year, next semester or even next month. It is the most important role change and challenge for us today. We must not allow the graduating class of 2023 to leave their graduation ceremonies without a basic understanding of what AI is and how it will impact their future careers. If, as ChatGPT says, our mission is to “provide students with the knowledge, skills, and experience to succeed in their chosen fields,” we must not ignore the now secure role of AI in all professional fields. However, I suspect that in many disciplines this has been ignored as faculty continues to teach the skills and capabilities of decades past.
In previous waves of AI and robotics, blue collar jobs were hit the hardest. In particular, assembly line workers and other factory workers who perform repetitive assembly jobs have found their jobs taken over by the more accurate, less expensive, and more efficient AI-controlled machines. Today, especially for colleges and universities, the jobs that will become vulnerable to generative AI are those that comprise a large proportion of graduates, who will sit in robes at graduation ceremonies in May, confident that they are headed for white-collar careers are prepared . If we ask these 2023 graduates three years from now, what will they say about how well prepared they were for their careers?
Aaron Mok and Jacob Zinkula write in Business Insider: “ChatGPT may come for our jobs. Here are the 10 roles AI is most likely to replace.” Among the 10 are tech jobs (coders, computer programmers, software engineers, data analysts); Media professions (advertising, content creation, technical writing, journalism); Jobs in the legal industry (paralegals, paralegals); and finance jobs (financial analysts, personal financial advisors). And that’s not even half of the top 10 fields listed by Mok and Zinkula.
A new poll from the Pew Research Center reports that many Americans are aware of the ways in which they encounter artificial intelligence in everyday life, such as B. Customer service chat bots and product recommendations based on previous purchases. However, only 30 percent of US adults are able to correctly identify all six uses of AI asked about in the survey, underscoring the incomplete and evolving nature of public understanding. That appears to be true in terms of the depth of faculty’s understanding of what AI is like now, or will soon impact the careers their students are preparing for.
So how do we ensure our faculty members are fully aware of AI trends and potential in their disciplines? Can we send them the message of how impactful AI will be in careers?
One response to consider is training faculty members, in small groups at a time, on how to use generative AI responsibly and effectively in their own work, e.g. B. in the revision of curricula and lesson plans. I’m not just talking about using the default parameters when creating ChatGPT prompts, but rather digging a little deeper to understand and use parameters like temperature, model engine, in-the-voice-of, and count to see the potential of better to test out the tool.
While we must now inform faculty members, we must also acknowledge that this is a tool that is actively being developed and updated. The competition brings other tools that offer up-to-date knowledge bases, more options and become more reliable than the current edition of ChatGPT, which of course will also be revised and improved. So we have to project these improvements exactly as one would have predicted in 1988 what would evolve from the then newly released Motorola “bag phone” into handheld smartphones first released in 1994 and the iPhone in 2007. Generative AI development will come much faster than mobile phone development, in part because it will be made available via user software that can be seamlessly upgraded on existing hardware.
In turn, faculty members must exercise due diligence to adapt their teaching to the changing careers students are likely to pursue in their field of study. For students who pay an average of more than $100,000 for a college education, nothing less is expected. We must teach for the future, not through the rear-view mirror. It is unacceptable to students receiving less than forward-thinking instruction. Imagine entire classes of students who carry tens of thousands of dollars in college debt only to show up unqualified for employment because faculty hasn’t bothered to research trends and developments to teach for the jobs that Will be available in 2025 and beyond!
Luckily, we have a new generative AI partner who will help us stay abreast of trends and forecasts. We need to share what we are learning now about how to get the most out of our AI partner with our students this semester. They need to become familiar with the technology as soon as possible. This cannot be left to chance or anyone else, as ever-evolving Generative AI will be our students’ partner as they launch their own careers. Their jobs and their future depend on it.
