Hot take: AI doesn’t have to be the enemy of education.
We’ve seen YouTube adverts showcasing the latest apps to solve your maths homework and effortlessly bag you A* after A*. Of course, if you’re a practical person, you’ll realise that this is the worst possible solution to solving your educational woes. Employing technology to do the work for you, instead of actively engaging with problems and solving them yourself, teaches you very little. Even when you read a solution to, say, an algebraic equation, you’re still only passively engaging with the material. For this reason, AI has become the bane of classrooms everywhere. It often does the job so well, that doing the work yourself can feel pointless.
But what if we used AI to make high-level education free to the masses?
Independent Learning
This is the question I asked myself in December, as a recently graduated A-Level student who studied English Literature, English Language and Media Studies.
After deciding that jumping straight into university wasn’t the best route for me as a budding journalist, I questioned how I could indulge my love of learning without the hefty financial burden of further education. Luckily, after some thinking, I arrived at the answer — autodidactism. In simple terms, self-learning.
If you’ve ever taught yourself anything, such as learning to play the guitar or knitting, you’re an autodidact. I have an unhealthy number of hobbies, so I’m an autodidact many times over at this point. Recently, due to a long-standing fascination with the subject and an annoying tendency to question everything, I decided that I would teach myself Philosophy. Sadly, my ambition far outweighed my ability to figure out how to approach such an undertaking.
How Can AI Help?
Good question. I’m a freelance writer, and as such I have a somewhat complicated relationship with AI. I don’t hate the technology; rather, I dislike some of the ways it is being used. Producing generic content and taking jobs away from talented wordsmiths and artists — who are arguably capable of producing more nuanced and original content than Chat-GPT’s copycatting — feels like a poor use of something with such potential. But what constitutes a good use of AI? I found this out when I tried to work out the finer details of my self-education master plan.
Content and Curriculum on Command
The internet presented a dazzling array of opinions on how I should approach self-teaching Philosophy. It’s almost as if I needed somebody who could examine the whole of the internet and return with the perfect curriculum to study my chosen subject.
Oh, wait. Couldn’t Opera AI in my Opera browser do that?
Aria, can you produce a university-level philosophy curriculum that I can use to self-teach philosophy?
Sure enough, the same technology that had previously been the bane of my existence when surfing freelance job boards returned a reading list for years one, two, three and four of a typical undergraduate philosophy degree, working up from Ancient Philosophy to contemporary issues such as the Philosophy of Mind. I also tried GPT-3, which produced a very similar output.
What AI did here was give me a guideline of what I should be learning. I used this to integrate lectures I found online from respected universities along with textbooks, creating a rudimentary yet more substantial curriculum. I am not, after all, aiming to take exams to grab an undergraduate degree (yet). But what I am doing, is gaining an in-depth understanding of a topic that fascinates me. Don’t get me wrong, taking classes at a university will be more organised and almost certainly far more efficient than AI-assisted self-teaching. But this method comes at a tiny fraction of the price of formal study. Since I don’t have access to tutors or anyone who studies the subject themselves, the effort must come from me. Here too, however, I realised that I could ask AI questions about what I am studying, and even have conversations with it about some of the ideas I am learning.
In the absence of subject specialists, using AI to exchange questions and thoughts works surprisingly well! I could engage it in all manner of wacky philosophical discussions and it returned sensible answers and suggestions that made me think more deeply about the subject than if I were to merely jot down notes. Notes are still a key part of my studies, but this back-and-forth is equally important to ensure I’m on the right track.
A Fantastic Learning Tool when Used Right
At its best, AI is a unique learning tool for those who want to know more but do not wish to go down the conventional higher education route. Without AI’s assistance, I would have struggled to know where to begin. I still, however, think that university would be more efficient and effective on many fronts (I’m currently struggling to write a proper essay on Philosophy and dearly wish I had a tutor), but for the masses, AI could be the perfect entry point to study a subject affordably.
The takeaway here is that AI should not be used to replace active learning. Rather, we can utilise this brilliant technology to advance our knowledge and improve our quality of life as a result. As long as you have an internet connection, your educational journey is only a few clicks away.
*Disclaimer: I do not sponsor Opera’s Aria — I use Opera as my default browser so it was what I had available at the time.
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