Chen Gen: AI will become the 'little teacher” for human learning

文/Chen Gen

While society is discussing artificial intelligence (AI) deep learning, AI has quietly found a new job for itself, and will be upgraded to a human "teaching assistant."

According to the latest news, the world’s most popular online computer learning course, Harvard University’s Introduction to Computer Science (CS50), has leapt into the new era of AI and is being transformed by ChatGPT.

Harvard University's CS50 course is an introductory computer course for all students, and non-majors can also take it as an elective. The course content covers a wide range of topics, including algorithmic thinking and introduction to programming.

The passionate and immersive teaching method of course professor David J. Malan turns a boring lecture on the basics of entry-level network development and software programming into an entertaining course full of interactive exercises , is deeply loved by students, and has become the most popular course at Harvard University, with hundreds of on-campus students and 40,000 "online students" every semester; at the same time, it has also quickly become a phenomenal Internet celebrity course. Nearly 5 million people have taken this course on edX (a massive open online classroom platform created by MIT and Harvard University), and it also has 1.4 million fans on the Youtube channel.

"In the process of course development, it is a challenge to provide customized support for students' specific problems on a large scale because there are many more students online than teachers." Malan said in an interview with the media , even with more than 100 human teaching assistants, it is difficult to fully interact with the growing number of students coming from different time zones and with varying levels of knowledge and experience.

In view of this, this introductory computer course will introduce artificial intelligence. It is understood that the team is currently fine-tuning an AI system to mark students' homework and testing a virtual teaching assistant to evaluate students' programming and provide feedback. During the teaching process, this virtual "teaching assistant" will ask some rhetorical questions and provide suggestions to help students learn, rather than simply finding errors and modifying code errors. In this regard, Professor Malan said that this move will help real-person teaching assistants have more time for offline or online video tutoring.

The use of AI in the CS50 course highlights the power of technology in education, especially in improving course quality and accessibility of online courses. Having said that, the education community still has many concerns about artificial intelligence. AI that is still in the development stage can easily deliver wrong information to students due to errors. As a result, more and more educational institutions are focusing on cracking down on "ChatGPT homework writing", Even disabling AI in schools.

Whether AI empowers education is good or bad depends on what kind of feeding humans provide. After all, no matter how powerful AI technology or deep learning is, it all comes from human training and interpretation.

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