"To what extent do you think Artificial Intelligence (AI) is already changing education?". It was with this question that Pedro Oliveira, Dean of the Nova School of Business & Economics (Nova SBE) opened the debate during the third episode of Futurecast, a school podcast about future trends in various business areas. Leid Zejnilovic, PhD Professor in Technological Change and Entrepreneurship, assured us that ChatGPT and other Large Language Models (LLM) have already changed the way we teach and learn.
"I think we need to promote experimentation," said the professor. "I think our role is to promote experimentation, to make sure that our students, the faculty, but also our corporate partners, are experimenting and reflecting - critically."
The Dean assures us that he is also "very enthusiastic" about the prospect of adopting these new technologies for the benefit of teachers and students, despite the "many challenges facing us".
"I can think of these LLMs, ChatGPT, for example, as a tutor who is sitting next to me, who can help me do my work, who is helping our students and our faculty do their work. And I think this is a good thing. There will be a base, eventually, that will be produced by a machine or an algorithm, so that we can then put in our own time and our natural intelligence, building on that base. [...] I don't think it would be very smart to try to stop ChatGPT, or other apps or LLMs. What we have to do, and I don't think we have any other choice, is embrace them."
Leid Zejnilovic also said that "we are entering an incredible world of opportunities, where education will be available to many people in an adaptive way, to improve the educational process. The future of education with AI is simply incredible, at least from what we know now. Whether or not it will be used for other purposes is another story, but that shouldn't stop us from acting to do the right thing and to educate people to do more and better and make life better for everyone."
Watch the full episode:
