Insights from the CEO

We can definitely welcome the fact that teachers and school professionals are using innovative tools such as AI to facilitate and enhance their work. What’s paradoxical though about the debate around AI in education is: how can something so good for teachers be so bad for students.

A recent research showed that 40% of administrators and 30% of instructors use generative AI daily or weekly. They use it for all kinds of things: curriculum development, designing lessons, conducting research, writing grant proposals, managing budgets, grading student work and designing their own interactive learning tools.

When innovative technology appears on the market it takes a while to understand what it is good for and how to use it ethically and responsibly. People begin using it in all kinds of ways and we experience both the positive and the negative impact. The issue, usually, is not if we should use it or not but in the way we use it and for what. It’s natural to use something if it makes our work easier, but we have to be careful to make sure that we really know what we mean for “easier” since that definition will drive all our decisions about an ethical and responsible use of any innovative technology.

In the case of education, the goal of using AI should be to free the administrator or the teacher from tedious work so that they can dedicate their time to creative thinking and research focused on improving the way students are taught. On the contrary if the goal of using AI is just to make our work easier so that we can work less, then all we are doing is becoming irrelevant and making ourselves dispensable: preparing our job to be done by a machine since we are not adding any value to the process.

Said in a different way, the advantage of using AI (and any other technology for that matter) is that we can work better, not less, and the social and cultural debate around technology, including AI, should focus on defining what “better” means. Moreover, such a debate should include both sides of the equation, that is teachers and students, because the challenges faced is the same by both groups.

It is unrealistic and unwise to simply forbid students from using AI or technology while everywhere else AI usage increase exponentially. It reminds me of those parents that while smoking a cigarette are telling their kids that smoking is bad for them. Our students, the new generations, deserve more respect and we should be aware that young people are looking at us to walk the walk not just talk the talk.

This debate is urgent. The use of AI is increasing, by everyone. Failing to engage in this debate can bring us to the dystopic scenario perfectly described in the observation of a teacher: "This sort of nightmare scenario that we might be running into is students using AI to write papers and teachers using AI to grade the same papers. If that's the case, then what's the purpose of education?"

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