Are MOOCs facing a "collapse" in primary and secondary schools? What can artificial intelligence do in the face of personalized education?
2024-08-15
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Following the launch of ChatGPT in 2023, OpenAI dropped another bombshell in 2024: the first text-generated video model Sora. Although these new technologies have not yet entered the field of basic education, their impact on education has been widely discussed. Some even believe that 90% or even 95% of teachers' work in the future will be replaced by artificial intelligence.
As a basic education worker, I believe that the changes that artificial intelligence will bring to education will inevitably be disruptive. No matter what the specific work of teachers will be in the future, human-machine coupling will help education return to its original purpose of educating people and focus more on cultivating students' comprehensive qualities rather than cultivating "exam machines."
What does it mean that MOOCs are facing a "collapse" in primary and secondary schools?
Generally speaking, the purpose of education can be included in three levels: from a human perspective, education undertakes the task of inheriting and developing human civilization; from a national perspective, it is an important support for improving the quality of the nation, providing human resources guarantee for national construction, and improving a country's comprehensive competitiveness in the world; for families and individuals, receiving education is for a better life in the future, including improving happiness at the material and spiritual levels.
Therefore, education is not limited to imparting knowledge and acquiring skills, but a process of growth in students' lives. In particular, the inheritance of civilized thoughts, the cultivation of family and country feelings, and the comprehensive and healthy growth of people's physical, mental and emotional aspects, including the development of personal behavior habits, learning habits, etc., is a long process - the realization of these goals cannot be replaced by artificial intelligence technologies such as ChatGPT.
Once upon a time, many experts believed that the emergence of MOOCs could solve the problem of low teaching quality of ordinary teachers and that the world could share the best educational resources. However, it has been proven that MOOCs are facing a "collapse" in primary and secondary schools. In addition, online classes or live webcast teaching can actually replace classroom teaching several times, but without the atmosphere of collective teaching, without the supervision of teachers, and without the mutual help of classmates, many primary and secondary school students cannot complete their learning tasks independently and consciously. Therefore, even if they complete the single task of imparting knowledge, it is not enough to develop some high-quality MOOCs.
Miguel Nicolelis, a professor of neuroscience at Duke University School of Medicine, who is known as the "father of brain-computer interface", said that human memory occurs in an analog rather than a digital way, and a true brain-computer interface does not exist. Therefore, large models such as ChatGPT can certainly be used as educational interaction tools, development platforms for educational resources, and creative molds for educational scenarios, but these are mainly used in subject-based course learning, which is usually referred to as "intellectual education" in educational activities. But education is far more than intellectual education. Richard Levin is a world-renowned educator who served as president of Yale University from 1993 to 2013. He once said, "If a student graduates from Yale University and actually possesses some very professional knowledge and skills, this is the biggest failure of Yale education."
In the fields of moral education, physical education, labor education, art and aesthetics, and practical experience, the role of artificial intelligence will not be very direct. Physical education, aesthetic education, and labor education emphasize physical and mental health, which requires process experience, food nutrition, and the digestion, absorption, and even strengthening of the body's functional system. This cannot be replaced by a real-world simulator like Sora, nor can it be dominated by ChatGPT. If students are addicted to various virtual scenes created by artificial intelligence, they may fall into "illusory growth."
For example, in terms of aesthetic experience, artificial intelligence technology may help improve the bottom line standards, but it cannot replace practical processes such as sketching, field research, and calligraphy copying. No particularly good practices have been found so far for the uniqueness and diversity of aesthetics.
Personalizing education is a gradual process
The new national curriculum standards propose that the focus of school education is on the cultivation of core competencies, focusing on students' lifelong development, rather than college entrance examination literacy or high school entrance examination literacy. School teaching must pay attention to which behavioral habits, qualities and abilities are beneficial to students' lifelong development.
Entering the digital age, the main goal of education is no longer to train a large number of assembly line operators. On the contrary, with the development of technology, all walks of life have higher and higher requirements for workers' reading ability, mathematical literacy and humanities. Today's society needs creative, curious and self-guided lifelong learners who are able to come up with ideas and put them into practice.
Historically, every major advancement in science and technology has promoted the development of education. The development of information technology, especially digital technology and artificial intelligence, has changed the traditional, uniform education model and provided the possibility for personalized education that teaches students in accordance with their aptitude. The realization of personalized education is not a one-off, subversive revolution, but a gradual process.
The revolution of information technology has not replaced the role of teachers in teaching and guiding. Today's classrooms still cannot do without teachers. Under the interaction between the virtual and real worlds, the content, form and means of education may change, but the profession of teachers will not disappear. Education is still an interaction between people, and an interaction between professional teachers and students.
As far as academic and professional learning is concerned, what is important is not academic learning itself, but that through academic learning, students at least understand what it means to be proficient in a major. A person may not have read Shakespeare's works, but should have studied classic literature in a commentary and analytical way under guidance; one may not understand a certain period of history, but needs to learn how to understand, observe and analyze the world today through history; a philosophy student should be able to understand the basic view of physics: the world is a rational, predictable system, and we can discover its laws through experience; a biology student should have the most basic moral reasoning ability...
Education is aimed at students' lifelong growth, guiding them to think and act independently, and building future-oriented literacy. A person's basic knowledge reserves must be acquired through long-term learning, or even through memorization and recitation. No matter how smart ChatGPT is, it will not directly form values and spiritual qualities in your brain.
Learning space is no longer limited, and learning content must also keep pace with the times
So, how should artificial intelligence technology be applied in the field of education? What kind of changes will education undergo in the intelligent era? These are difficult questions that we must answer. In any case, we must bravely meet this challenge. The education community generally has the following consensus on the vision of future educational changes:
First, the personalization of learning methods. Artificial intelligence makes all-weather interactive learning possible. Learning spaces are no longer limited to schools and homes, but have expanded to any smart space for travel and leisure. In the learning process, language learning efficiency can be effectively promoted through human-computer dialogue, and the path of scientific and technological education can be explored in scene simulation and virtual experiments. All of these will also reshape learning habits.
The second is the personalization of learning content. The personalized diagnosis and precise push of intelligent technology make it possible to implement learning at different paces based on personal learning ability and interest. Therefore, in school, students in the same class can study different subject courses and subject content of different depths, but this still does not prevent everyone from participating in physical education and art classes together, and carrying out other collective activities in the class. Students in school still need to discuss the problems faced in growth and social hot spots as a group, learn to get along with others, and learn to coexist with nature. In terms of learning content, more attention should be paid to the inheritance of classics, the learning of methods and skills, and more attention should be paid to future informatics learning. Especially in the study of life sciences and healthy growth, more attention should be paid to the construction of children's ethics, the ethical education of minors should be put in the forefront, and preventive measures should be increased for minors.
The third is the comprehensiveness of the learning courses. The adjustment of learning subjects is a big step in education reform. Comprehensive courses will become the trend of future learning. In short, it is based on real social (natural and humanistic) problems and seeks solutions. The school will offer various community practice activities. On the one hand, students can understand their own personality traits in rich personal experiences and have a full self-awareness, including interests, character, hobbies, values, etc.; on the other hand, through rich experience, students' comprehensive abilities can be improved, so that students can begin to conduct preliminary exploration of future career roles, and by improving self-awareness and comprehensive decision-making ability, they can understand cooperation, so as to have better problem-solving ability, innovation ability, social emotional ability and other "soft skills".
From curriculum design to student evaluation, artificial intelligence has opened a new era of personalized teaching from primary school to doctoral courses. Based on the current status of school education in China, in the next few years, we will see it gradually transform with the small-scale primary school classes: in the future, students will have fewer class hours for subject learning and more time for science, art, sports and health, achieving the five-pronged education.
Author: He Meilong
Text: He Meilong (Shanghai Geography Special Teacher, Director of Minhang District Education Bureau) Photo: Visual China Editor: Wang Xing Editor-in-Chief: Jiang Peng
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