But eighteen months later the New South Wales education department has successfully trialled its own version of ChatGPT called ‘EduChatNSW’ and is rolling it out across all schools to help both students and teachers. Far from reactionary, the state department drew together a team of educationalists and AI experts to move slowly and make good decisions. The state of South Australia did much the same, blocking school access to ChatGPT first then developing their own version called ‘EdChat’.
Australia is leading the way with educational chatbots in schools and countries across Asia, North America and Europe are knocking on their door for advice.
For those unsure, ChatGPT is a chatbot which can respond to users' inputs in a conversational dialogue. ChatGPT is trained on immense datasets of text from the internet and can respond by predicting which words go next to each other. For instance, prompt ChatGPT to "create a new scheme of work for a Year 9 Geography curriculum that aligns with the UK National Curriculum" and it will write up a professional, detailed document with curriculum intent, lesson titles and objectives, suggested tasks and all other required parts. Trained on millions of texts found across the internet (including National Curriculum documents, existing Geography schemes of work and lessons) it can create a new document from scratch.
To be clear, this is not in the truest sense artificial intelligence - it is unthinkingly mashing together words in an order that is most likely to create a text that fulfils the prompt. However, the results of this mysterious process are often remarkable.
There are downsides - occasionally ChatGPT will seem to make things up ('hallucinating') and the output is rarely creatively written. Its strengths are in tasks requiring the synthesising of a lot of data like summarising and planning. You can add extra prompts to hone in the accuracy of the output ("write the document in the style of... make sure there is reference to X....").
It is a useful tool for adults in their workplace - I know of many people using it daily to create first drafts of work. The problem with ChatGPT as an educational tool is that when students use it, they intuitively ask it to do their thinking and work for them and ChatGPT obliges.
Back to the Australian pioneers - EdChat and EduChat are bespoke GenAIs which are trained on the normal vast datasets but also, more usefully, on specific school curriculum and teaching and learning policies of the state. Most importantly, EdChat/EduChat are trained to respond as a teacher or LSA would. It attempts to teach rather than tell, guiding and checking understanding in a dialogue meant to engage students and lead to learning.
As students under 18 will be using them, engineers have created robust 'guard rails' which prevent harmful responses.
Early impact reports from trial schools suggest it is making a difference and initial trials have been expanded. Students who have struggled with engagement in lessons have been using it with enthusiasm. Use with EAL students attempting to 'level-leap' at school have similarly produced promising results. Unequal access to technology across Australian states notwithstanding, it is a positive picture and educators are eagerly awaiting more extensive research on outcomes.
Generic tutoring chatbots do already exist but my own experimentation with them has highlighted the need for bespoke units. You can try KhanMigo out for yourself on the free version of ChatGPT. I recently asked it to explain the concept of high pressure in Geography whilst I role-played as a Year 8 student. The responses were adequate but it wasn't the WA curriculum version of high pressure and didn't take into account prior curriculum knowledge in Year 7 (but it did successfully navigate my terse teenage ‘idk’ style responses!)
Another application of GenAI is reduction of teacher workload. I already use ChatGPT to rewrite news articles more concisely with a lower reading age for differentiation and write first drafts of information packs for student centred tasks.
However, ChatGPT not trained on WA data. The effect is therefore generic rather than personalised to our students in a way that a single teacher would struggle to achieve without extensive collaboration.
In contrast, EduChat and EdChat have teacher versions that can likely answer a prompt in a way that is responsive to the school's entire curriculum e.g. 'Re-write this article for a Year 9 student that takes into account the substantive and disciplinary knowledge already learnt in all their subjects over the Year 7 to 8'.
A bespoke chatbot creating impactful resources may help teachers achieve a more sustainable work-life balance - high workload continues to be the most commonly cited reason for teachers leaving the profession.
24/7 bespoke tutoring chatbots such as EdChat and EduChat seem to be a pragmatic use of GenAI in education. With more research on pedagogy and, importantly, the voices of the students using it, it could be a great addition to UK schools' teaching and learning in the years to come.
WA is in a unique position as a 1-to-1 device school so has much more to gain from careful adoption of new technology. I look forward to hearing more discussions about the future of education as we increase our CPD on EdTech this year and explore the existing tools at our fingertips.
Ben Law Smith
