AI-ALOE Builds on ChatGPT for Innovations in Adult Learning and Online Education
The goal of the National AI Institute for Adult Learning and Online Education (AI-ALOE) is to use AI to enhance the proficiency of adult learning through personalization of online education, and to thereby transform the reskilling and upskilling of the workforce. To accomplish this goal, AI-ALOE conducts three types of research. (1) Use-Inspired AI research on teaching and learning assistants for concept and skill learning, interactive videos and books, question asking and question answering, modeling and simulation, adaptive feedback, and self-directed learning; (2) Foundational AI research on a mutual theory of mind between humans and AI agents, encompassing machine teaching and teachable AI agents, metacognition and self-explanation in AI agents, and information visualization; (3) Both Use-Inspired and Foundational AI research on the collection, standardization, and analysis of large-scale data on learning, and the use of data analytics by teachers, learners, and the AI assistants for personalized learning. The AI-ALOE Spring 2023 Newsletter provides details on these projects ).
Recent advances in Generative AI such as ChatGPT and GPT-4 offer new opportunities for learning and education. ChatGPT is a conversational agent based on the state-of-the-art GPT family of large language models that can often generate human-like responses to given prompts. However, these systems also suffer from problems and pitfalls such as biases and hallucinations. Further, much of the inner functioning of GPT-4 remains opaque to the research community. Thus, a challenge for AI-ALOE is how make use of the opportunities afforded by GPT-4 and ChatGPT safely while keeping the focus squarely on its strategic goals. Below are four examples of AI-ALOE’s safe and responsible use of ChatGPT as a tool for natural language processing.
1. Teacher Presence: A well-known problem in online education is the lack of teacher presence. In many online contexts, learners learn from digital content (video lessons, ebooks) prepared by a teacher, but otherwise have little interaction with the teacher. However, for many learners, teacher-learner interaction is critical to motivation and engagement. In cases where a teacher in fact is available to the learners, the load on the teacher in a large, asynchronous, and geographically distributed online class can become overwhelming. Thus, in 2016, Georgia Tech’s Design & Intelligence Laboratory (dilab.gatech.edu) developed Jill Watson, the world’s first virtual teaching assistant that automatically answers learners’ routine questions anytime anyplace; this amplifies the voice and reach of teachers by helping with the task of answering routine questions. Over the years, we have successfully deployed Jill Watson in more than 40 online classes with more than 12,000 students and more than 300 human teaching assistants. However, scaling the construction and deployment for new classes has been a challenge. A preliminary version of Jill Watson powered by ChatGPT is now operational in our laboratory. The new Jill (Jill+) will have the capability to directly ingest class documents for answering questions, making it an efficient and scalable tool for teachers and learners. We intend to deploy Jill+ in many more classes in the near future than was feasible earlier. With multiple safety checks in place, Jill+ will be a safe and reliable tool to explore how adult learners approach learning with the advent of ChatGPT.
2. Social Presence: Another common problem in online education is the lack of social interaction because of the asynchronous and geographically distributed nature of the learning. However, learning is not only a cognitive process but also a social and emotional process and thus requires social connectedness. Further, for many learners, the opportunities for social interaction and professional networking are part of the motivation for learning. Georgia Tech’s Design & Intelligence Laboratory (dilab.gatech.edu) has developed a virtual social agent named SAMI that uses AI to enhance social connectedness in online learning. SAMI uses natural language processing to analyze learners’ posts; extract each learner’s location, interests, hobbies, and other entities; build a knowledge model for each learner; and suggest personalized social connections to the learners based on their shared identity. We have successfully deployed SAMI in more than 30 online classes with more than 8,000 students. Preliminary evidence indicates that the SAMI’s innovative technology can help improve learners’ feelings of social connectedness and belonging. However, natural language processing in SAMI has required much effort and scaling SAMI to match students across an increasing set of features has been a challenge. Now SAMI can outsource the natural language processing task to ChatGPT, thereby accelerating SAMI’s development and enabling features that a few weeks ago seemed like too much work. We intend to deploy the new SAMI (SAMI+) in several online classes soon. We expect that SAMI+ will suggest more meaningful matches and result in higher social presence.
3. Teachable assistants: The Teachable AI Lab at Georgia Institute of Technology is harnessing the power of GPT to democratize access to intelligent tutoring systems by making it easier for educators to create them. Recognizing the immense potential of GPT to fluently handle the variability of human language, the lab’s innovative approach employs GPT to transform teacher instructions, provided interactively via natural language dialogues, into rich, symbolic, hierarchical representations of task knowledge. The learned knowledge can then be employed within a tutoring system to provide personalized hints, feedback, and instructional recommendations to students at scale. In other words, our approach will let teachers create virtual teaching assistants through teaching. These AI assistants, in turn, can then provide personalized instruction to all the students in a class. This groundbreaking method overcomes some of the key limitations of using GPT on its own (e.g., via ChatGPT) to directly tutor students. GPT is good at processing language, but when students ask it for tutoring guidance, it regularly makes mistakes in its reasoning. Perhaps more troubling from a pedagogical perspective, it does not recognize its mistakes and confidently presents them as correct, which can hinder students learning. Our innovative solution uses GPT to translate language instruction into symbolic structures and then uses tutoring system methods to provide students with accurate and explainable instruction. The Teachable AI Lab’s cutting-edge solution aims to transform how people learn, empowering educators to harness the full potential of advanced AI technologies in the classroom.
4. Intelligent textbooks: Finally, the Language and Educational Analytics Research Laboratory at Vanderbilt University is using large-language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT in the iTell framework to provide personalized feedback to users of intelligent textbooks. iTell is an adaptable framework that integrates multiple AI technologies and tasks to make learning within textbooks more adaptive, interactive, and personalized. LLMs are used in iTell in two ways. First, at the end of chapter sections, users are asked to summarize the material read. We use LLMs to assess the accuracy of the content provided in these summaries as well as to examine the wording used. The LLM results are then formatted to provide feedback to the user. We are also using LLMs to generate questions specific to paragraphs within sections that users may have skimmed or skipped based on reading patterns. These questions (along with their answers) are meant to ensure users’ comprehension of text material. In addition, we plan on integrating ChatGPT within the iTell framework as an assistant that will allow users to ask questions about the readings to get a better understanding of the material.
These are exciting times for AI, including AI in learning and education! The challenge for AI-ALOE is to make good use of the capabilities of the new AI technologies, such as ChatGPT and GPT-4, responsibly while remaining focused on its strategic goal of enhancing the quality of online education for adult learners. AI-ALOE is leading the way in exploring this uncharted space and exploiting new opportunities.
