GEN board member featured on National Public Radio
On October 17, 2023, Global Educators Network (GEN) board member Chesa Caparas joined a panel of experts on Forum, a Bay Area radio show, to confront the implications of AI in higher education.
As Forum host Lesley McClurg framed it, “Next month will mark one year since the public release of ChatGPT, the AI-enabled chatbot. The technology immediately sent shockwaves across college campuses: would it revolutionize higher education, or simply lead to widespread cheating and plagiarism? We’ll look at how chatbots and AI are impacting higher ed, from college essays to classroom teaching.”
All the panelists on the radio show, including two undergraduates, agreed that AI was already being routinely used by students to assist with everything from writing research essays to solving complex math problems. McClure asked Caparas about how she was incorporating the technology in the classroom, to which she replied, “I am incorporating it at different levels...I do want students to think critically with it, but not just about the output of the models. I want them to think critically about why they chose certain questions. Why did a certain prompt work or not work? Because I feel like that is the critical thinking skill that they’re going to need: how do we ask better questions?”
When asked about concerns surrounding cheating, Caparas responded, “I don’t frame it as cheating because I think instead, ‘What is it that we’re trying to measure?’” For Caparas, the key concept is intelligence itself. “Intelligence,” she argues, “is about adapting and using tools to answer questions better. Or to solve problems better. On some level, using ChatGPT to answer questions is a new form of intelligence, because they are problem solving in new ways.” In fact, Caparas argues that the greater danger posed by AI is that “students don’t trust themselves anymore. Whenever they get a question, they’re like, ‘Ooh, let me ask ChatGPT.’” So as a teacher, she strongly encourages her students “to ask themselves what are they curious about. And then they start to trust their own questions.” That’s the essence of critical thinking and critical intelligence at any level.
Intelligence is about adapting and using tools to answer questions better. Or to solve problems better. On some level, using ChatGPT to answer questions is a new form of intelligence, because they are problem solving in new ways.
As for the looming threats of AI at an institutional level, Caparas admits that, "It has eroded trust. Not just trust among students but trust between students and teachers. And trust in education in general.”
Forum’s producers were first drawn to Caparas’ work through several recent programs sponsored by GEN that focused on the explosive impacts of ChatGPT and OpenAI on teaching and learning internationally. In a GEN YouTube channel interview, she gave an overview of the potential impacts of artificial intelligence in international education from her perspective as a recent Fulbright Scholar in the Philippines. For multilingual and multicultural students and scholars in particular, she argued, it was already becoming clear that AI could be a tremendous tool for supercharging both learning and research.
One month later, GEN hosted an Educators Inquiry Meetup featuring Mission Community College Professor and Faculty Senate President Aram Shepard, which was designed to “help college instructors understand the significant disruption machine writing will bring to many current teaching practices by providing an overview of AI text generators, including what they are, their current abilities, and what they are likely to be capable of in the near future.” Not surprisingly, that workshop attracted more than 100 participants from community colleges across the United States.
Most recently, Caparas—who teaches English and Asian American and Asian Studies as a professor at De Anza Community College—was invited to join a master’s degree program in information and knowledge strategy at Columbia's School of Professional Studies, where her work focuses on integrating AI into higher education. Caparas' journey from Fulbright Scholar to NPR to Columbia underscores the potential of the Global Educators Network to bring human intelligence to bear on some of the most pressing issues facing community college educators today.
In the final minutes of the Forum interview, Caparas offered some closing thoughts: “To anybody who is interested in writing or being creative in general: these generative AI, they are predictors. So if you want what you write or create to be predictable, then it’s understandable that you use them. But I feel like creativity is more important than generativity.” She concluded her remarks with a plea: “The last thing I want to say is just a request for compassion for teachers.” Despite all the confusion and controversy still swirling around AI in education, that’s one statement GEN can stand behind.