The Future of Education

Since its launch in November 2022, Chat GPT has created waves of uncertainty across academia and the education sector. English-language teaching is particularly vulnerable to AI-assisted plagiarism and it is important that as an industry, we are cautious and seek to protect the integrity of our assessments and examinations. This is why it is first crucial that practical strategies are provided to help English-language writing instruction to pivot in curriculum design, strategies that play less to the strengths of large language models and more to their deficiencies, and therefore challenge and teach students most effectively in the production of written language. The strategies we have found most successful have combined formative, classroom learning with strong case-based prompts in assignments that require stages of writing. This is a content-driven approach that short-circuits programming that is “good at form, bad at content”. (UVA, 2023) Of course, it will become important for English-language teachers to seek to incorporate AI text generation into their classes and assist student learning. Our proposed strategy would not pre-empt constructive integration of AI into writing instruction, but rather provide healthy contexts within which to introduce AI strategies, in which the temptation to leave it all to ChatGPT would be mitigated.

Sam Harrington and Dana Roskey are Senior Lecturers at Rotterdam Business School, part of Rotterdam University of Applied Sciences (Hogeschool Rotterdam). They are currently responsible for a range of English programmes within Rotterdam Business School, including curriculum design and coordinating the assessments of over 3,000 attending students across a 4-year bachelor programme taught entirely in English. Their courses are core, mandatory components of the curriculum, which focusses on Business English & Communications. They are currently conducting research within Rotterdam Business School on AI Text Generation and its impact on student assessments and evaluation within the field of Business Communications.