| | OCTOBER 20239It has still been the rare institution that has fully embraced the ability to have students interacting en masse with the professor being more the guide on the side to the crowd in the cloudon teaching in the same way that humans have taught each other for millennia: the sage on the stage. One learned person (teacher, professor, lecturer, instructor) reading their notes to the dozens, hundreds, or thousands who would listen passively, hopefully taking notes to then regurgitate the content at a later stage in some form of assessment.It has still been the rare institution that has fully embraced the ability to have students interacting en masse, with the professor being more the guide on the side to the crowd in the cloud. Teachers, professors, and instructors love to impart knowledge. That's what we get into teaching, for it's nice for a class of students (and at the university level, these would be adults in their twenties, thirties, or older) to respect and acknowledge how 'clever' one is. But let us not remember that thanks to the growth of these technologies over the past thirty years, we now have all the knowledge in the world online. Available to anyone for free. They might need to look for it, and they won't necessarily have the critical thinking skills needed to sort the truth from the nonsense, to identify the teachers in the crowd who are true experts and the ones who trade in rumors, gossip, and misinformation. So surely all universities should be focusing more on teaching critical thinking rather than imparting knowledge, right? That's certainly what we've changed the Bachelor of Business Administration degree at Hult International Business School to do: focusing on the five core skills (critical thinking, creative thinking, communication, collaboration, and learning to learn) rather than focusing purely on teaching students what they can get elsewhere.And so it's time to address the AI elephant in the room. This latest disruptive technology will change society in every way possible. Some jobs will be lost; others will be created. It will give us the ability to have personalized experiences, including personalized education, in a way that was only available to the very rich previously. Some universities have already said that any use of generative AI is banned whilst they look straight ahead in their tanker at the iceberg 4 miles ahead of them. Some, like Hult, have created a policy that is aimed at embracing AI and teaching students how to navigate it sensibly, responsibly, and ethically. There's no point in teaching our students how to do analysis that AI will be doing in two years; they have to know how to be better than AI and provide more value to their future employers.This is what excites me about this period at the birth of AI. Its capabilities and scope will increase exponentially in the coming years, so we, in the education sphere, need to ask ourselves how we can embrace this new tool to give a completely different, personalized, exceptional educational experience to our students. Just as students' jobs will change very quickly, and they will need to know how to use AI in the workplace, our jobs as educators are changing now, and we can either adapt or die.
< Page 8 | Page 10 >