ChatGPT offers significant potential benefits for education while presenting notable challenges that must be addressed for responsible implementation.

Objective: The main goal of this study was to explore how ChatGPT can be used in higher education, identify its limitations, and examine both the advantages and disadvantages of ChatGPT in educational settings through a first rapid literature review.

Methods: The researchers conducted a systematic literature review following the six steps described by Machi and McEvoy (2016) and the approach of Wu et al. (2012). They used keywords "ChatGPT" and "ChatGPT in education" to search for relevant papers across multiple databases including Google Scholar, IEEE Explore, ScienceDirect, and Web of Science. Given the emerging nature of the topic, they also included newspaper articles and blog posts. From an initial pool of 112 records plus 10 additional blog posts, they eliminated duplicates and irrelevant articles, resulting in 41 papers for final analysis. The researchers categorized these papers based on publication location, year, and whether they focused on general education or specific fields. They then synthesized findings to answer three research questions about how students and teachers use ChatGPT, and its advantages and disadvantages in education.

Key Findings:

• ChatGPT serves multiple educational functions: as a research assistant, exam creator, curriculum developer, assessment tool, critical thinking promoter, and text summarizer.
• Primary advantages include providing personalized learning experiences, serving as a writing assistant, aiding language learning, and producing/translating code.
• Major disadvantages revolve around plagiarism concerns (mentioned in 31 of 41 papers), bias due to limited source material, AI hallucinations (incorrect information presented confidently), and privacy issues.
• The literature revealed specific applications in various fields, with medical education and related healthcare fields being the most frequently studied areas.
• Most papers (38 out of 41) were published in 2023, showing the rapidly growing interest in ChatGPT's educational applications since its release in late 2022.
• The literature demonstrated a geographic spread of interest, with most publications coming from North America (16), Asia (11), and Europe (10).

Implications: The study suggests that ChatGPT has the potential to transform education with promises of personalization and creating more interactive learning environments. It highlights that banning ChatGPT is not a viable long-term solution, as traditional assessment methods will inevitably change. The authors propose that educational institutions need to develop clear guidelines for ChatGPT usage that balance its benefits while addressing ethical concerns. The review suggests that ChatGPT could ultimately represent a more significant transformation in education than previous technological innovations like calculators or Google.

Limitations: The research has several limitations, including the rapidly evolving nature of the topic, which means new research is constantly emerging. The review was "rapid" rather than comprehensive, potentially missing relevant studies. Additionally, as ChatGPT was only released in November 2022, long-term studies on its educational impact were not available. The inclusion of non-peer-reviewed sources like blog posts, while necessary given the topic's novelty, may have affected the reliability of some findings.

Future Directions: The authors suggest that future research should focus on defining clear rules for ChatGPT usage in educational settings. They recommend studying the long-term impacts of integrating ChatGPT into classrooms and developing frameworks for addressing ethical challenges like plagiarism, bias, and privacy concerns. Additionally, they suggest exploring how traditional assessment methods need to evolve in response to AI tools and investigating how to best incorporate ChatGPT's capabilities into curriculum design.

Title and Authors: "Harnessing the power of artificial intelligence and ChatGPT in education – a first rapid literature review" by Irfan Jahic, Martin Ebner, and Sandra Schön

Published On: 2023

Published By: Proceedings of EdMedia + Innovate Learning, Association for the Advancement of Computing in Education (AACE)