Educators’ Academic Insights on Artificial Intelligence: Challenges and Opportunities

Abstract

The study on " Educators’ Academic Insights on Artificial Intelligence – Challenges and Opportunities" was conducted to gain a deeper understanding of the rapidly evolving phenomenon of AI in education. This research serves multiple objectives. Firstly, it aims to foster awareness regarding the integration of AI into teaching and learning practices by providing clear definitions of AI and explaining key AI-related terms. It also seeks to illustrate AI's diverse applications within a broader context, with a special focus on AI-supported research and learning platforms. Additionally, the study delves into the current discourse surrounding chatbots, contributing to address the central research question. Lastly, this initiative aims to provide valuable recommendations for effectively harnessing AI in education, enhancing the teaching and learning experience. The researchers conducted a review of literature concerning artificial intelligence. They adopted a qualitative method, using open-ended questions to collect feedback from educators globally, including those from the University of Technology and Applied Sciences, Al Musannah, and participants in the online discussion forum at Oxford English Learning Exchange.com. The qualitative data was analysed, leading to the identification of key themes and subthemes derived from the responses of research participants. The study's findings incorporated a wide range of concerns expressed by educators, comprising ten key subthemes. These concerns ranged from doubts about AI's ability to replace human educators and fears of its potential to hinder student development to worries about its hyped popularity and its perceived futuristic nature. Educators stressed the importance of effective AI training while emphasizing the need to prioritize human expertise over excessive reliance on AI. They were also acutely aware of both the advantages and disadvantages of AI, viewing it as both a potential boon and a looming threat. Furthermore, educators recognized the potential for enjoyable experiences with AI and acknowledged the pivotal role of users in determining the extent of AI adoption. Content analysis revealed additional apprehensions, such as concerns about job displacement, AI's impact on critical thinking, teacher frustration in assessing AI-assisted student writing, the use of AI-generated content for assessments, potential erosion of human services, stifling of user and learner creativity by AI, the risk of errors in AI-generated information, opportunities for cheating in exams, and concerns about the overreliance on and overrating of AI platforms. Positively, the findings included an array of opportunities that AI platforms offer. Study participants highlighted various aspects of these opportunities that surpassed their concerns and associated risks. The opportunities are categorized into twenty subthemes: enhancing learner motivation, facilitating template creation, utilizing AI as an educational aid, promoting proper training and fostering positive AI usage, harnessing AI for teaching challenging subjects, enabling personalized learning experiences, offering an interactive tutoring experience, supporting remote learning, facilitating self-study, providing comprehensive educational content overviews, giving instantaneous feedback and evaluation, functioning as search engines and chatbots, enabling content validation, efficiency in terms of cost and time, streamlining material preparation, facilitating skill and language enhancement, promoting familiarity with topics and vocabulary, enabling text-to-speech and speech-to-text conversions, editing multimedia elements, and facilitating content generation.