ChatGPT is a paradigm shift that education should embrace fully, according to Dr. Mark van Rijmenan, founder of Datafloq and The Digital Speaker.

"The education industry needs to embrace the rise of AI and adapt to the new reality. The technology will evolve faster than teachers, professors, and school management can anticipate, and students will always find new ways to incorporate the latest technologies,” writes in a recent post to Datafloq.

Mark makes the argument that traditional, lecture-based teaching methods have been shown to impart relatively little knowledge to students, resulting in retention rates of only 5% to 10%. By contrast, he writes, “participatory teaching methods drastically improve memory retention rates, with group discussions bringing it to 50 per cent and learning by doing to 75 per cent..”

He further writes, “Hearing and reading can be useful in some use cases, but the best would be to learn by doing, and that is where augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR) come into play.”

ChatGPT is not the only manifestation of generative AI, it will no doubt continuously improve over the short and long terms, and it won't be the last product or platform in this world. Thus, Mark believes not only in ChatGPT specifically but in the entire nascent world of generative AI.

As he writes in this piece, “Personalized learning, AI coaching, adaptable immersive content, hyper-realistic role-playing games with artificially intelligent NPCs (non-playing characters), or synthetic humans, are the only way forward for our education system. Continuing to teach our children, as well as our employees, as we have done for over a century, is no longer sufficient.”