Embracing Disruptive Technologies

• Business schools have a responsibility to disrupt the thinking around new technologies and AI tools.
• To ensure AI tools are used to enhance student learning, rather than detract from it, business educators need to share their experience and strategies with colleagues.
• Universities are using immersive virtual world technologies like the metaverse to enable students to interact with various business environments.

Transcript

Isabelle Bajeux-Besnainou: [0:17] ChatGPT, new tool is really scaring a lot of our professors. We're trying to think about how these tools are going to be an enhancement of the teaching.

[0:34] That's a very, very important question, and that's a question that we need to address right away. We need to make sure that we're finding solutions right away.

[0:43] What's important is to really start having these discussions with our professors, making sure that they're sharing their experience, their ideas, their strategies in terms of using the tool to enhance the learning of the students, instead of at the detriment of the learning of the students.

[1:11] I have an example that I can use here. One of the professor at Tepper, back in December, when the tool was very new, used ChatGPT to generate an answer to the final exam question that she was going to give to her students.

[1:31] She got the answer from ChatGPT, which was a pretty good answer, but by far not a perfect answer. What she did was to give the answer generated by ChatGPT to the students, telling them, "This has been written by ChatGPT. It's not good enough, improve."

Using the tool to enhance the learning of the students, instead of at the detriment of the learning of the students.

[1:52] There's another tool that is coming up and that is very important in terms of technology coming in our toolbox for our students, and that's the metaverse.

[2:08] There are some very obvious applications of the metaverse when you're thinking about astronomy, chemistry, when you're thinking about history, and reliving historical moments instead of just hearing the stories about that. In a business context, there are some applications that are also possible.

[2:31] I've heard some of my dean colleagues using the metaverse to recreate a retail environment, for example, for a marketing course, or using it for entrepreneurship and making sure that they use the metaverse to recreate a business environment that the students will be able to interact with in a very realistic way.

[2:58] Is that going to take off or not is still a big question mark. I have a lot of doubts about that, and I'm really, really curious to see what's going to happen with this technology.