The above description of ChatGPT includes a prompt followed by ChatGPT’s description of itself.

Summary

This summary was originally generated by ChatGPT and then easily and quickly refined by the author.

This article discusses the potential benefits and challenges of using ChatGPT 3.5 in the field of adult foundational education. It suggests that teachers and tutors can use ChatGPT to develop tailored curricula for students, customized to their reading levels, language needs, and industry-specific vocabulary. The article emphasizes the importance of understanding ChatGPT's limitations and risks, as it is not 100% accurate or accountable.

Three steps are suggested to get started with ChatGPT: gaining background information about the tool, signing up for free on the OpenAI website, and practicing using ChatGPT to learn something. The author recommends asking clear, specific questions or giving instructions related to a chosen topic, evaluating ChatGPT's responses for accuracy and bias, and reviewing and testing the knowledge acquired.

The author also mentions various ways to use ChatGPT, including seeking information, recommendations, explanations, comparisons, and language translations. He highlights the ability to customize ChatGPT's responses, request more detailed or simplified explanations, and obtain shorter or longer versions of generated texts. The author concludes by mentioning the importance of understanding how to maximize the benefits and minimize the risks of using AI chatbots like ChatGPT in adult foundational education.

Introduction

Suppose that as an adult foundational education (i.e., adult literacy, basic education, secondary education, ESOL/ESL, IET, etc.) teacher or tutor you could quickly develop a tailored curriculum for some of your students. For example, what if each personalized curriculum could be quickly written at the student’s reading level, with translations of some words in your immigrant or refugee students’ first languages, with vocabulary and examples from the industry in which they work, or in other ways customized to their needs.

Perhaps you are a teacher or tutor who writes curriculum, lesson plans, student evaluations, emails, articles, or does other kinds of professional writing. If so, what if you had a way not only to spell check and grammar check these texts but to get from AI software useful suggestions for improving the clarity, conciseness, tone, or other aspects of each kind of writing you do. What if you could get more detail and examples of how to improve your specific kind of writing and, over time, learn how to improve your professional writing?

Suppose that your students have already discovered the capacity of ChatGPT or another AI chatbot to be their personal tutor, to develop for them a customized lesson or curriculum to learn something they want or need to know. For now at least, there are some risks as well as opportunities in using ChatGPT for this purpose. One way to address the risks or challenges is to explicitly teach your students how to use ChatGPT, or another AI chatbot, to maximize the benefits and reduce the risks.

Where to begin?

How ChatGPT can Help you as a Learner, and as a Teacher or Tutor

If you haven’t used ChatGPT 3.5 yet, you can sign up quickly, easily and for free. (Go to https://www.openai.com/.) You can use it as a personal mentor or tutor, or as an assistant researcher, idea generator, storyteller, writer, evaluator, assessor or in other ways I haven’t discovered yet. It can tap an enormous amount of information, retrievable usually in seconds, in response to your questions or instructions. It can put its responses in contexts that you might suggest, and it offers cautions about what it cannot do or points out its limitations. However, as a free service, ChatGPT 3.5 is not 100% accurate or accountable. You – and your adult learners – need to understand its limitations and its risks.

The information and suggestions below have been influenced by my use of ChatGPT 3.5. They have also been influenced by several recent articles about ChatGPT, and by YouTube videos about how any learner could use ChatGPT. The focus of this article is on how teachers and tutors, especially those in the adult foundational education field, might use ChatGPT. Some of these suggestions, however, may also be relevant to other kinds of teachers and tutors, may apply to other AI Chatbots and other versions of ChatGPT, and may be adapted for adult learners to use on their own.

To learn about ChatGPT you can do these three things:

1. Get some background information about ChatGPT by reading about or watching videos that explain what it is and how it works. This will help you to have a basic understanding of the tool and what it can do. Here are links to six articles that may help you understand what ChatGPT is and why it’s important. The last two are written by adult educator, Rachel Riggs, at World Education’s EdTech Center.

• “Decoding NLP: How computers understand human language?”

• "Artificial Intelligence: What It Is and Why It Matters"

• “What is GPT-3 and Why is it Important?”

• “What is GPT-3” An article in which there is also a link to a short video

• “ChatGPT and Dall-E and AI, Oh my! Part 1: What’s all the buzz about?”  Part 1 of a two-part blog by Rachel Riggs from World Education’s Ed Tech Center

• “ChatGPT and Dall-E and AI, Oh my! Part 2: A Balanced Approach” Part 2 of a two-part blog by Rachel Riggs from World Education’s Ed Tech Center

Here are links to several YouTube videos that provide details describing and showing how ChatGPT might be used. The first three were especially helpful to me in writing this article.

• ChatGPT Tutorial: How to Use ChatGPT For Beginners 2023 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gaf_jCnA6mc

• How to use ChatGPT to Learn Things https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YSDvbYsmf6I

• How to Use ChatGPT for Learning and Practicing English https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-IBxIXBaei8

• A series of four videos created by the EdTech Center at World Education specifically for adult foundational educators. Below are the links to the videos and my summaries of them.

In the first EdTech Bytes Generative Artificial Intelligence video, “Zero to Hero” Rachel Riggs is the presenter. From 7:40 to16:45 she offers some useful definitions and many examples of “generative artificial intelligence”. She includes: “artificial intelligence”, “generative artificial intelligence”, “large language models”, such as Chat GPT, Bard, and Sydney, and “image generators” such as DALL-E, Midjourney, and stable Diffusion. From 16:46 to 21:26 she describes how they work.  From 21:27 – 22:55 she talks about why it matters, providing a little background on the release of a free ChatGPT tool for the general public in November, 2022 and a few major events that have followed. From 22:56 to 25:37 she shares thoughts about how adult foundational education practitioners have navigated new technologies before, can navigate this rapidly changing technology now, and the need for people, processes, and systems to acquire digital resilience.

In the second EdTech Bytes Generative Artificial Intelligence video,“The Power of Open,” Jeff Goumas is the presenter.  He covers: What “open” means and why it matters, including definitions of “open”, “Creative Commons licensing”, ”technology”, and “Status Quo Bias”. He describes issues for “content ownership” in the new Generative Artificial Intelligence environment: what constitutes ownership and how technology challenges this.  He then discusses “Technology, AI and Open.”. He raises a key question about ChatGPT, for example, “What content has been used to ‘train’ the AI?”  

Jeff Goumas concludes with what he believes are the implications for education. He describes a ChatGPT experiment on an important education need, contextualized in industries such as construction, health care, and information technology. He has asked ChatGPT to write five word problems in the context of working in each of these industries that address a particular College and Career Readiness skill standard that he also provided. The results, produced in under 20 seconds for each industry, were a total of 20 word problems addressing this standard. He points out that he then had to ask himself if the information was accurate, realistic, free from bias, and where it came from. He shows the importance of human decision-making in the process by giving an example from the development of SkillBlox as part of the EdTech Center CrowdED learning initiative. He concludes with a few implications and considerations in using content generated by artificial intelligence and the importance of keeping in mind the impact on human beings.

In the third EdTech Bytes Generative Artificial Intelligence video, “Making it Work”, Zoe Reinecke, from 1:00 to 3:22 describes the differing reactions to ChatGPT by K-12, higher education, and adult foundational educators. She then points out, from 3:23 to 4:29, that AI is not a teacher, but is a potentially useful tool for teachers. This is followed by four panelists who talk about specific applications of AI in Adult foundational education: Javier Suárez-Álvarez, Ph.D, Project Director for the Adult Skills Development Program at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, from 5:14  - 10:27, who talks about training AI for test development; Anson Green, the Director of Digital and Automation Upskilling at Tyson Foods, and formerly the state Director of Adult Basic Education at the Texas Workforce Commission, from 10:28 – 16:44, who talks about adapting technical instructions for employees; Lina Kh. Rahme, M.Ed, an ESL instructor at the Teaching Women Enhanced English program, from 14:47 – 21:42 ,  who talks about sparking creativity to empower women learners in Lebanon; and Yeonjai Rah, PhD, ESL Instructor and Professional Development Trainer at Austin Community College, whose work using ChatGPT to support language learners was shared on her behalf by Rachel Riggs, from 21:44 – 26:16.

The fourth EdTechBytes Generative Artificial Intelligence video had not been posted at the time of this article’s publication. However, in this presentation Rachel Riggs began to address some problems and opportunities with generative AI. She spoke about the importance of equity access, and that data biases are a challenge in the large data sets used by generative AI. She emphasized the importance of adult foundational education teachers and tutors letting their adult learners know when they are using AI, by including statements such as “ChatGPT has helped me with this by….” She also emphasized the importance of enabling adult learners to construct and share knowledge using generative AI, that is, that they should be able to create and contribute, not just passively read ChatGPT output. 

2. Sign up. Go to https://www.openai.com/ and, in just a few minutes, you can sign up to use ChatGPT 3.5 for free.

3. Practice using ChatGPT to learn something.

• Choose a question or topic you want learn (more) about. This could be almost anything; for example, something to do with a course you are taking; with local, national or world events (up to September 2021); a home appliance you want to learn to repair; or a question about a sport or a hobby.

• Ask ChatGPT a question or give it an instruction (command): Once you have chosen a topic, provide ChatGPT with a brief, clear, specific question or instruction related to the topic. In seconds, ChatGPT will create a written response addressing your inquiry.

• Provide follow-up questions or instructions, for example, to get more detailed information, or information at a lower or more advanced level.

• Evaluate ChatGPT’s responses for accuracy and bias. You may need to double-check the information provided using other sources or to consider potential limitations or biases in the way ChatGPT has been trained to respond. ChatGPT is an AI large language model and, as such, will sometimes have limitations and biases, and sometimes information that is incorrect.

• Review what you have learned: After asking ChatGPT your questions, or studying a particular topic you have queried it about, review what you have learned to make sure you understand the key concepts. You can test yourself by asking ChatGPT to “test” or “quiz” you about the “key concepts” or the “main ideas” of your topic.

More ways to use ChatGPT                                                                                                                    

There are a large number of ways to use ChatGPT. I have included some of them below and put them in categories, although some ChatGPT features fit more than one category.  For example, you can ask for:

Personal or professional help in getting information, recommendations, explanations, comparisons, language translations, brainstorming ideas, or learning how to do something

Information.  Ask ChatGPT about facts or detail questions such as: “Who was the 21st President of the United States?” just as you might ask a search engine such as Google, but ChatGPT is conversational; it answers your question directly instead of sending you to websites where you may find answers. You can also ask for definitions.

Recommendations. For example, you could ask, “Can you recommend at least three Thai restaurants in Milwaukee?” or “Can you recommend five books on climate change?” or “What are some good ways to engage adults in online or hybrid learning?”

Explanations. For example, you can ask how nuclear fission is different from nuclear fusion, or how a refrigerator that does not use electricity, that instead burns kerosene, can keep food cold. If the explanation is too advanced you can ask ChatGPT to adjust the difficulty level, to “make the explanation simpler.”

Comparisons. You can ask, for example, “What are the gasoline savings between electric vehicle (EV) cars, EV cars with hybrid, and cars that run on gas?” (Remember that the information that ChatGPT 3.5 draws upon was only up to date in September 2021.)

Language translations. ChatGPT language translation may be more accurate than other translation programs because it takes context and social cues into account. You can ask a follow-up question, too, such as “How do you pronounce that?” and you will get text that shows you how the translation should sound. You can also enter a particular text and have it translated into another language, including into some languages that do not use a standard U.S. alphabet.

Brainstorming ideas. You can explain and ask, for example, “I need to give a (talk, presentation, speech) about (some topic). Can you give me some ideas about what I could say?”

How to do something. You can ask, for example, how to fix a toilet, stop floorboards from squeaking, or repair a bicycle flat tire.  You can ask for step-by-step directions or guidance on how to perform a specific task or solve a specific problem.

Customization of ChatGPT’s responses, for example:

Getting more or better responses to your questions. If you don’t like the first answer to your question because it lacks detail, you can click on “Regenerate response” and get a longer, more detailed answer that you might like better. You could also use the “thumbs down” icon, one of three icons found at the top of each ChatGPT response. (If you are satisfied, you can use the “thumbs up” icon.)

Follow-up. You can ask follow-up questions such as “You wrote that there are many reasons why we should eat vegetables. What are all the reasons?” or “Expand on your explanation….” Or “Can you give more examples?” or just “more…”

Shorter or longer versions of a ChatGPT-written text. For example, you can ask ChatGPT to “re-write the response” it has given you “in under 300 words,” or to “provide a longer version of this.”

More Advanced or less advanced text. For example, you can ask ChatGPT to “Write this for a complete beginner” or “Write a more advanced version of this.” You can ask for text at higher or lower levels of literacy (e.g. a ChatGPT question or instruction could include “Write this at a fifth-grade level.”)

Summaries. Use a long response from ChatGPT or copy into ChatGPT a long text and ask for a summary.

Briefer version, or bullet point lists from descriptive text. You may, for example, want to take a long text you have written and ask ChatGPT to “Write it in fewer words.” or to “Use bullet points.”

Help with instruction or administrative tasks as a teacher or tutor

Creating curriculum or course outlines. Many teachers who are also course or curriculum writers have already discovered this feature and use it to suggest topics or headings that they may not have considered for a curriculum or sections of a curriculum.

Lesson Planning. You can ask ChatGPT to create a lesson plan for your adult learners. It will be more accurate and detailed if you provide information about the topic of the lesson plan, the learning objectives, the students it is intended for, their level, and other information that may be relevant, such as “This is an Integrated Education and Training class, and the occupational training is for positions as home health aides. Be sure to review the output for accuracy.

Generating lists. For example, “Create a list of fifteen widely used learning management systems (LMS)” (Although the data only includes popular LMS’s as of September 2021, the list is still useful, if not complete.)

“Original” writing. A ChatGPT request can save you time as a teacher, for example by drafting emails or email replies; curriculum or lesson plans; job applications, or by providing ideas for writing something else. However, the ChatGPT response may have errors or information that you may need to check. It may have taken another’s writing word for word without properly crediting the author. If you submit this as your own writing without properly citing it as from ChatGPT or, in some cases even if you do, what you have written may not be acceptable, for example, to a course instructor or journal editor. Note that you can learn how to cite ChatGPT in APA style by going to https://apastyle.apa.org/blog/how-to-cite-chatgpt

Editing. You can enter a text into ChatGPT and ask for: translation in one or more languages); grammar or spelling checks; synonyms or antonyms; or proofreading. You can ask if you have properly formatted your citations, for example in APL, MLA, or other formats. You can ask ChatGPT to review your text for clarity, conciseness, flow, structure, tone or style, word choice, conformity to certain guidelines or standards that you provide to ChatGPT, or you can ask it for overall feedback on a piece of writing you provide.

Pros and cons for a topic. ChatGPT can generate advantages and disadvantages for many topics, for example, the pros and cons of enrolling in a particular kind of graduate program, or occupational training program.

Feedback on text written by you or by an adult learner. Enter into ChatGPT, for example, a lesson plan, article, letter, blogpost, or something else that you have written, and ask, “Give me feedback on what is good and what is not.” One possibility, if you are evaluating students’ papers, is to enter the paper and ask for an evaluation. Do not assume that what you get is correct or complete; instead, use it as a check for completeness after you have already written your own evaluation. Try entering the student’s writing and your evaluation and ask ChatGPT, “What else might I include in my evaluation?”  You can also ask ChatGPT to rewrite the text or parts of the text that you know need improvement. You can ask ChatGPT to “Give me an analysis of the writing style.” You can add as a follow-up instruction, “What things would you change, add or leave out?” You could ask for “better adjectives”, “better description” and more. Again, this requires your judgement. Don’t assume that ChatGPT will get everything right. Use it to get an analysis of text, some of which may be useful. If you decide to use ChatGPT as a personal writing tutor, you may be able to improve your writing. Your adult learners may be able to improve their writing too, especially if you give them specific instructions on how to use ChatGPT in this way.

Role playing. Assign ChatGPT a role and context. For example, tell it “Pretend you are an (adult education, ESL or ESOL, high school equivalency, etc.) program administrator interviewing me for a (particular) teaching job. Ask me three easy practice job interview questions and ten hard practice interview questions for this job.” Or “You are USCIS-certified interviewer. Ask me ten practice U.S. Citizenship interview questions.” Also, you can ask ChatGPT how you (or your student) did in responding in this, or in a different kind of, role play. You can role play in a language you are learning, for example, and ask ChatGPT, afterward to suggest improvements to your (written) responses. For this kind of role-playing, you will need to give ChatGPT details about the context, such as “Let’s role play that you are a waiter in a restaurant in Bogotá, Colombia. I will ask you questions in Spanish, and you will reply in Spanish.” Afterward you can ask as a follow-up question, “How could my Spanish in this context be improved?”

More GPT queries or commands.  You can ask ChatGPT itself what to ask it! It will give you a few of the things it can do. You can keep hitting “Regenerate Response” to get more responses. You can make the question more specific, such, as “What kinds of questions can I ask you about the American Civil War?” or “What can I ask you about solving quadratic equations?” or “What can I ask you about being a good parent?” or “What can I ask you about starting up or building up a business?” The answers, at first, are general. To get the detail you may need, ask follow-up questions about these responses.

Much more. Think of ChatGPT as a person (but remember it’s software) and write to it in the way you might ask a person. For example, “Can you write this at a fourth-grade reading level?” or “The audience for this is someone who is a beginner.” Or “This is too long (or short)” or “Can you focus more on….?”  Also remember that ChatGPT remembers everything it has already written within a specific chat, so if the response to your follow-up questions does not meet your needs, try again, ask for more detail, ask for examples, or ask for more information about a particular detail of a response. Think of ChatGPT as your personal tutor helping you learn something.

Helping adult learners use Chat GPT

This is a topic for another article, including if and when it is appropriate to introduce ChatGPT to adult learners, what the opportunities and risks might be in their using the free version, ChatGPT 3.5, and more; but here are a few possibilities to consider. Some of the personal help features listed above might be used by some adult learners, such as getting information, recommendations, explanations, comparisons, language translations, brainstorming ideas, or learning how to do something. Adult learners might benefit from using chat GPT to role play a job interview or a U.S. Citizenship interview. They might also benefit from being able to take a response from ChatGPT or a text they have copied into ChatGPT and asking it to summarize the text. Many could benefit from the ability of ChatGPT to make a text less or more difficult to read. It may be useful as a way for adult learners to more easily begin or complete tasks such as outlining.

However, it's important at this phase of its development at least, to use ChatGPT thoughtfully and cautiously, to be aware of its limitations, and to teach your adult learners how to use it thoughtfully. For example, a common media literacy approach to helping students develop good ChatGPT analysis strategies could be to ask ChatGPT to create an essay on a topic; in this case, do not adjust what it has written based on fact- and bias-checking or word choice, tone, grammar or punctuation choices. Instead, display the essay to your class as it was written. Explain that it was created by an AI software program called ChatGPT (and if your students don’t already know what that is, tell them.) Explain that there may be factual or interpretation errors in the essay, perhaps bias, or even distortions or important omissions of fact, and that there also could be other issues in the writing.  Ask your students to find as many of these as they can. Then take what they have found, item by item, and demonstrate how you would fact check these, or how you might recognize bias or distortion. You might mention that it is possible that some of the text was appropriated and not credited to the person who wrote it, and show them how you would go about finding the original (e.g. by copying that part of the text into a search engine, or using Turnitin’s AI writing detection software or other software that can now check for ChatGPT plagiarism.) Show your adult learners how a citation is needed for the purloined text. In other words, teach the critical analysis skills we all need when examining text, and mention that similar kinds of skills may also be needed to analyze the accuracy and bias of AI-generated images and videos.

If you haven’t yet used ChatGPT 3.5 I hope this article has made you curious enough to try it; If you have tried it, perhaps you have learned some other beneficial ways to use it as an adult foundational education teacher or tutor. I believe it could be helpful to have an online community of adult foundational education ChatGPT users or, perhaps more broadly, education users of a range of AI Chatbots, including ChatGPT. I am considering creating a threaded discussion group where such users can share opportunities and challenges they have discovered, and what strategies they have found or created to overcome the challenges. Let me know if you would be interested in joining a free, asynchronous threaded discussion group such as this.

David J. Rosen                                                                                                          

djrosen123@gmail.com