Generative AI as a Disruptive Technology for Educational Systems

Disruptive technologies are groundbreaking innovations that fundamentally transform existing markets, create new economic opportunities, and render previous technologies or business models obsolete by offering more efficient, cost-effective, and user-friendly solutions.

In my talk I illustrate, from cognitive, pedagogical, and curricular perspectives, why Generative AI (GenAI) can be viewed as a disruptive technology for educational systems worldwide. To support this claim, we revisit cognitive, pedagogical, and curricular models and theories, and explore their implementation and implications regarding GenAI in educational settings. Among the pedagogical and cognitive theories and models we explore are constructivism and constructionism, motivation theories, Bloom’s taxonomy, didactic transposition, the knowledge-skills-attitudes (KSA) model, and the 21st century skills set.

One conclusion of the above claim is that there is an urgent need to rethink and apply new educational formats and models so as to remain relevant in the current transforming era that we are all witnessing but whose future is still unclear and cannot be predicted.

One important insight that I aim for my audience to take away from this talk is that the education community should not perceive GenAI as a threat, but rather as an opportunity. That is, by enabling to increase the level of abstraction and complexity of the tasks we assign students and of the skills and competencies that we seek to impart, GenAI makes it possible to achieve pedagogical goals and impart the values that we have always sought to impart but could not, mainly but not only due to the prevailing organizational culture of education systems whose roots were planted in the first industrial revolution, which took place two hundred years ago. As a disruptive technology, GenAI will actually force education systems to adapt to, and skip directly to, the 5th industrial revolution, which is taking place now.

Speaker: Orit Hazzan, Technion

Attend in person, or watch onlline here.