AI is an interesting beast. This is something that scares teachers everywhere throughout the world. They would not use track GPT to generate their own assignments. Would students become dumber than what they are using AI? These are questions that are common in teachers’ circles. However, the fact of the matter that we are always missing out in these kinds of conversations is that AI is only as powerful as the person using it. What if I tell you that you can spend less amount of time studying and learn more effectively if you use AI the right way? Let me show you how. Let’s get going.
Whenever you’re learning something, it usually happens in three steps. Firstly, building a knowledge base. Secondly, building a conceptual clarity. And thirdly, testing that conceptual clarity. When you break down these steps and look into all of them in detail, you will realize that these steps have certain aspects that require a lot of energy or cognitive load. Of course, everyone has a limited amount of energy to put in a certain task. So how can AI help you here? AI can help you automate all of your tasks in such a way that your cognitive load gets reduced and you can use this cognitive load to study for longer, study more, and learn better.
Imagine you’re learning a new language. How would you go about it? Would you first learn the characters, then learn words, learn phrases, and then sentences? Or will you go about listening to words, listening to sentences, and then trying to decipher what each word means, what each word is written like? Both of it is possible, but depending upon your cognitive understanding, the amount of cognitive load that will be required will be higher in one of these and over the other. So the important task over here is to create a flow to build your knowledge base.
See, if you’re studying organic chemistry, there’s a ton of information available on this. How do you understand and learn this? This is by building a flow of what chapter to go about first. So what you can use AI here for is a simple problem. You can generate a syllabus and a lesson plan for someone learning this topic for the first time. The student is in this grade, this board, and this country, and is referring to whatever textbook or reference book that you mentioned for it. What does this exactly do? This generates the flow to your topic. Moreover, if you ask it to generate a study plan, it will allocate some number of days to revise the topic as well. This will help you plan out your studies properly.
Now that we’ve already built a knowledge base, it’s time to connect the dots to enhance your conceptual understanding. In the previous video, I had asked you people to frame questions to build a conceptual understanding. Be it as stupid as it sounds, but those questions are important. Sometimes, what happens is that these questions have answers that you may not exactly understand to the simple Google search. Here again, you can use AI. ChatGPT is a very good language learning model. It can comprehend information and present it in such a way that you can understand it easily. Moreover, it sends it and remembers conversations. It keeps this flow of information smooth.
What prompt you can use? Say, if you’re studying the concept of work, you can generate a prompt like, ‘I want to understand the concept of work. How do I link the definition of work to the formula? Give me some analogies that make it easier to understand work and the advantages and limitations of those analogies.’ What does this do? This links your concept to other things that you may see or experience in your daily life. We learn things by linking new concepts to things that we already know. ChatGPT does a good job of listing down these things to reduce the amount of time it will require to search this up and helping you to use that time that you have saved in critical thinking, in critical analysis of those analogies, of those understanding of your concept and formula.
So, to test your conceptual understanding, I suggest practice papers. Sometimes, it becomes difficult to source these questions, especially when it is behind a paywall. What you could do is, ChatGPT could just ask it to generate questions. Say, you want short answer questions, say you want long answer questions, say you want fill in the blanks, true or false, whatever. Generate those questions for those topics. Ensure that you get accurate questions and answer them. If you want specific papers, you could even use AI-powered search engines like Bing AI, where you can just type in whatever you want to look for. You might even get websites linked to actual papers.
Now, you can put in a prompt like, ‘I want to study Force. Give me some questions to practice.’ So on and so forth. So there you have it, these three simple steps automated using AI. Remember, AI is only as powerful as the person using it. Make sure you make the most of the resources available to you. That’s all for today. Thank you and happy learning.
