Quality teaching requires good planning to map the curriculum to a delivery schedule and detailed planning of each teaching session. An excellent learning experience requires teachers to plan creative and engaging learning activities. Easing teachers of the burden of planning and preparation could allow them to spend more time focussing on the needs of individual and to be able to provide better individual feedback, thus improve learner outcomes. Emerging technologies can now enable this to happen. Open AI’s release of GPT-3 (Generative Pre-trained Transformer) in 2020 is set to revolutionise many aspects of our lives including education.
GPT-3 is the natural language interface to the world’s largest neural network that generates original content, based on the user asking it to ‘do something’. This huge neural network is capable of generating extremely realistic text, making it a powerful tool for many different applications. Transform Education plans to use GPT-3 to build the Teaching Generator Station (TGS) platform. A suite of content ‘generators’ will help teachers produce materials for their courses including schemes of work, lesson plans, engaging learning activities (e.g., classroom debate topics, assessments such as multiple-choice questions for quizzes). The project will be trialled in different learning environments and will gain input from a range of vocational teachers. The platform will have integrated feedback forms to allow teachers to report on the value of the outputs and a forum for teachers and developers to discuss the platform’s functionality and effectiveness.