Education in the Era of Generative Artificial Intelligence (AI): Understanding the Potential Benefits of ChatGPT in Promoting Teaching and Learning

Since its maiden release into the public domain on November 30, 2022, ChatGPT garnered more than one million subscribers within a week. The generative AI tool ⎼ChatGPT took the world by surprise with it sophisticated capacity to carry out remarkably complex tasks. The extraordinary abilities of ChatGPT to perform complex tasks within the field of education has caused mixed feelings among educators, as this advancement in AI seems to revolutionize existing educational praxis. This is an exploratory study that synthesizes recent extant literature to offer some potential benefits and drawbacks of ChatGPT in promoting teaching and learning. Benefits of ChatGPT include but are not limited to promotion of personalized and interactive learning, generating prompts for formative assessment activities that provide ongoing feedback to inform teaching and learning etc. The paper also highlights some inherent limitations in the ChatGPT such as generating wrong information, biases in data training, which may augment existing biases, privacy issues etc. The study offers recommendations on how ChatGPT could be leveraged to maximize teaching and learning. Policy makers, researchers, educators and technology experts could work together and start conversations on how these evolving generative AI tools could be used safely and constructively to improve education and support students’ learning.