Is AI a passing fad?
Artificial intelligence (AI) and ChatGPT are all the rage right now.

Generative AI can do some amazing things, like writing essays on a given topic or creating stunning videos simply from text prompts. With such a powerful tool, the possibilities are truly mind-boggling.

No wonder companies are jumping onto the AI bandwagon, and those that aren’t run the risk of being seen as falling behind.

According to a recent Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) report, 27% of jobs are at high risk due to the AI revolution.

In December last year, the European Parliament passed the world’s first Act on AI, and other nations, including Malaysia, are soon to follow suit.

Academia has also been caught up in the fervour of AI. Universities across the globe have launched a slew of new programmes in AI, and it has become fertile ground for new research opportunities.

Universities dedicated to AI, such as the Mohamed bin Zayed University of AI in the Middle East, have even been established.

Higher Education Minister Datuk Seri Dr Zambry Abdul Kadir has also recently mooted establishing Malaysia’s first AI polytechnic (An eye on AI, Sunday Star, March 17, 2024).

Will AI be a game-changer in the way that some evangelists would have us believe? Will it one day even render universities obsolete? Who knows.

In this techno-centric world, it’s increasingly hard to distinguish between what might be the beginning of a new dawn, and a trendy new wave that will inevitably pass with time.

After all, it was not that long ago that evangelists were touting blockchain and virtual reality (VR) as the next big things. It seems every new technological innovation carries with it a degree of hype.

Research firm Gartner even coined a phrase for it, known as the Gartner Hype Cycle, where the hype is at its greatest at the “peak of inflated expectations” before settling down into the “trough of disillusionment”, “scope of enlightenment” and eventual “plateau of productivity”.

We are also now living in an age of education evangelism. During the Covid-19 pandemic, when universities were forced to conduct teaching and learning remotely, there was a view that online learning would become the new norm.

Post-pandemic, this has shown not to be the case, and most universities, including my own, seem to have largely returned to on-campus, face-to-face learning. Yes, perhaps there is now a greater smattering of online lectures and remnants of online assessment, but we’ve largely returned to the old norm rather than embracing a new one.

Don’t get me wrong – there are probably more universities offering online degrees than ever before, but it has enhanced or complemented rather than displaced traditional face-to-face learning.

Even before the global pandemic, massive open online courses (MOOCs) were all the rage and thought to be a disruptor of sorts. Though the major MOOC players are still around, they are hardly thriving, and the MOOC movement has largely come and gone. If one visits the Malaysia MOOC website hosted on openlearning.com, you will find a total of only four courses.

In Gartner’s hype cycle, we’ve reached the plateau of productivity. The MOOC evangelists seem to have moved on, as have the gamification and mobile learning evangelists before them. I’m not sure how long the micro-credential evangelists will be around for.

There’s nothing wrong with getting excited about new innovations, but we should not forget about the basics, like staff development, teacher training, well-equipped classrooms, and reliable Internet access.

Truth be told, many of us would prefer to read about the last developments in AI versus the last developments in education pedagogy. The problem comes when such trends become a distraction for issues that deserve genuine attention or worse still, somehow become embedded in strategy, organisational objectives and crude KPIs.

In Malaysia, we seem to be a nation obsessed with creating new roadmaps and continually chasing the next big thing.

In five years, AI may no longer be the “in-thing”, and the peak of inflated expectations will have passed. But not to worry, because the next “big thing” will have arrived by then to replace it.

Prof Wing Lam is the provost and chief executive officer at University of Reading Malaysia, an international branch campus of University of Reading, United Kingdom. He has held a variety of academic positions in Malaysia, Singapore and the UK. Prof Wing completed his PhD in computer science at King’s College London in 1994. He has published over 80 peer-reviewed articles and journals. His current areas of research interest include technology and innovation. The views expressed here are the writer’s own.
education,hybrid learning,Higher Education Ministry,AI,University of Reading Malaysia,Gartner Hype Cycle,Moocs
Artificial intelligence (AI) and ChatGPT are all the rage right now.