Coding boot camps, such as General Assembly, are integrating artificial intelligence (AI) into their curriculum to prepare students for an AI-integrated workforce. General Assembly, a pioneer in education and career transformation, is incorporating the AI chatbot ChatGPT into its lesson plans, allowing students to use the tool to complete their homework.
The instructors are teaching students how to responsibly use AI and about the technology’s functioning, with standardised curriculum materials set to be rolled out to all 30,000 of its teachers this summer. The coding instructors are also required to keep up with the pace of technological advancement.
Jeff Maggioncalda, CEO of Coursera, claims that even an English literature class may eventually look like a maths class, where despite having calculators, students are still required to show their work. Similarly, students using ChatGPT to complete their coursework are required to provide citations, showing the exact prompts they fed into the AI tool. Robert Jones, VP of product strategy at General Assembly, believes that it is essential to teach students critical thinking skills that involve learning how to make the most of these technologies.
Coding boot camps, which cost more than £10,000 for a 12-week programme, are incentivised to respond to the changes brought by AI to prevent their business model from becoming obsolete. The uptake of AI will be slower in public education settings.
Code.org, a non-profit that works with school districts to integrate computer science education into classrooms, is also expanding its curriculum to include lessons on how AI is used in natural language processing and image generation. It aims to offer a digital teaching assistant powered by AI to help teachers identify struggling students and monitor cheating.
Coding boot camps are typically focused on specific occupations. However, Jones expects that generative AI will change all kinds of jobs, and create new ones, in the same way the internet did. General Assembly is preparing students to use ChatGPT before AI replaces human instructors in the future, considering that AI will transform about two-thirds of UK occupations, according to a Goldman Sachs report.
