Generative AI in Education: A Study of Educators' Awareness, Sentiments, and Influencing Factors
It addresses educators' perspectives on AI in higher education, but it is incremental as it fills a gap in existing literature without introducing new methods or broad impacts.
This study investigated university instructors' awareness and attitudes towards generative AI tools in education, finding that educators are generally aware and positive, with computer science educators showing more technical confidence but no greater ability to detect AI-generated work.
The rapid advancement of artificial intelligence (AI) and the expanding integration of large language models (LLMs) have ignited a debate about their application in education. This study delves into university instructors' experiences and attitudes toward AI language models, filling a gap in the literature by analyzing educators' perspectives on AI's role in the classroom and its potential impacts on teaching and learning. The objective of this research is to investigate the level of awareness, overall sentiment towardsadoption, and the factors influencing these attitudes for LLMs and generative AI-based tools in higher education. Data was collected through a survey using a Likert scale, which was complemented by follow-up interviews to gain a more nuanced understanding of the instructors' viewpoints. The collected data was processed using statistical and thematic analysis techniques. Our findings reveal that educators are increasingly aware of and generally positive towards these tools. We find no correlation between teaching style and attitude toward generative AI. Finally, while CS educators show far more confidence in their technical understanding of generative AI tools and more positivity towards them than educators in other fields, they show no more confidence in their ability to detect AI-generated work.