Happy New Year! At the start of each New Year, we may make resolutions or goals that we would like to focus on. Some of these are more a wish list of do-good habits than a conscientious effort for change and improvement. To kick off the New Year, I thought we could start off on the right foot and reflect on how entrepreneurship education might change and improve for 2024.

What is trending at the moment is artificial intelligence and how this can be embedded into teaching, learning and assessment in an appropriate and ethical manner. Our students were already enquiring last semester as to whether they are allowed to use AI-generated images in their infographic coursework assessment for our first year entrepreneurial thinking module. We foresee much more inquiries and even bold attempts to push the boundaries in using generative AI tools like ChatGPT. In truth, while there has been a great deal of hype about ChatGPT, this is just one example of one type of AI tool. Besides large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT, there are translation tools and AI detection software.

In terms of teaching, learning and assessment, AI tools that transform content, paraphrase content or correct grammar/spelling such as Grammarly, Quilbot and Google Translate, have been used by students for quite some time now especially among international students. For 2024, might we consider how these tools might change and improve enterprise and entrepreneurship education? For example, we know that the word “entrepreneurship” is a very western concept and many of our international students find it challenging to relate to this concept and see themselves as entrepreneurs or intrapreneurs. AI translation software can be encouraged in this instance to help students with their reading, writing and comprehension. We may even find that there is a more holistic and systemic concept that is palatable to a wider group of students. ChatGPT suggests “entrepreneurialism” as it “might be used to denote a broader cultural or societal ethos that is supportive of entrepreneurial endeavours, implying a quality or an ideology that embodies the spirit, attitude, or ethos of being entrepreneurial”

As educators, we are all too familiar with the AI detection tools such as, Turnitin. Some other examples are Copyleaks and GPTZero. You will also be aware that none of these tools presently provide the depth of accuracy or reliability we need to confirm academic misconduct by our students. So for 2024, might we consider how we can make our assessments more authentic? We are after all enterprise educators, and our students should not be writing 2000-word business plans. At my university, we have significantly reduced written essays and reports from our enterprise and entrepreneurship curricula and replaced these with digital storyboards, 6-minute group pitching, vlogs and consultancy projects. I challenge you to do the same.

Ultimately, we circle back to LLMs like ChatGPT and similar generative AI content creation tools, including Midjourney, Bard, Minerva, and Perplexity.ai, to mention a few. It is within our gift as enterprise educators to lead the way in how these tools can be used. I firmly believe that we should seek to understand more about these tools and incorporate them into our teaching, learning and assessments rather than present these tools as an enigma or forbidden fruit. For instance, tools like ChatGPT and Midjourney are proving to be quite useful for our digital storyboarding assessments as students can generate images using their own prompts to empathise with consumer/market needs. It provides a sense of inclusivity for those who are not good at drawing or sourcing images and the assignment becomes more about the story-telling, insights into the consumer and market research rather than artistic drawing.

Integrating AI in enterprise education will come with its risks, but the opportunities for personalised learning, real-world relevance and enhanced collaboration that can foster innovation and critical thinking is one that we cannot afford to miss out on. The future is AI.

Views expressed are my own and not that of my university.

OpenAI. (2023). ChatGPT (Mar 14 version) https://chat.openai.com/chat