The future of learning: generative AI tutors at home, higher order thinking in class.

Although the emergence of generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) has promised certain pedagogical benefits, including personalising education at scale, it has also raised ethical concerns including learners over-relying on the technology, which can potentially impact their critical thinking. Traditional teaching and learning structures design teaching to occur mostly in classrooms, while assessment is undertaken by learners in their homes. With the wide accessibility of GenAI tools that can support academic activities, assessments in uncontrolled environments risk being completed using GenAI, with little or no contribution by the learner. Therefore, the current learning structure, which uses classroom time for didactic content delivery, is inefficient in this new era of GenAI. This teaching and learning approach denies the educational system the opportunity to leverage GenAI for large-scale learning personalisation and also deprives students of guided opportunities for collaboration, critical thinking and development of essential metacognitive skills, which are increasingly becoming crucial in today's world. This article proposes a reconfiguration of teaching and learning structures through a flipped classroom model. As GenAI continues to be democratised, modern education should consider shifting foundational learning to GenAI-powered tutors at home and libraries, while classrooms are designed to support assessment, interactions, collaborations and deeper intellectual engagements. In this flipped-classroom model, students attend classes better prepared with foundational knowledge, allowing the use of classroom time for further synthesis of knowledge, creativity, self-reflection and application of knowledge.