Equity and Fairness Challenges in Online Learning in the Age of ChatGPT

Recent research suggest that equity remained a neglected consideration in most learning analytics and continues to be an esoteric concept. Online learning poses many additional equity challenges that largely concerns gender, access to resources, socio-economic conditions, fairness, or feeling of isolation. In this article, we discuss a novel equity concern in the emerging online learning environment often aided by large language models such as ChatGPT. It has been observed that ChatGPT-like models can be a significantly powerful learning and tutoring aid for learners. However, in online learning and in the absence of a human instructor, ChatGPT could introduce inequity in form of "wrongful" tutoring that could be devastatingly harmful for learners, which we call Ignorant Bias. We illustrate this form of inequity with an illustrative example.