24/7 Learning Partner: Is Chatgpt Your New Study Buddy?

24/7 Learning Partner: Is Chatgpt Your New Study Buddy?

Navaratnam Vejaratnam, Heng Han Kok, Hafatin Natrah Binti Md NohaSafar, Alexander Tay Guan Meng, Frankie Goh Song Peng

Faculty of Accountancy and Management Economics, New Era University College, Kajang, Malaysia.

DOI: https://dx.doi.org/10.47772/IJRISS.2025.903SEDU0282

Received: 19 May 2025; Accepted: 23 May 2025; Published: 23 June 2025

ABSTRACT

The world of education is changing quickly, and AI has come with some tools that have the potential to deeply change the way learning happens. While many AI-powered chatbots exist, one has emerged as a versatile 24/7 learning partner–ChatGPT, a sophisticated conversational AI program created by OpenAI that provides tailored, interactive, and adaptable assistance to students. The present study sought to examine the multiple facets of ChatGPT contributions to contemporary education as an academic productivity tool, critical thinking aid and self-directed learning facilitator. It furthermore offers insights on the challenges − net of academic integrity, ethics, and overdependence. This research highlights ChatGPT not only as an innovative educational tool but as a facilitator of responsible and ethical adoption by offering a pitched structured self-learning framework enhanced by ChatGPT. The results would offer guidance to educators, students, and policymakers as they use AI technologies to support equitable and effective learning outcomes.

Keywords: ChatGPT, Artificial Intelligence in Education, Self-Directed Learning, Academic Productivity, Ethical Considerations

INTRODUCTION

With technology playing a role in almost everything, we do these days; the introduction of artificial intelligence (AI) has revolutionized education. One of the most powerful and versatile tools that is emerging among the latest innovations is none other than ChatGPT which, most promisingly, is set to change old learning paradigms. ChatGPT powered by Artificial Intelligence is not just a question-answering machine, but a 24*7 companion to learn from, helping students obtain personalised, interactive and efficient learning experience (Pokkakillath & Suleri, 2023).

Beyond instant responses, ChatGPT is transforming education itself. The ability to emulate human-like conversations, provide individualized feedback, and present situation-based materials makes it a great “study buddy” for learners of any level (Xiao & Zhi, 2023). It has found applications in eliminating one of the biggest hurdles in today education and giving students a chance to learn with no time or place constraints (Lin, 2023).

ChatGPT has few advantages as a learning companion. For one, it provides an easily accessible source for information, enabling students to self-explore, clarify certain concepts or solve problems without the immediate need of human interaction. Examples include improvements in vocabulary learning, writing skills and speaking proficiency results, making it suitable for individualised learning (Nugroho et al, 2023).

Second, ChatGPT functions as a virtual teaching assistant that cultivates self-reliance in academics. Studies showed that this method is useful for open learning settings, where students using it to help them set their own learning regularities, plan their work and monitor it. Such autonomy promotes a more engaged approach to learning resources and promotes critical thinking skills (Muniandy & Selvanathan, 2024).

Third, it allows continuous learning as the support and guidance is available at all times. Chat GPT is always available and responds 24/7, dismissing all contemporary students complaints (Wu, 2023) regarding the rigidity of learning environments that tend to bound the learners by the schedules of their classes.

While this was beneficial for students, bringing ChatGPT within the learning environment has its challenges too. This has raised issues of academic misconduct where students would use this tool to do their work or get the answers without understanding (Arista et al., 2023). Secondly, although the AI is trained to autonomously create a content at a very high level, it does not mean that artificial intelligence is error-proof. Meron and Tekmen Araci (2023) highlighted specific examples of accuracy problems, biased responses, and over-dependence toward AI tools, which has triggered teachers’ calls for critical assessment of AI-generated information.

Additionally, ethical issues such as privacy, data security, and access remain essential challenges. ChatGPT processes a massive amount of data when interacting with users, so it is also crucial to protect any sensitive information and comply with privacy regulations. Concurrently, the digital divide might deepen educational inequalities, especially in less privileged areas (Wardat et al., 2023).

In this article, we explore the changing nature of the role of ChatGPT as a 24 x 7 learning partner and what it means for the modern learner and education in general. This study is essential not only because it deals with the movement — opportunities and threats as well as ChatGPT integration in learning environments. This research addresses important aspects of this AI tool in three areas—pedagogical, ethical, and practical—benefiting educators, students, and policymakers-contextualized. As education systems around the world try to catch up in adapting to an ever-changing technological landscape, it is important to understand how transformative tools like ChatGPT can be. Discussing the benefits as well as the challenges and suggesting ways to integrate it properly without compromising core values of education, this study adds to the literature of how AI can bring value to education method without compromising its fundamental principles. It highlights how vital it is to regulate innovation for ethical compliance if AI technologies, such as ChatGPT, are expected to deliver on their promise as reliable and inclusive partners in learning.

Benefits

ChatGPT, an AI language model developed by OpenAI, is indeed a revolutionary AI tool that has changed the way students engage with learning materials, but this tool is better considered as a new marriage between AI and education. Being a generative AI, ChatGPT provides students with a myriad of benefits, including personalized learning experiences, improved academic productivity, language proficiency and critical thinking ability. The benefits we have talked about in the previous paragraphs turn ChatGPT into a helpful tool in contemporary education.

Perhaps one of the most profound advantages ChatGPT entails is its potential for individualized and responsive learning. ChatGPT can serve as a virtual tutor, adapting responses to the specific needs of each student, providing instant feedback, and personalized assistance in a wide range of subjects. For instance, it can help students disassemble complex subjects into simpler parts, enabling them to understand hard concepts easily. ChatGPT nurtures deeper engagement and allows the students to advance in their progress according to their needs (Ngo, 2023).

One of the most amazing benefits of ChatGPT is its role in student productivity and time management. Part of the problem is the extremely fast pace of the academic world, as students are constantly rushing to meet deadlines, they lose track of time. ChatGPT tackles this dilemma by providing immediate replies to questions, drafting essays, and streamlining research activities. It means that students do not need to spend so much time doing administrative work — or any kind of repeatable action — but instead, dedicate more time to critical thinking and creative problem-solving. ChatGPT has been linked to improved efficiency and efficacy in completing assignments, which can be an influential factor on academic performance (Fauzi et al., 2023).

ChatGPT is a great tool for this as well when it comes to language learning. It can be an ideal companion to hone writing skills, grammar, and vocabulary due to its inherent language generation abilities. ChatGPT can help students practice conversations, correct their work, and polish language. Such an interactive method has specifically helped non-native speakers wanting to see an improvement in their foreign language skills. As a virtual interlocutor, ChatGPT offers students a chance to practice and hone their communication skills at their own pace (Nugroho et al., 2023).

Beyond academic gains, ChatGPT fosters student collaboration and critical thinking. It is also useful for group work as it can help with brainstorming, diverse perspectives and in organizing the ideas of students. In addition, ChatGPT helps to carry out critical engagement as it encourages the users of the AI to determine the quality of the response and the accuracy of answer (Zhao et al. 2023). Such interactive dynamic develops critical thinking and keeps students engaged during the process of learning (Wu et al., 2024).

Further, the accessibility and flexibility of ChatGPT enhance its utility as a learning tool for contemporary learners. ChatGPT is always open and available as opposed to common educational resources which may be available during only a period of time. This especially benefits students who have busy schedules or reside in remote areas where formal education is sparse. ChatGPT also, through enabling everyone to access educational resources, dissolves barriers to education, increasing equity (Castro, 2023).

Last but not least function that ChatGPT helps is that, it aids in learning about complicated concepts by providing stepwise simple explanations. ChatGPT offers guidance and examples in detail and interactively to assist students to understand challenging concepts better in fields like programming, medicine, and mathematics. With this customized assistance, students can develop their technical expertise and gain hands-on experience in applying their theoretical knowledge. In this regard, Silva et al. (2024) point out that in programming education, ChatGPT is a valuable learning companion generating code snippets and providing debugging tips that are useful for novice programmers.

All tests are over, in my opinion, ChatGPT has turned everything over in education, and students can now experience the best version of learning. ChatGPT tackles multiple challenges of students which include personalized guidance and convenience to improve productivity, make students think critically and increase their accessibility to learning in general. Although we need to address ethical considerations and the potential downside of over-dependence there, the advantages of ChatGPT make it a vital part of the emerging scenario of education. If used responsibly, ChatGPT can help students succeed academically, and prepare for the challenges ahead.

Challenges

While the main topic of this blog is how the integration of ChatGPT into education has great benefits, it is also essential to mention the drawbacks that come with its versatility. This challenges the critical thinking, academic integrity, and approaches a student is expected to adapt through the traditional learning methodologies.

Another major concern of ChatGPT is its ability to spoil critical thinking skills among students. ChatGPT as a student companion — While ChatGPT can be helpful as an informal knowledge guide, students overutilize the power of ChatGPT to answer the simple questions and assignments without going through the cognitive processes within themselves to discover the solution to the problem. Such an over-reliance can diminish students’ development, which affects their capacity for critical thinking and reflection (Ngo, 2023). Studies indicated that relying heavily on AI tools such as ChatGPT would result in a shallow conceptual awareness based on a superficial processing of information, that violates the higher order learning (Hot) skills that students should continuously hone; finally graduating with academic proficiency in life-long information processing (Murtiningsih et al., 2024).

The second major challenge is the risk to integrity of academics. The structured nature of ChatGPT outputs makes it an attractive method of completing academic dishonesty. This can lead students to abuse the platform to produce essays, answers, or even exam answers without any proper thinking. The difficulty which the teachers will have in sorting out the work done by the students or the content created by the AI makes the process of assessment complicated for the teachers as they would not be able to differentiate between AI generation and student original work (Mosaiyebzadeh et al., 2023). Moreover, current plagiarism-detecting software usually cannot identify content produced by ChatGPT, increasing concerns about its ethical use (Lukashchuk, 2023).

A significant challenge is the inaccuracies and biases ChatGPT spreads in its answers. ChatGPT, like other AI models trained on big datasets, has a tendency to produce false or biased information. Such students may use ChatGPT, but if they do not confirm whether the output of ChatGPT is true or not, they may spread misinformation in their academic work. However, this constraint forces students and educators to invest extra time in scrutinizing and analysing the outputs generated by AI, which can stand in stark contrast to the mere efficiency that ChatGPT endeavours to deliver (Farrokhnia et al.

In addition, it would also harm creativity and originality as a result of ChatGPT. He believes that it prevents students from researching innovative solutions to problems by giving ready-made solutions and ideas. So, this dependence can suppress students’ creativity while the quality of students works will be less unique and meaningful (Zabelin et al., 2023). Moreover, AI affects the human environment in AI learning systems that may reduce the social aspect of education, playing a role not only in academic education but also in the human aspect (Murtiningsih et al., 2024).

The difficulties of ChatGPT have been multiplied by ethical and privacy issues. One of the reasons for concerns regarding the security of these tools is the fact that many of the AI tools process a lot of data, including personal information of the students. While ensuring adherence to the data protection laws is of paramount importance, compliance becomes an additional complexity for educational institutions when they undergo an integration of ChatGPT within its systems (Shaikh et al., 2024).

Finally, the technological gap forms the third core issue around this. ChatGPT vs Digital DivideAlthough these innovative solutions are attractive and helpful, they will not be beneficial for every student, since not all of them have the adequate devices or internet connection they need for this. Such a digital gap may deepen existing discrepancies in education, especially among students from the deprived community (Yin, 2024).

There are undeniable transformative opportunities for education presented by ChatGPT that need to be taken into account with the challenges that should certainly be addressed to ensure responsible and ethical use. To mitigate the disadvantages of the AI generation in education, educators and institutions need to plan methods for how to manage it in a way that balances its benefits with its drawbacks, creating an environment in which AI enhances the learning experience rather than detracts from it. The caveats attached to ChatGPT can be most effectively blunted through direct appeal to students’ better angels by encouraging critical thinking, ethical awareness, and equitable access.

Proposing Framework for Self-Learning via ChatGPT

In today’s dynamic educational landscape, self-directed learning is an essential skill for upper-level students. This allows learners to be in the driver seat of their education, allowing them to develop independence, critical thought, as well as a greater comprehension of complex topics. Apart from classroom teaching, self-study forces them to learn subjects at their own pace, adapt their learning methods, and pursue knowledge in a lifelong manner. Along with the advancement of technologies, tools such as ChatGPT have made self-learning even better, as we now have an all-in-one companion assisting in answering questions, summarizing concepts and providing explanations based on individual requirements etc. In fact, prompt quality is essential to the effectiveness of ChatGPT and other tools. The importance of well-crafted prompt ensures the writing is clear, relevant and specific, and provides the AI with the information it needs to return accurate and informative responses. Well-crafted prompts allow students to make the best use of tools like this, bringing the output in line with their learning outcomes. In this part, the authors discuss an organized structure for self-learning, outline how neatly designed prompts can help, and illustrate how ChatGPT is an asset to a student in his/her learning path.

1. Defining the Learning Objective

The first part is to set a very precise goal. Students need to ask this question: What do I want to learn or achieve from this subject or this topic? This question helps define the scope of study for obtaining focus. An artificial intelligence ethics student might want to learn about the principles of AI ethics, such as bias, accountability, and impact on society. Having clear objectives provides direction for the learning journey. Well, here the examples of the prompt:

“What specific knowledge or skills do I want to gain from this topic?”

“How will mastering this topic contribute to my personal, academic, or professional goals?”

2. Understanding Key Concepts

When a focus is established, the following step comes — examination of the main concepts, theories, or skills related to the topic. This means finding the core concepts that underpin the topic. Chan suggested that students focus on thoroughly understanding the principles rather than excessively rote learning. Students could investigate concepts such as the ethics of AI, accountability frameworks, and the impact of bias in AI systems as examples of this. Below are the examples of the prompt “What are the essential theories or concepts related to this topic?”

“What examples can I find to illustrate these concepts in action?”

3. Identifying Resources

Having the right information available is essential to self-study. Students need to gather different types of materials, such as books, academic essays, videos, and trustworthy sites. Through their diversing interests, they net the topic and many angles. So, for example, if a student in AI ethics was seeking material they could look at research journals on the matter, online classes that touch on the topic, and then look into case studies within the real world.

“What are the most trustworthy sources for this subject?”

“Are there any multimedia resources (videos, podcasts, or infographics) that can simplify complex concepts?”

4. Formulating Critical Questions

At the core of self-learning lies critical thinking. Creating some intentional questions where students then resist their understanding and push deeper into what is being studied. Like, What can I do with this? or “What is it that current theories cannot explain? build analytical skills and reveal the complexities around the issue. Prompt Example:

“What questions arise as I study this topic?”

“What are the potential strengths, weaknesses, and biases in the existing theories?”

5. Active Engagement with Content

For information to be absorbed and retained, we must be intentional and engage. Students can use a variety of tools and techniques to actively engage with the material in their studies. Methods such as mind mapping, summarizing information and case study solution are the most efficient. For example, a student could build a comparison chart on ethical theories in AI to help them visualize and clarify their understanding. Below are the examples of the prompt:

“How can I organize this information to make it easier to understand and remember?”

“What are some practical exercises I can do to apply these concepts?”

6. Applying Knowledge

Knowledge only matters when related to use cases. It would be advisable for students to seek out chances to apply their learning to real-world tasks or academic projects. For Examples, if AI ethics, it could include examining ethical dilemmas regarding the role of technology deployment in education or industry. This not only reinforces understanding but also proves the practical nature of the subject. Here are the examples: – “How can I use this knowledge in a real-world situation?”

“Are there case studies or examples that show how this theory works in practice?”

7. Reflection and Feedback

To improve their learning, it is important for the students to reflect upon their self-learning, which is a key component of the self-learning process. Students should be asking themselves, ‘What do I already understand and what do I need to work on next? Getting feedback on assessments from peers, mentors, or instructors can

also provide good feedback on how to focus your future learning efforts. Here the examples

“What challenges am I facing, and how can I address them?”

“What feedback can I seek to improve my understanding?”

8. Self-Assessment

Lastly, self-assessment helps the students in checking their learning and understanding of the subject matter. You can do that with self-testing, talking to other learners, or teaching the information to another person. An often-reliable measure for mastery of a topic is based on the ability to clearly explain a concept. For instance, if a student is reading about AI ethics, they might share ideas with a peer group and engage in discussion and critique. Below are the prompt examples

“Can I explain this topic in simple terms to someone unfamiliar with it?”

“What questions would I ask myself to test my knowledge?”

The use of prompts during this process can create a repetitive self-driven approach to mastering any subject matter. A diagram highlighting the components of a self-study framework and the place of ChatGPT between the components. The steps in the framework are sequentially connected and demonstrate the ways in which they build on each other Self-Study Framework with ChatGPT.

Figure 1: Propose Framework for Self-Study via ChatGPT

Source: Own

CONCLUSION

With the advent of Chat GPT in education, this was a key transformative step in the evolution of learning methodologies. ChatGPT provides personalized guidance, interactive support, and access to resources that promote self-directed learning by acting as a 24/7 learning companion for students. In a world where learning must adapt to be flexible, equitable for all, and effective, its capacity to de-mystify complex ideas, reinforce analytical skills, and modernize the approach to academic work, is about as essential as it gets.

That said, using ChatGPT is not without obstacles. Managing concerns like over-reliance, potential plagiarism, or the possibility of generating incorrect information is challenging. The ethical implications, also privacy concerns as well as the digital divide emphasize even more the responsible use of and the need to fair access to the technology.

ChatGPT has the potential to drive new opportunities, yet it also has risks as do all new technologies; a structured self-study framework augmented with ChatGPT provides a more balanced approach to the new opportunities and opportunities. Students can utilize ChatGPT by having clearly defined learning objectives, learning how to engage critically with content, and applying knowledge in real-world situations, all while becoming independent learners who know how to learn throughout life.

On balance, the effectiveness of using ChatGPT in education will depend on working together as educators, students and policymakers to reduce its downsides while building on its strengths. ChatGPT has the potential to lead us to that future where technology and education harmoniously coexist to provide valuable and inclusive learning when used appropriately and ethically.

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