22 examples of teaching with AI
/(A professor) plans to weave ChatGPT into lessons by asking students to evaluate the chatbot’s responses.“What’s happening in class is no longer going to be, ‘Here are some questions — let’s talk about it between us human beings,’” he said, but instead “it’s like, ‘What also does this alien robot think?’” New York Times
Prof Jim is a software company that can turn existing written materials—like textbooks, Wikipedia pages or a teacher’s notes—into these animated videos at the push of a button. A teacher could use the software to turn a Wikipedia page about, say, the Grand Canyon into a video. EdSurge
Some professors are redesigning their courses entirely, making changes that include more oral exams, group work and handwritten assessments in lieu of typed ones. New York Times
There is no understanding or intent behind AI outputs. But warning students about the mistakes that result from this lack of understanding is not enough. It’s easy to pay lip service to the notion that AI has limitations and still end up treating AI text as more reliable than it is. There’s a well-documented tendency to project onto AI; we need to work against that by helping students practice recognizing its failings. One way to do this is to model generating and critiquing outputs and then have students try on their own. Can they detect fabrications, misrepresentations, fallacies and perpetuation of harmful stereotypes? If students aren’t ready to critique ChatGPT’s output, then we shouldn’t choose it as a learning aid. Inside Higher Ed
ChatGPT could help teachers shift away from an excessive focus on final results. Getting a class to engage with AI and think critically about what it generates could make teaching feel more human “rather than asking students to write and perform like robots.” MIT Tech Review
Reverting to analog forms of assessment, like oral exams, can put students with disabilities at a disadvantage. And outright bans on AI tools could cement a culture of distrust. “It’s going to be harder for students to learn in an environment where a teacher is trying to catch them cheating,” says Trust. “It shifts the focus from learning to just trying to get a good grade.” Wired
I’ve given students assignments to “cheat” on their final papers with text-generating software. In doing so, most students learn—often to their surprise—as much about the limits of these technologies as their seemingly revolutionary potential. Some come away quite critical of AI, believing more firmly in their own voices. Others grow curious about how to adapt these tools for different goals or about professional or educational domains they could impact. Inside Higher Ed
ChatGPT can play the role of a debate opponent and generate counterarguments to a student’s positions. By exposing students to an endless supply of opposing viewpoints, chatbots could help them look for weak points in their own thinking. MIT Tech Review
Assign reflection to help students understand their own thought processes and motivations for using these tools, as well as the impact AI has on their learning and writing. Inside Higher Ed
In March, Quizlet updated its app with a feature called Q-Chat, built using ChatGPT, that tailors material to each user’s needs. The app adjusts the difficulty of the questions according to how well students know the material they’re studying and how they prefer to learn. Some educators think future textbooks could be bundled with chatbots trained on their contents. Students would have a conversation with the bot about the book’s contents as well as (or instead of) reading it. The chatbot could generate personalized quizzes to coach students on topics they understand less well. MIT Tech Review
Encourage students to use peer-reviewed journals as sources. These types of journals are not available to ChatGPT, so by teaching our students about them and requiring their use in essays, we can ensure that the content being presented is truly original. The Tech Insider
Students must then take apart and improve upon the ChatGPT-generated essay—an exercise designed to teach critical analysis, the craft of precise thesis statements, and a feel for what “good writing” looks like. Wired
Show students examples of inaccuracy, bias, logical, and stylistic problems in automated outputs. We can build students’ cognitive abilities by modeling and encouraging this kind of critique. Critical AI
Far from being just a dream machine for cheaters, many teachers now believe, ChatGPT could actually help make education better. Advanced chatbots could be used as powerful classroom aids that make lessons more interactive, teach students media literacy, generate personalized lesson plans, save teachers time on admin, and more. MIT Tech Review
When possible, scaffold your assignments to promote revision and growth over time, with opportunities for feedback from peers, TAs, and/or the instructor. Build assignment pre-writing or brainstorming into class time and invite students to share and discuss these ideas in small groups or with the class as a whole. Barnard College
Nontraditional learners could get more out of tools like ChatGPT than mainstream methods. It could be an audio-visual assistant where students can freely ask as many clarifying questions as necessary without judgment.Teachers juggling countless individualized education plans could also take advantage of ChatGPT by asking how to curate lesson plans for students with disabilities or other learning requirements. New York Magazine
Discuss students’ potentially diverse motivations for using ChatGPT or other generative AI software. Do they arise from stress about the writing and research process? Time management on big projects? Competition with other students? Experimentation and curiosity about using AI? Grade and/or other pressures and/or burnout? Invite your students to have an honest discussion about these and related questions. Cultivate an environment in your course in which students will feel comfortable approaching you if they need more direct support from you, their peers, or a campus resource to successfully complete an assignment. Barnard College
We will need to teach students to contest it. Students in every major will need to know how to challenge or defend the appropriateness of a given model for a given question. To teach them how to do that, we don’t need to hastily construct a new field called “critical AI studies.” The intellectual resources students need are already present in the history and philosophy of science courses, along with the disciplines of statistics and machine learning themselves, which are deeply self-conscious about their own epistemic procedures. Chronicle of Higher Ed
Spend some time discussing the definition (or definitions) of academic honesty and discuss your own expectations for academic honesty with your students. Be open, specific, and direct about what those expectations are. Barnard College
Experiential learning will become the norm. Everyone will need an internship. Employers will want assurances that a new graduate can follow directions, complete tasks, demonstrate judgment. Chronicle of Higher Ed
Khan Academy released the Khanmigo project which is able to help students as a virtual tutor or debating partner and helps teachers with administrative tasks such as generating lesson plans.Columbia Journalism Review
One situation in which I have found ChatGPT extremely useful is writing multiple-choice questions. It’s quite easy to write a question and the right answer, but coming up with three plausible wrong answers is tricky. I found that if I prompted ChatGPT with the following: “Write a multi-choice question about <topic of interest> with four answers, and not using ‘all of the above’ as an answer,” it came up with good wrong answers. This was incredibly helpful. Nature
ChatGPT outperformed most of his (journalism) students who were in the early part of the course. But students would have to seek out sources, do on-the-ground reporting, and find the important trends in the data. “And all of that, you’re not gonna get from ChatGPT.” Columbia Journalism Review
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