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Course: AI for education > Unit 2
Lesson 2: AI in the classroom: Promising practices- A new chapter in education
- Setting realistic expectations
- Don't ban AI-powered chatbots
- Learning with AI: Promising practices for students
- Teaching with AI: Emerging practices for teachers
- Teaching with AI: More inspiration for teachers
- The writing process, redefined in the Age of AI
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Teaching with AI: More inspiration for teachers
Inspiring ideas for AI-powered lessons, from Montclair State University's Office for Faculty Excellence
From Montclair State University’s Office for Faculty Excellence (shared with permission)
Implications for Teaching
Generative AI can be a tool for short-changing learning and getting a passable grade on an assignment. So can Wikipedia, pasting in answers from a digital text, and copying from a peer.
Generative AI is also a tool for learning, as anyone who gets into the tool and starts inputting queries and studying the output knows.
Your synapses are firing as you write and read the rapidly generated text. It’s fun and you’re likely wide awake, judging, speculating, disagreeing, agreeing, and doing all those things that happen when an engaged reader encounters text.
Generative AI pushes us to focus on the challenges of teaching.
“Teachers teach someone something, in that order.” — Samuel Natale
Natale reminds us that our enduring value as instructors is in teaching students how to learn — how to ask and answer questions. How best to learn in our disciplines and sub-disciplines varies, and thus students need to continue to develop and hone their learning skills.
With every new group of students, we thus need to foster self-reflection on the work of learning in our course. Through exam wrappers, reflection questions, in-class quick writes, think-pair-share activities, and large class discussions, we help students come to know their own best methods for learning. With Generative AI the lure of skipping by learning may be greater, so we may need to double down on our attention to attending to students’ growth as learners.
Practical suggestions to mitigate non-learning/cheating
Strategies for course design and pedagogy
Talk about academic honesty with your students: Talk to students about your expectations for academic honesty, and remind them of institutional policies. Tell them that using ChatGPT is academically dishonest, akin to paying a person to write your paper, take your test, or complete your assignment. Give examples and be specific and frank about your concerns.
For most faculty, academic dishonesty is galling because honest students are disadvantaged, but also because it is an offense to our commitment and passion for learning. What’s the point of pursuing a degree, of taking a class, if you don’t learn?
Raise these questions to stimulate reflection. Most students who engage in academic dishonesty are doing so impulsively or without reflection. Anticipate this human behavior and engage students in an open discussion about academic dishonesty.
Add a clarifying statement, such as, “Use of an AI text generator when an assignment does not explicitly call or allow for it without proper attribution or authorization is plagiarism.”
Provide incentives for the behaviors and habits that are associated with strong learning — for trying — as well as producing. If a perfect product (test, paper) is the only way to receive an A, students are more likely to consider cheating.
In your effort to fully assess student learning, make sure you assess (and reward) the processes that are needed to be a strong learner in your course: reading, viewing, speaking, improving, and reflecting on one’s learning.
Review your grading criteria and rubrics to make sure you’re setting your students up to adopt strong learning strategies.
Run your assignment through ChatGPT and/or Bing, review that answer, and tell your students about your experience (and that you’ve saved the output). Note: ChatGPT does not produce the same answer each time it’s posed.
Strategies for assignment design
ChatGPT and similar tools rely on available text — they know little about text that is obscure or recent or behind firewalls or paywalls.
These suggestions are built on this design characteristic.
- In written assignments, reference class materials and notes, or sources that are not available on the free internet (books or articles that are recent, behind firewalls). For example, “Refer to two of the theorists discussed in class.”
- Include visuals — images or videos that students need to respond to — in your assignment. Be sure to include alt-text for accessibility.
- Reference or connect to current events or conversations in your field.
- Ask for application or engagement between personal knowledge/experience and course concepts or topics.
- For short reading responses, instead of using open-ended questions in Canvas, try social annotation tools that require students to engage with a text along with their classmates. Hypothes.is and Perusall are two options here.
- Replace an essay or short-answer writing assignment with one that requires students to submit an audio file, podcast, video, speech, drawing, diagram, or multimedia project. That is, mix up the assignment in ways that make running to ChatGPT more work than it’s worth.
- Chunk your written assignments with due dates for individual elements that precede the final submission: an outline, notes on research articles, and drafts.
Finally, incorporate ChatGPT in your assignments. For example, ask students who choose to open an account to generate a ChatGPT response to a question of their own choosing, and then write an analysis of the strengths and weaknesses of the ChatGPT response.
ChatGPT is interesting! Engage with the tool and discover with your students what it can and cannot do.
Strategies for the classroom
Extend flipped learning: Use class time for writing, designing, synthesizing, and creating.
Ask students to read, view, and digest material at home, and then apply, demonstrate, and perform in class.
For example:
- Have students write responses in class. If students have 20 minutes to write brief responses to the kinds of questions you might have provided as homework, they will learn a great deal, and as a bonus, your subsequent class discussion will benefit from that engaged individual work.
- Have students respond orally, requiring each student to respond to a different question.
- Have students work in small groups in class to present on topics in class.
- Incorporate brief in-class quizzes, tests and other assessments. The key is to make these short, frequent, and possibly even unannounced. They serve assessment purposes, reward attendance, and provide useful immediate feedback about learning. Small point values for individual assessments allow poor performance to be informative to students rather than disastrous.
Want to join the conversation?
Never really trust AI. It's in the name, Artificial Intelligence. and shouldn't be used for everything. There isn't any way that people are going to be smart enough to keep it all contained and not get out of hand and at one point, hurt people in a variety of ways. It's a disaster waiting to happen.
stuff we do not need like self driving cars, AI for peoples face (face recognition) or voice recognition. It can become a robot of sorts and, like I said before, it is artificial. Its beneficial, but not a go to answer and shouldn't be. People need to be careful during the upcoming years as people are probably aware of how out of hand AI can get and we just don't know it yet. Be safe with your phones, cameras, and voice apps, recordings and such.(2 votes)
The comment section is empty here...(and my dad said something too: never use ai in class)(1 vote)
Have him read this article.(2 votes)
Never really trust AI. It's in the name, Artificial Intelligence. and shouldn't be used for everything. There isn't any way that people are going to be smart enough to keep it all contained and not get out of hand and at one point, hurt people in a variety of ways. It's a disaster waiting to happen.(0 votes)
That is the theory of the Singularity, named after black hole physics: AI will get so smart that it will turn against its creators (us) and destroy humanity. In reality, I think, AI is not going to go against us, but instead go with us, if we train it properly.
I agree with you about not trusting AI. It is only a mere prototype right now and not much good. Trusting it like be like trusting a dumb guy.(2 votes)