by Jennifer Zaylea & Jonah Chambers
Looking back at the initial public announcement of generative AI, we can see a big shift from how we initially thought about these tools to how they’re being used in practice currently. The creativity with which faculty have begun to thoughtfully and critically incorporate generative AI into their teaching over the past year has been nothing short of inspirational.
Initially, reactions to AI often focused on searching for ways to prevent or get around AI use. We now witness a blooming of new and exciting uses of AI to assess student learning, critically examine the ethical implications of AI use, and develop AI-centered assignments that place formative feedback center stage. An atmosphere of consternation has given way to a more positive willingness to experiment, explore, and play.
Annual Faculty Conference
At our January 2024 Annual Faculty Conference on Teaching Excellence, we included an AI Playground space that invited faculty members to explore a variety of AI tools. The goal of the AI Playground was simple: provide faculty with an opportunity to experiment with AI without fear of using it incorrectly or not understanding the tool.
There were heartening conversations that emerged between faculty members as they huddled around each workstation: discussions about the way a tool may address a particular teaching challenge, a limitation of the tool to be considered, or ways that these tools can augment teaching and the efficiency of other faculty work. We were excited to see so many faculty who, despite being completely new to the tools, left feeling energized and more confident to continue exploring the tools.
Experimenting with Generative AI Tools
If you’re ready to begin incorporating AI into your teaching, it is important that you first experiment with the tools to understand their limitations and strengths as they relate to your discipline. We created a video to provide a brief introduction on how to use ChatGPT and a more specific video on how to think about assignments in relation to this tool. It is important to identify an assignment’s objective as it relates to student learning, course goals, and in relation to AI’s affordances and limitations. This will help you establish whether you should incorporate AI and what aspects of AI may enhance the learning process.
Our conversations with faculty members over the last year, in a variety of disciplines, have illuminated the sheer diversity of ways faculty have used AI to deepen learning. Some faculty provide structured guidance on how students can use AI for brainstorming, outlining, and drafting texts, others address digital literacy by having students compare AI outputs with human-authored texts or industry standards to highlight where AI comes up short. In the medical professions, some have had their students prompt ChatGPT to create a care plan for a particular case and then instructed them to critique that plan, giving students a unique opportunity to apply what they’ve learned. Faculty in other disciplines have incorporated AI to help students process and interpret large data sets.
As an example from the creative disciplines, we created an AI-integrated assignment for the School of Theater, Film and Media Arts where the student learning goal was to develop storyboards as part of the preproduction set design process. The assignment harnessed the combined assistance of ChatGPT and Adobe Firefly to serve as a useful tool for students with limited drawing skills or who need to make very quick iterative adjustments as part of a collaborative preproduction process. To develop the storyboard, we:
- Asked ChatGPT for a single scene script;
- Using the generated script, prompted ChatGPT to break it into a six-frame summary;
- Prompted Adobe Firefly, using each summary, to develop a single image from the summary; and
- Populated a storyboard with the resulting six images.
The AI tools allowed for an expedited path forward in our imagined set design process. Now, we would be able to spend less time trying to learn to draw and more time fine tuning our filming strategy, constructing the stage, and rehearsing with the actors.
Student Experiences with Generative AI
On the other side of this equation, we have heard from students about their experiences, ranging from excited to fearful, in courses offering AI-assisted assignments. Students who had initially only thought of AI as a “cheating tool” came away with a deeper appreciation of what can be accomplished in collaboration with it. Others conveyed that these tools helped them better understand and weigh AI’s limitations and risks, such as its tendency to generate incorrect facts as well as the risk of losing one’s intended point or voice when employing AI in the writing process.
Perhaps most interestingly, students expressed that they felt much more comfortable using AI once they had the opportunity to use it in a class. Just as faculty need to experiment with AI to understand its usefulness, students also need to explore these tools to understand what is potentially gained and lost in their use. By intentionally incorporating AI into their assignments and providing immediate formative feedback, faculty provide valuable learning opportunities to students who are likely to encounter these tools in the workforce.
As far as we’ve come, there’s much farther to go. As AI tools change and become more ubiquitous, we recognize that it is faculty themselves who will forge productive paths forward for the use of AI in teaching and learning. As always, the CAT is here to help you every step along the way, at whatever point you find yourself in your AI journey. Please feel free to schedule a consultation and/or attend a workshop by visiting the CAT website.