Artificial intelligence and machine learning have rapidly become a pressing matter in academia.
There are quite a few concerns over plagiarism and shortcuts with the rise of ChatGPT, and understandably so. However, we also have seen AI used for good in the classroom, and exploring this technology with students is a better way to address any challenges than a policy of total prohibition.
Recently, the Van Andel Education Institute in Grand Rapids, Michigan has been diving deep into how ChatGPT and AI can be used to enhance your instruction, make your life easier, and unlock your students’ full potential. Here are just a few key points we’ve gathered.
What AI Is
Artificial Intelligence tools are just that: Tools. They can help you write in ways you otherwise couldn’t, and they can do it quickly and easily. Some of the most incredibly powerful, versatile AI tools are text generators like ChatGPT and Bard, which generate text in response to prompts. However, these tools can also make mistakes, as they’re not actually “intelligent.”
How to Avoid Misusage
There are tools out there that are supposed to detect when papers are AI written, but these tools make mistakes constantly, giving false positives and negatives, largely because many phrases are common in academia. If you actually want students to develop a specific thinking skill and their own writing voice, such as writing a five-paragraph essay, you can have them do it by hand in class! If you want students to be able to explain their reasoning, you can have them do it in conversation, unassisted by technology! In other words, you can subvert misusage by focusing on in-person tasks.
Teaching Students TO Use AI and BY Using AI:
Collaborate with AI: Let your students use ChatGPT as a brilliant collaborator. They can brainstorm ideas together, get suggestions for revisions on their work, or overcome obstacles they’re encountering.
Let Them Lead: You don’t have to do all the work when it comes to creating excellent uses for AI in your classroom. Students can exercise flexible thinking as they explore how to use AI to level up their own learning—and they’ll take ownership of the process as they do.
Model, Model, Model: Students learn from seeing examples — and ChatGPT can give you a plethora of them! Whatever concept you’re exploring, have ChatGPT generate examples for your students to examine. You can have them notice shortcomings and work to provide improvements. One idea is to create “B+ Exemplars” — examples that show lots of great features, but allow students to make additional improvements.
Beat ChatGPT: For the rest of their lives, students will be asked to add value above and beyond what AI tools come up with, so this game is incredibly relevant. The concept is simple: give ChatGPT a prompt you want your students to be able to respond to, see what it comes up with, and use that as a model for your students to shoot for. They can analyze what it did well and where it can be improved, and work to create a response that improves upon the computer’s.
The best way to learn how to use AI is to open it up, play around, and be creative! And the more you do so, the better you’ll be able to spot what ChatGPT sounds like (it has a distinct voice). AI is neither an enemy nor a friend—it’s a tool for you, with your own intelligence, to use
