Artificial Intelligence: Uses and Challenges for Teaching and Learning
10/10/2024
Nirmal Trivedi, PhD
Asst. Director for Teaching, Learning, and Technology
Center for Teaching Excellence (CTE)
Boston College
nirmal.trivedi@bc.edu
About me
GenAI in Education: Three Challenges
What is the scale of the problem we want to solve?
University-level? Classroom? Assignment level?
How can we teach faculty what they need to know about Generative AI while respecting their time and approach to teaching?
Getting buy-in, understanding different teaching contexts, finding the right support
How can we equip students with the knowledge and skills to engage Generative AI in an ethical and critical way?
Are all students impacted equally? How are students using it now? Where do want to see students be able to do in the coming years, for their education and for their career?
Challenge #1:
What is the scale of the problem we want to solve?
GenAI in Education: An Outsized Issue
Time
Time needed to learn the tech and keep up with developments
People
People available with the knowledge and skills to synthesize the issues and provide guidance
Money
Financial resources to support any interventions
Feels like a outsized challenge for the resources we have:
Boston College's Approach to GenAI
Center for Teaching
Consults, pedagogy workshops, online resources, guidance for assignment design
Digital Innovation
Special projects, experimentation (e.g., chatbots in class)
Library
AI literacy for students, ethical issues with GenAI, research support
IT
Licenses, data privacy, research services, how-to workshops
Organic multifaceted approach developed over time
CTE Approach to GenAI
Critical AI Literacy
Acceptance of GenAI as a powerful tool.
Teaching faculty how to use it for teaching, and how to cultivate AI literacy amongst students.
Process-Centered Assessment
Encouraging faculty to assess the process of completing assessments over or equal to product.
Centering the "human-in-the-loop" adage.
Open Dialogue
Encouraging faculty need to have open conversations with students about GenAI's potential risks, opportunities, and its appropriateness for class.
Transparent Expectations
Providing faculty with guidelines on how to design assignments, clarify meaning of academic integrity, and
At the Department-level
The only new thing here is teaching faculty
-- how to use it and
-- how to cultivate AI literacy
CTE Support/Programming
Online Resource
Excellence in Teaching Day
Pedagogy Reading Group
Workshops
Consults as needed
Cohort planned for 2024-25
"Knowledge in the Age of GenAI"
Challenge #2:
How can we teach faculty what they need to know about Generative AI while respecting their time and approach to teaching?
Baseline knowledge
GenAI Essentials For Faculty
Generative AI exemplifies probabilistic technology
Experimenting with GenAI now routine faculty practice
Learning to prompt is now an essential skill
AI 101 for Teachers (code.org)
How does it work?
Prompt Engineering
Acknowledge the Variety
Implications for Writing
Plagiarism undetectable
Plagiarism detection tools are often unreliable
Emphasizing writing process
Emphasize the writing process to help students with thinking, project planning, brainstorming, research, outlining, drafting, and revision.
Risks involved
There are risks involved: GenAI may impair original thinking and problem-solving.
Assignment and Assessment Design
AI Assessment Scale
Perkins, Mike, Leon Furze, Jasper Roe, and Jason MacVaugh. 2024. “The Artificial Intelligence Assessment Scale (AIAS): A Framework for Ethical Integration of Generative AI in Educational Assessment.” Journal of University Teaching and Learning Practice 21(06). doi:10.53761/q3azde36.
AI Assessment Scale
HANDOUT ON ASSESSMENT Tool
Course Policy Consideration
Syllabus Policies
Potential Uses for Faculty in Teaching
Streamline Tasks
AI can help with quiz generation, creating rubrics, creating slideshows, and lesson plan creation.
Analyze Course Grades
Upload a spreadsheet with grades—with all identifiable info redacted—to see patterns.
Customized Feedbacks
AI can help you craft feedback that addresses specific issues with a student's coursework.
TeacherServer
Created by USF St. Petersburg Education Professor Zafer Unal, TeacherServer provides free AI tools to assist planning, assessment, preparation, research and more.
The AI Pedagogy Project
RESOURCE ON SYLLABI and class discussion
Sample Prompts
Teaching Ideas
"Suggest a teaching idea for these ethical issues. Do not align to a particular subject area. Build out robust and interesting lesson activity ideas which can be applied to any of the following 4 areas:
Do not align activities with the 9 areas. Use contemporary teaching practices, and a mix of discussion, research, student centred, and explicit instruction.
Produce a title for the activity, one or two learning intentions, and the description of the activity. Limit activity to a maximum of 50 minutes."
As an Example Generator
"I would like you to act as an example generator for students. When confronted with new and complex concepts, adding many and varied examples helps students better understand those concepts.
I would like you to ask what concept I would like examples of, and my year in college. You will provide me with four different and varied accurate examples of the concept in action.
The first concept is …"
As a Recruitment Letter
"I am a faculty member at Boston College interested in developing a faculty learning community focused on Generative AI for teaching and learning.
Ask me one question at a time, wait for my response, and provide feedback on how I can improve the email to appeal to my target audience.
Do not provide me with the exact language. Only ask questions that will help me write the email by myself.
Ask me follow up questions based on my response to your feedback.
My tone for the email should be professional, informative, and accommodating. I am also seeking to recruit academic faculty from a wide range of disciplines."
Challenge #3:
How can we equip students with the knowledge and skills to engage Generative AI in an ethical and critical way?
GenAI Literacy for Students
GenAI Ethics 101 Curriculum
Data & Privacy
The use of personal information to train GenAI models raises concerns about privacy and potential misuse.
Bias
GenAI models can perpetuate existing biases found in the data they are trained on, leading to unfair or discriminatory outcomes.
Hallucinations
GenAI models can generate false or misleading information, potentially impacting the accuracy of information dissemination.
Academic Integrity
The use of GenAI for academic work raises questions about plagiarism and the authenticity of student work.
Copyright & Intellectual Property
The generation of content that may infringe on existing copyrights raises legal and ethical concerns.
Human Labor
The development and training of GenAI models may involve exploitation of human labor, particularly in data annotation tasks.
Environmental Impact
The energy consumption associated with training and running GenAI models has significant environmental implications.
Spreading Misinformation
The potential for GenAI to generate and spread false or misleading information poses a threat to public discourse.
Examples of Student Use
As a retrieval tutor
"Act as an expert tutor for a first year university biology course.
I need to study the topics of cell biology, evolution, and genetics. Generate a passage that contains statements that integrate and interleave these topics.
Wait for my responses to the passage and then give me feedback on my responses."
As a universal simulator
"I want to do deliberate practice about how to conduct bedside consultations in a large hospital. You will be my teacher.
You will simulate a detailed scenario in which I have to engage in a patient consultation. You will fill the role of the patient or their family, I will fill the role of the doctor.
You will ask for my response to in each step of the scenario and wait until you receive it. After getting my response, you will give me details of what the other party does and says.
You will grade my response and give me detailed feedback about what to do better using medical consultation models. You will give me a harder scenario if I do well, and an easier one if I fail."
As an explainer
"I would like you to act as an example generator for students. When confronted with new and complex concepts, adding many and varied examples helps students better understand those concepts.
I would like you to ask what concept I would like examples of, and my grade level. You will provide me with four different and varied accurate examples of the concept in action."
Considerations for Instructors
Help your students learn how to identify misinformation and combat the spread of misinformation…
Because, the ability “to discern what is and is not A.I.-generated will be one of the most important skills we learn in the 21st century” (Marie, 2024, para.3).
Resources:
Readings:
Questions
At what scale can you make an intervention?
University-level? Classroom? Assignment level?
What is one new thing you can learn about GenAI?
Prompting?
Variety of tools?
How others are using it in their classrooms?
What do you think is most essential to teach students about AI?
How to prompt?
How to spot misinformation?
The environmental impact?