AI and Teaching | Events and Resources
ChatGPT, an AI-powered chatbot, has stirred debate across the higher education community,
with some claiming artificial intelligence will revolutionize education while others
see it as a significant threat. One thing is clear, and that artificial intelligence
is here to stay, and it will disrupt current practices, not just in writing, but in
the arts, software coding, and many other disciplines. It will become part of our
students’ future jobs, which create the need for a new kind of literacy. Higher education
must take a proactive role, engaging with this technology, shaping the ways we utilize
it, with a critical perspective and an ethical approach.
To promote campus engagement, the Office of the Provost is hosting several events
to promote campus conversations about the implications of these new technologies.
These events are open to faculty, staff, and students alike. CETL is also offering
follow up workshops. The full table of offerings is below.
ChatGPT, Artificial Intelligence, and the Future of Higher Education: A Community
Conversation
Tuesday, February 28, 2023, 12:30 - 1:45 p.m.
ALC Auditorium (1100) & Online
AI has generated both excitement and trepidation on college campuses around the world.
Join us for a campus conversation with faculty and staff from multiple disciplines.
RSVP Here
Bright Ideas: How to Use AI in Teaching and Learning
Wednesday, March 22, 2023, 11:00 a.m. - 12:30 p.m
In-person & Online
Join a panel of faculty, staff, and students who will showcase how they are using
AI in their classrooms.
If you have ideas to share, please click here.
Taking an Educational Research Perspective to Explore How AI Might Impact Student
Learning and Success
Thursday, March 30, 2023, 3:45 - 4:45 p.m.
Online
CETL Scholarly Teaching: Tris Utschig and Hillary Steiner
Use of AI tools such as ChatGPT can impact student learning in myriad ways. These
new technologies have potential advantages for cognition during the learning process.
They also create risks that can undermine learning. Research on cognition and pedagogical
approaches can inform the use of AI tools for learning. Considerations range from
how AI tools might reduce cognitive load to free up working memory, to how they support
transfer of knowledge or synthesis of information, to critical thinking required to
craft meaningful prompts for the tool, to using metacognitive approaches to interpret
responses the tool generates. We will briefly demonstrate how the ChatGPT tool functions,
and then hold a series of open discussions around knowledge from cognitive science
and pedagogical research designed to elicit considerations from multiple perspectives
and across multiple disciplines.
Register Here
Ethical Considerations When Incorporating AI Tools in Your Course
Tuesday, April 11, 2023, 11 a.m. - 12 p.m.
Online
CETL Scholarly Teaching: Linda Stewart and Michele DiPietro
AI tools are trained based on human systems. These systems are inherently limited
to the cultural perspectives they represent, the language in which the tool and the
documents it accesses is written, and on the human behaviors used to train the system.
As a result, the products that emerge from an AI tool reflect those limitations, raising
important ethical considerations about inherent bias. With these limitations in mind,
we must also question how students and teachers can ethically use these tools in an
educational setting. Join us for a webinar conversation where we collectively explore
questions about bias and representation within this software application and the ways
in which students and teachers can best practice ethical and productive approaches
when using ChatGPT in their classrooms and beyond.
Register Here
AI and the Future of Education
Wednesday, April 19, 2023, 10:00 - 11:00 a.m.
ALC Auditorium (1100)
Speaker: Stephen Harmon, Executive Director of the Georgia Tech Center for 21st Century
Universities
RSVP Here
CETL is committed to promoting research- and evidence-based pedagogies. Unfortunately,
the use of AI-based tools in university courses is still new and a consensus on best
practices has not emerged yet. Lacking those, we are providing resources on these
tools from a variety of perspectives in order to jumpstart your thinking process with
issues to consider.
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Articles in The Atlantic
The Atlantic was one of the first outlets to call attention to AI. Its first article,
The College Essay Is Dead, rang the alarm and presented a rather pessimistic perspective.
The Atlantic has kept a focus on this topic and has since published a variety of perspectives
on AI. Here is a selection.
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On the Opportunities and Risks of Foundation Models
This exhaustive and valuable report discusses the capabilities, applications, and
technologies of AI, culminating in an examination of issues of integrity, fairness,
misuse, and ethics of scale. It also addresses societal impacts and how these new
models may be favorable to advance educational goals locally and worldwide.
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A Critical Appraisal of Equity in Conversational AI
In examining user experiences, this study finds “substantively worse user experience
with GPT-3 education minority subpopulations. However, they achieved the largest knowledge
gain, changing attitudes toward BLM and climate change” after interacting with this
language model. They suggest an equity-based framework that considers education level,
language skills, and attitudes of users to enhance equity in the design of AI systems.
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ChatGPT Proves that AI Still has a Racism Problem
AI-based tools are trained on the internet, and therefore, they will incorporate and
reflect to us all the human biases of internet users, including racism, sexism, and
other isms. As we engage with these tools, it is important to be mindful of this reality.
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We have collected a selection of online conversations or opinion pieces about AI that
reflect a variety of perspectives. It is important to understand the context, as AI-based
tools in the arts present a unique set of issues compared to text-generating tools.
While by no means an exhaustive collection, we hope these videos will help educators
arrive at their personal stance on these tools.
