- personalized learning and time-saving approaches?
- instructional design and course assistance?
- academic writing and research?
- the ever-evolving relationship between instructors and students?
These were some of the questions explored in the Explore Generative AI tools workshop held in mid-October 2023. Guided by an AI critical literacy approach, participants sought to:
- understand the basic concepts and technologies used by AI
- evaluate AI platforms/systems and their outputs for accuracy and bias
- consider the ethical implications of AI on societal impacts such as work, creativity, culture, politics, etc
Participants were introduced to AI tools in the following four areas. Each of the areas included use cases and demonstrations of AI platforms.
Writing Instruction and Support
Bill Rozaitis, Education Program Specialist from the Center for Educational Innovation, discussed uses for generative AI in writing instruction. There is a growing list of activities and strategies being used to support writing instruction, and a good resource for these is the WAC Clearinghouse “Introduction to Teaching with Text Generation Technologies.” The resource groups assignments into different categories based on the purposes for which instructors might use generative AI in writing instruction:
- to improve students' AI literacy and develop critical thinking skills
- to explore ethical considerations related to the use of AI tools in writing
- to examine academic integrity
- to prepare for professional writing
- to integrate AI into workplace contexts
- to support rhetorical engagements
Bill chose an example from the final category, rhetorical engagements: using ChatGPT to support peer review.
Course Assistance
Sara Schoen, Instructional Designer from Academic Technology Support Services, discussed the potential uses of generative AI for instructional support such as creating or revising outcomes, assessments, activities, and other resources. To gain constructive assistance Sara shared an AI for Education ‘prompt library’ resource for educators wanting to hone their syllabus, objectives, lesson ideas, and more. The library offers prompts you can use in any generative AI large language model (like ChatGPT).
Sara also introduced two free-to-start tools (that are not supported or endorsed by the University) that can help instructors design and develop interactive course materials: NOLEJ AI (pronounced ‘knowledge AI’) and TeachMate AI.
- NOLEJ AI takes instructional videos and can create interactive courseware such as flashcards, and question sets, as well as enhance the original video to an interactive video that highlights when a new term is introduced and more.
- TeachMate AI has over 80 tools (only 11 are free) to help you create content. Examples include an activity idea generator, ‘this time in history’ to place historical events in the context of other events, Math Starter questions, and more. The TeachMate AI example folder contains results generated by five of the free tools.
As we tell our students, most generative AI tools, like ChatGPT, contain bias and inaccuracies and often output hallucinations and confidently wrong information: review, verify, and modify any materials produced by them.
Image Generation and Presentations
Mary Jetter, Education Program Specialist from the Center for Educational Innovation, shared three tools used for image generation. Adobe Firefly is free to use and requires you to create an account and log in. Users use “Text to image” meaning, you describe what you want and the generator creates based on that description. The tool generally produces diverse images. Two other tools discussed were Night Cafe Studio and Bing Image Creator. Mary shared potential uses for these types of tools, including:
- Illustrate a problem or story
- Create a mnemonic device or memory hook
- Images & text graphics for presentations
- Language practice - vocabulary, verb tense, fluency, etc
- Create avatars
Research
Jennifer Englund, Instructional Designer from Academic Technology Support Services, discussed how AI tools such as Research Rabbit, ChatPDF, Elicit, and Scite may assist students and researchers in different stages of the research process, such as finding credible sources, citation tracking and mapping, and developing/refining research questions.
Workshop resources
Register for the upcoming workshop
Acknowledgments
This post was co-written with:- Mary Jetter & Bill Rozaitis from the Center for Educational Innovation
- Jennifer Englund, Lauren Marsh, Sara Schoen, & Susan Tade from Academic Technology Support Services