I just attended the Teaching and Learning with AI Conference in Orlando, and my brain is brimming with ideas on how to use AI in support of students and faculty. I think most of us remain stuck in the Chat GPT mindset, concerned about academic integrity and students using that platform to write their papers and discussion posts. I’m not downplaying either that, or the privacy and ethical concerns about AI. But that’s just one part of the conversation. In the last two years there has been an explosion of other tools that could have positive impacts in the teaching and learning environment, and as Jeremy noted, we should be talking about those, too.
If you’ve ever had the urge to say, ‘its in the syllabus!’ to a questioning student, I’ve got some good news: there’s an AI for that.
You can train a custom AI relatively easily with your syllabus (and if you want, institutional policies), and then students can query that chatbot rather than you with questions about the course. They could ask it, for example, when a particular assignment is due, or how they will be graded, or what the required readings are for next week, or whether extra credit is available. Think of how this could clear out your inbox! Instead of saying ‘check the syllabus’ you could link to the chatbot and say ‘ask the bot!’.
There are some instructions on how to do this here and here but basically you are creating a custom generative AI, then training it to use only the data you provide–a syllabus, assignments, a course website, student handbook, etc. You also prompt it, so you can control what kinds of answers it gives (if, for example, you were creating one not as an FAQ on your course but instead as a study guide, you might tell it not to provide answers, but to point students to appropriate resources that will help it find an answer). You can also tell it what tone to answer students in, whether to provide links, and what to say if the bot doesn’t have the answer. It can also provide answers in multiple languages, which can even the playing field for students who are non-native speakers of the local language of instruction.
I’m going to experiment with doing something like this and will report back on my findings, but what astounded me at the conference was how many faculty are innovating in this area. Don’t get stuck in an academic integrity mindset–there are ways to mitigate that, and thinking through the ramifications of Chat GPT is just the first level of what is going to be an immense shift in how we teach in the future.