Today is the ‘Teaching Day at ISA’, a free mini-conference held on the first day of the International Studies Association’s Annual Meeting. We’ve got four great panels going, on Creating Compelling Courses; Assignments in the Age of AI; Active Engagement; and Mentoring Early Career Instructors.
So far, the idea that has most stuck with me comes from Dr. Ronnie Olesker of St. Lawrence University from the AI panel. She’s found an innovative way to do reading quizzes that help students engage with the mistakes commonly made by AI. Reading quizzes have long been used to encourage students to engage with the assigned reading, but AI has made it possible for students to quickly generate a quiz-passing summary without actually reading. Dr. Olesker instead feeds her questions into AI, and then counts the mistakes it makes. The quiz asks students to read the AI response and ‘find the mistakes’–with an A going to students who find the same number (or more) of mistakes that she does.
This is a creative way to continue using reading quizzes to encourage student engagement, but also to teach students about the hallucinations and other issues, such as AI’s tendency to leave out important context or information. The quizzes are closed book and in-class, and because they focus on finding errors, students who rely on AI summaries won’t be able to pass the quizzes.
Looking forward to learning more great ideas at this event!
This is such a creative idea – I can’t wait to try it! Thank you very much for posting about it and I can’t wait to read more from your conference 🙂