How Can Educators Leverage Generative AI?
New artificial intelligence tools are emerging every day in the public domain. This brings a myriad of challenges but also opportunities for education as well as for students and educators. There seems to be a sense of excitement about technology in the academic community, along with other sectors.
Educators mostly think of academic integrity only
Educators are interested in maintaining academic integrity, as the use of artificial intelligence may not be in line with its integrity, so it is essential to educate all people involved about the proper use of AI in a responsible way and according to ethical practices. Those who are experts in their fields but lack AI skills may think of using technology as a daunting exercise, but once tried and used for professional work, it can be a useful tool that has many benefits.
Experimenting with AI tools is the first step to understanding the nature of how AI models work. One just has to get in and try his or her hands on the thing to see what comes out of the machine. An easy way could be that whenever you want to search for something, then, along with Googling, try to ask about the same thing from ChatGPT or Gemini, as this could potentially serve as a good first step towards using AI. And at times, you might find them more useful in some use cases.
Running assignments through AI tools to see what they recommend can be very helpful. Though more keen students can play around with prompts to make it harder to detect the tools’ usage, at least having one example of an AI response at hand will help get the idea.
It has other implications than simple cheating as it may offer insights on whether the assignment should be revised or possible flaws in it by asking multiple questions from the tool like how students might leverage this same tool or similar for this assignment or does it makes sense for the course, or where should students need assistance while figuring out a certain part.
All these things can provide a much broader perspective on scope, which sometimes is not in the focus of the human mind.
AI cannot replace human educators
These tools cannot replace educators as they cannot offer the learning experience of a human teacher, but these tools can provide rapid solutions for time-consuming tasks, for example, dissecting data in longer texts and providing summaries of the same.
But it is essential to have an AI use policy in your syllabus, and to reach this step, an educator may need to go through the initial process. If someone does not have the time or capacity to go knee-deep in the process, they still have to face it, and the more quickly a policy is developed, the better it will be for the academic integrity of the course.
Learning about prompt engineering can be a good idea, as it involves asking questions in a creative way and refining them for better results. This will be really helpful in guiding the AI model to provide more specific answers and avoid generalization, and reduce the user’s surprise reactions to the model.
Artificial intelligence is here to stay, and it will change the ways educators have been relying on for teaching for decades, as AI is expected to have a more profound impact than how email and search impact educational practices.
