Campus Technology Insider Podcast August 2024
Jordan O'Connell 11:29
And that's the kind of thing you can do, but an instructor won't necessarily know how to do or would take a long time to learn. So that's where we can really help. I think not being overwhelmed by the number of AI tools out there is somewhat of a challenge. One of the first lists we put together I know had like 50 vetted tools that we had sort of done deep reviews on, and now there's obviously tens of thousands of these tools. So going with a couple tried-and-true tools, and not trying to find other options that might do something slightly different, but just getting comfortable something like a ChatGPT, a Claude, and if your school has Lumi, that can be really, really powerful. And it does expedite question building in the question library, assignment creation, discussion creation. Those tools are just fast enough to not be annoying as an instructional designer, they're just fast enough to keep pace with us, which is pretty great.
Shannon Brenner 12:12
So in terms of engineering prompts, I think it comes down to being very direct with the AI tool. I almost like to liken it to talking to a five year old. You know, you have to be very direct and sort of very concrete with what you want and what you say, and just be willing to refine, keep refining until you get what you need. And then when you do get what you need, to save those prompts, because the next time you have a conversation, even with the same AI tool, it may not answer it in the right way, or may not produce the same content the next time, it may make mistakes. And so being able to go back to those prompts that worked previously is really helpful.
Rhea Kelly 12:52
So we've been talking from an instructional design perspective. Are there ways that generative AI has changed your teaching from, like, you know, the faculty perspective?
Jordan O'Connell 13:02
I'll jump in on this right away. I instantly started to realize that my students had access to it, and I could potentially take advantage of this. As a longer term, I'm very much thinking about the ways in which the course objectives that I write, that I'm actively involved in, that as a humanities group, we're always sort of working on and wanting to improve, how those Blooms verbs sort of need to change, because students have access to information so readily, that's mostly pretty darn good, from these AI chatbots. In some way, shape, or form, I have to reconcile with that as an instructor, and I realized that pretty early. So I have not been, number one, in terms of artificial intelligence, and Shannon's done the same, we've started to ask students to record in the online space, and so we're using different assessment methods to account for this new world we find ourselves in. And so students are looking at their camera and just riffing about US history or government or the Electoral College with me, and it's fun. Like my class reviews are way up. Students like my class more. I'm leaving them video feedback, which is awesome. So it sparked this movement for me toward this sort of alternative version of oral exams in the online space that students have gotten comfortable with. And I've dabbled with video. I've long had my own lectures in my classes, and I've always asked students to kind of record an intro video or kind of a stump speech at the end of my government class since 2020. But I've seen the ways in which, partly because of, I think, COVID lockdowns, things like that, students have gotten more and more comfortable jumping onto a video tool, recording a thing, and submitting it. I think that's, that's the reality of, at least for our community college learners here in Iowa. So yeah, it's changed the way I assess, students are having a better experience, I'm leaving all this video feedback, which students are really liking too. I put chatbots in my own classes, which are super simple to keep updated, so I'll get these messages from students sometimes 11 p.m. saying, hey, what's the late work policy, or what's going on? And then five minutes later, oh, never mind, I asked the chatbot. But I'm using Dante for that, Dante AI, and there's a number of instructors, there's, you go to any conference, tons of instructors are doing this. It's really, really neat. So I think it can really empower better instruction, our students can have access to information. It's a research tool, right? It's another, it's another way they can learn information, and so it has to be accounted for. It can expedite their own learning, it can enhance their own learning, it can expand their own learning. We should try to take advantage of it to some extent. And we're having lots of internal debates at the college about, it's asking, it's forcing us to ask really philosophical questions about, how do people learn best? How do our students learn best in this program? We're asking these questions we've always made assumptions about, at least in my time in higher ed, that are long overdue, and I don't exactly know what the answer will be in the end to all these questions, but I'm really glad we're asking these questions and we're exploring,