Campus Technology Insider Podcast August 2024
Shannon Brenner 20:58
I would say, I'll speak from the instructional design standpoint, you know, we still have some faculty who are, I think, more afraid of AI that, you know, at this point than anything else, and who kind of really just want us to give them a tool that will help them detect, 100% certainty, whether someone in their courses has used AI so that they can give them a zero and move on. And so it's a challenge sometimes to convince some of those faculty that that tool doesn't exist and probably never will exist, because as the detection tools get better, the AI generators get better too, right? So it's just probably not in the cards. And so we are trying to kind of get our faculty, some of them, to think differently about what they're doing, and to think, and to understand that if they have students using AI in their courses on particular assignments, maybe those assignments need to be the thing that's reimagined, right, and maybe not the detection tools. And so we can, trying to work towards more authentic assessment and more audio and video and, you know, just getting, getting to the root of, what is the learning objective that you're trying to assess here? And is that prompt, if it's that easy to replicate it through AI or any other means, is it really doing the thing that it's set out to do anyway?
Jordan O'Connell 22:13
Right. And we knew it, we knew it 10 years ago, when, when students could Google their way to some of these answers. But now it's real. And so faculty really have to make a choice. Do I change or do I try to force my students to change? And that's where a lot of our faculty are currently.
Rhea Kelly 22:27
So you mentioned trying to make sure that every student can get some AI literacy training. And I'm curious, has Northeast Iowa established, like, official policies around things like that, or around, you know, acceptable use of AI, or is it more about providing the resources and information?
Jordan O'Connell 22:48
We have, we actually just launched, sort of at the direction of our interim president, Dave Dahms, we have an Artificial Intelligence Alliance, which I think is a sort of a neat approach. So we're kind of waiting from, potential guidance from the state and the community colleges across Iowa, but in the interim, we have sort of a small group that reports to the president's cabinet that's kind of entertained questions like this. And so we have not created an AI policy, but we went back and looked at like our academic freedom policy, academic integrity policy, processes, and a couple of others too, to kind of make sure that we're kind of prepared for what's coming. So Shannon and I worked real hard last semester to really update that academic integrity piece with all of our, with a ton of faculty in that group too, multiple, multiple drafts, to lay out very cleanly like what was still in their control and how they, you know, what they could do in their syllabi and through course policies to kind of prepare, take advantage of AI or help students learn without it, would kind of be the approach. So no top-down policy, but a nice framework in place and a group in place that's good doing constant professional developments, right, reaching out to faculty, triaging when we do get those tickets coming in, saying, "Help, I have a student who's using AI and won't stop," right? So we have a ready group of people, kind of ready to talk to those faculty and even staff too when these things come up, to help guide them through that process. It's course specific, context specific, and discipline specific, right?
Shannon Brenner 24:08
Yeah, I don't think I have anything else to add to that other than that we did add, I think, one line to our academic integrity language that goes in, out in all syllabi, that just indicates that unauthorized use of AI without citation is considered plagiarism. And so at least there's that, that line to protect faculty if students are using it in, in a way that is unethical or not allowed in the course. But then faculty are strongly encouraged to create their own AI policies for their specific courses and put those, there's a specific section in our syllabi for course policies, and they, they can put it there.