Campus Technology Insider Podcast August 2024
Jordan O'Connell 04:22
And we saw very early, I think when we, sort of, ChatGPT was released to the public, I don't know if it was version 3 or 3.5, we sort of recognized the potential here, particularly for our group of faculty. So Shannon was talking about adjuncts. But there's also hundreds, I believe, of concurrent faculty teaching high school classes that are connected and teach the same course, or teach the same course objectives, as full time faculty that we see every day, but they're kind of on an island, and the way that we deliver classes is decentralized in that way. But this AI tools provide us a means of kind of pulling everyone together and pulling their best ideas together and building courses that will work for those late hires that we're kind of, that we're currently dealing with here in late August, right, at our community college. Shannon and I probably answered the phone 100 times this morning with different questions, issues with some of those courses. So the technology is such that we can make good on like long-term plans we've had to create courses that can serve a broader group of people, that people can just step into, but we haven't really had the technology, tools, or time to do that. But because tools like D2L Lumi expedite this, suddenly things are possible. Our time goes further. We can do a lot more with the, the time that we have with, with different groups of faculty.
Shannon Brenner 05:33
Yeah, and we actually, part of our role is to provide LMS support to students and faculty. And AI has allowed us to sort of offload some of that to chatbots, and, you know, some, some things like that. So some of the easily answered questions we can have available on a chatbot, and then that frees up more of our time to do some more in-depth work.
Rhea Kelly 05:56
When you say, "This allows us to do more," what, what does "more" mean? Like what, what are you spending your, your newly freed up time on?
Shannon Brenner 06:07
Well, I think some of that time is spent being able to kind of dig in a little bit more with some of our faculty. So I'll go back to the adjuncts hired, well, not necessarily even the adjuncts recently hired, but some of our disciplines, because we're a community college there are things like agriculture or welding or other career and technology fields. And those instructors come from industry, and so they are great at what they do in industry, but they have no training, necessarily, in teaching. And so it really frees up our time to help them become better teachers and help them create materials like slideshows and lecture notes and, you know, key questions and things like that that they can put into their courses. We don't have to teach them how to do that stuff. We can just do it for them. So I think that's one way that we have been able to kind of better utilize our time.
Jordan O'Connell 06:57
Right, and so to carry forward that example, so if we would spend a month working kind of offline, asynchronously, with an adjunct or even a full-time instructor who's trying to do this at night, we're exchanging e-mails, we're trying to build simple question libraries that will be secure, that will help them achieve their assessment aims. But instead of spending that month designing the perfect final exam, we create the perfect final exam in 1/10 the amount of time, right, in partnership with the instructor, and then we start to talk about ways in which they can tackle other things they'd like to do in the classroom but don't know how — in terms of active learning, flipped classroom, recording lectures, where we get to move forward past these introductory technical stages, where we're just basically teaching people how to use the LMS over and over again, or helping them, hand-holding them through it.
Rhea Kelly 07:44
And how has the response from faculty been? If you, like, when you hand them over a list of quiz questions created by AI, are they impressed by it? Or, you know, how much sort of back and forth is necessary to vet those, the output of the AI?