325. Looking Forward to 2024

As we enter this spring semester, we take a break from our usual format to discuss what we are looking forward to in 2024.

Show Notes

Transcript

Rebecca: As we enter this spring semester, we thought we’d take a break from our usual format to discuss what we’re looking forward to in 2024.

[MUSIC]

John: Thanks for joining us for Tea for Teaching, an informal discussion of innovative and effective practices in teaching and learning.

Rebecca: This podcast series is hosted by John Kane, an economist

John: …and Rebecca Mushtare, a graphic designer…

Rebecca: …and features guests doing important research and advocacy work to make higher education more inclusive and supportive of all learners.

[MUSIC]

John: So what tea are you drinking now, Rebecca?

Rebecca: I’m drinking Ceylon tea.

John: And I have ginger peach black tea from the Republic of Tea.

Rebecca: So it’s a new year, John, and we’re gonna have a nice positive episode. So what are you grateful for?

John: I’m grateful that we survived another year. I’m grateful for the continued return to face-to-face instruction and a continuing return to a more normal classroom environment and college environment after all the disruptions from COVID that lasted for a while. And I’m also grateful for the initiatives that we’re using on our campus, and most campuses, to provide more focus on equity and trying to reduce some of the equity gaps that we’ve been seeing. And I’m seeing a general interest in that across a wide range of faculty and the administration. And we’re just in the process of running some workshops, and we’re getting some really good attendance at workshops that focus on techniques that faculty can use to improve equity and reduce some of those gaps. And I’m looking forward to seeing continued expansion of more equitable practices. And also, we’ve had quite a few people trying to implement the TILT approach that Mary-Ann Winklemes has talked about on a past podcast episode, and we’re hoping that that, combined with the increased structure that many people are trying to use in their classes, will help provide all students with more equitable outcomes.

Rebecca: I’m really glad that you have brought up equity, John, because I was just reflecting on a couple meetings that I was in just this week, and thinking about how equity oriented many of our colleagues are. And it’s really exciting to see them really advocating for policies, instructional practices, and many other things that are really equity oriented, and thinking about inclusion, and access, and all the things that you and I have talked about for a long time and have cared about and tried to implement in our classes. I’m also really grateful for, and I know you are too, for the many guests that we’ve had who’ve shared their expertise with us and with our audience. When we do these weekly episodes, it’s so great to have the opportunity to talk to such experts, to learn from them, to stay fresh with what’s going on, and to be able to share it with everyone else. It’s an experience that I didn’t know that I wanted, and I’m glad that we get to continue doing it.

John: And one other thing I’m grateful for from last fall is I attended my first POD conference, and I got to meet dozens of guests that we’ve talked to before. And we’ve talked to them, we’ve seen them on camera, but it was so nice to meet them and talk to them in more detail and in more depth in person.

Rebecca: I felt that way when I went to EDUCAUSE for the first time this year and connected with a number of colleagues focused on accessibility and growing that network and really connecting beyond just names and emails and other ways that we’ve communicated.

John: What are some of the major things you’re watching in the higher ed landscape? We’ve seen a lot of changes going on in the last few years, what are things that you’re going to be focusing more of your attention on in the next year?

Rebecca: I know that some of the things that we’re working on in grad studies and that I’m personally really involved in are kind of some increased accessibility resources for our colleagues at Oswego as well as SUNY. I’m looking forward to building out some of those resources, sharing those resources, and wrapping up a couple of research projects related to accessibility and getting to share those out. And I’m really excited that the higher ed landscape generally is having a lot more focus in this space because students with disabilities have been often overlooked in our diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives. And there definitely is a push to be a little more inclusive, and to have that population represented in these efforts and initiatives. We’re also really focused on ideas of belonging for a wide range of students, thinking about how do we get our online students connected to each other and to the larger population of students and to see them as members of our community, extending some of those features and opportunities for international students and really thinking about what some of their needs are to be successful at our institution, especially with our kind of rural location, and what can make things really excited. So I’m really looking forward to finding ways to support our students not just in the courses that I’m teaching or in my instructional role, but also in policies and procedures that we’re implementing at the institution,in grad studies, but more broadly as well. How about you?

John: One of the things that I’m really following closely is the development of AI. This came about a little over a year ago and it’s been a really disruptive influence. It offers a lot of tremendous possibilities, but it also provides some challenges to traditional assessment, particularly in asynchronous online courses. So I’m looking forward to continued development, it seems like there’s new tools coming out almost every week. And it offers some really nice capabilities to narrow some of the equity gaps that we have by providing low-cost assistance for students who may not have come into our institutions quite as well prepared. It offers a possibility of students doing a little bit more retrieval practice for those classes where instructors are not providing those opportunities. It offers students who, again have a somewhat weaker background, to take more complex readings that they may have been assigned and simplifying it and creating a more accessible format to help students get up to the level they need in their classes. And so it provides tools that can help students improve their writing, and so forth. The challenge, of course, is that it can also be used as a substitute for learning in some classes unless assignments are designed in a way, and assessment techniques are designed in a way, that reduces the likelihood of that and that’s one of the things we’ll be working on a lot this year, ways of coming up with more authentic assessment and ways of providing more intrinsic motivation for the work that students are doing, so that students can see the value of the learning rather than focusing entirely on grades. And one of the things we’re doing is we have a reading group coming up early this semester on Grading for Growth by Robert Talbert and David Clark. And we’re, in general, encouraging faculty to at least consider the adoption of alternative grading systems, which shift the focus away from students trying to maximize grades to maximizing their learning. And there’s a wide variety of tools that could be used for that, ranging from mastery learning quizzing systems, which many faculty have already been doing through specifications grading, contract grading, labor-based grading, and also ungrading.

Rebecca: Yeah, it’s really exciting that we’re going to focus on that semester, something that I’ve been interested in for a long time and have been using in my classes as well. I’m glad you mentioned AI, there’s certainly a lot of promise, and I’ve been really excited by how many faculty, staff, administrators who’ve actually really been engaged in the conversation around AI. I think sometimes there are new innovations and things and people kind of brush it aside and don’t always think it applies to them or isn’t relevant to them. But I think this is something that’s relevant to everybody. And most people are seeing that and engaging in the conversation, struggling in the conversation, but at least we’re doing that in community. And I think there’s some power in that as we think through policy, in assignments and all the things that we need to think about to provide an enriching experience for our students, but also engage and use the tools and the power that they offer.

John: One other thing I’m following is the development of a wide variety of new edtech tools. We saw an explosive growth in the development of tools and expansion of their capabilities in response to the COVID pandemic, but that growth and expansion hasn’t dropped. And we’re seeing more and more tools that have often been designed based on research about how students learn. And I think we’re going to see expanded use of many of these tools in the coming year.

Rebecca: And I think a lot of faculty got used to experimenting with these tools during remote education and are continuing to use them in physical and virtual classrooms, which I think is really exciting, maybe even more exciting to me was attending big conferences like Middle States and actually having a presenter use some of these edtech tools as part of a plenary. So rather than having more of a lecture style session, it was more of an interactive session, which doesn’t always happen at conferences of such scale, or these more leadership conferences. So it’s exciting to see that we’re modeling some of these practices at the highest level so that the wide variety of individuals involved in higher ed are experiencing learning and engaging with these kinds of tools. Along the same lines, I’m also excited that many of these tools are starting to actually attend to accessibility, in part because higher ed institutions are really pushing back to third-party providers and requesting them provide information about accessibility, and even refusing to adopt tools if they aren’t meeting basic accessibility principles, which I think is really excited and really important.

John: And I saw something very similar both at the POD conference where you might expect to see people creating more interactive workshops, but I’ve also been seeing it in the workshops that we’ve had in the last couple of weeks here. We have a record number of faculty presenting in workshops, they’re using polling, they’re using tools like Mentimeter and they’re doing many more interactive activities than in past years. If we go back a few years, many of the sessions that were presented were essentially straight walkthroughs through PowerPoint slideshows with not a lot of interaction with the participants. And our workshops here have been both in person and remote over zoom. And people have been working really effectively to bring all the participants into the discussion and into the activities, regardless of whether they are in person in the room or remote. And it’s been nice to see that. Much of that I think did grow out of the experiences of COVID, and people just getting more comfortable trying new tools.

Rebecca: Come to find out, practice helps us learn things.

John: Also, our campus enabled the AI Companion in Zoom, which will provide meeting summaries for people who arrive late or people who come in at the end of a discussion. And I think that’s going to offer some nice opportunities for people who may have missed part of the discussion early on in a session, or in a workshop, or in a meeting, because so many of our meetings now take place over Zoom.

Rebecca: And there’s lots to be watching that are also highly concerning, but John and I resolved that we weren’t going to focus on those today.

John: So this will be a relatively short episode. [LAUGHTER]

Rebecca: So continuing on this theme of gratefulness and positivity, John, what are you looking forward to trying this year, or focusing on in your own work this year, or committing to this year?

John: One thing, and this partly follows up a couple of podcasts we’ve had in the last year or so. In our campus, many departments are working to build in some of the NACE competencies into their classroom. And there’s some really significant advantages for that. If it’s done well, it will help students recognize the intrinsic value of the things they’re learning in class and recognize that these are skills that they’re going to need later, which again, helps provide much more motivation for students to learn than if they just see a series of activities that instructors ask them to do, and they don’t see the value of that. So by making the connections between what we’re doing in the classroom in terms of the development of critical thinking skills, teamwork, and all those other NACE competencies, it offers some really serious benefits for students and for faculty. Because if students are more engaged in the activities and understand the purpose of them, I think they’re going to be much more likely to focus on the learning rather than again, trying just to get the highest grade. And that’s also very consistent with the TILT approach that we mentioned earlier. If students understand why you’re doing things, they’re going to receive the techniques and engage in them more productively than if they didn’t see the value of those tasks.

Rebecca: Yeah, I’m glad that you mentioned TILT as well. We mentioned it earlier, but I was just remembering that one of the things I wanted to mention while we were talking today is a commitment to thinking about TILT, not just in a classroom context, but all the other places that touch a student experience. So thinking about policies and procedures and ways that we can use a TILT approach to really improve transparency and clarity for our students and provide some equity and access by doing so. The other thing that I’m committed to trying to do is get back to more play, we’ve had some episodes on Tea for Teaching focused on play. And they always get me really excited about some of the things that I’ve done in the past in some of my classes and that I’ve done with some of my colleagues… and that the burden of transitioning during COVID to remote learning, some of these things have taken time and maybe attention away from play. And I’m hoping to take some time in 2024 to put some more attention back on being a little more playful.

John: So, you think education could be fun?

Rebecca: Maybe.

John: Okay. [LAUGHTER]

Rebecca: I’ve moved to doing some exercises and activities again a little more recently that get to some of these more playful ways of creating and making and thinking through complex problems. And every time I do that the students appreciate it. I have more fun, they have more fun, and I think a lot more learning gets done.

John: Since we want to focus on the positive, we’ll leave challenges for future episodes.

Rebecca: We’ve got all of 2024 to do that, John.

John: And we really appreciate, as Rebecca said, all of the wonderful guests that we’ve had since the beginning of this podcast, and we appreciate our audience too. So thank you for hanging in there with us.

Rebecca: Have a great 2024.

[MUSIC]

John: If you’ve enjoyed this podcast, please subscribe and leave a review on iTunes or your favorite podcast service. To continue the conversation, join us on our Tea for Teaching Facebook page.

Rebecca: You can find show notes, transcripts and other materials on teaforteaching.com. Music by Michael Gary Brewer.

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321. College Students with Disabilities

Sharing student narratives about their experiences can help us to understand how our instructional and policy decisions impact the student experience. In this episode, Amy Fisk joins us discuss to discuss her research project with Rebecca on the perceptions that students with disabilities have of their learning experiences.

Amy is the Assistant Dean for Accessibility at the State University of New York at Geneseo. Amy oversees the Office of Accessibility Services, which coordinates accommodations and support services for students with disabilities. Prior to her role at Geneseo, Amy coordinated a support program for students on the autism spectrum at SUNY Purchase.

Show Notes

Transcript

John: Sharing student narratives about their experiences can help us to understand how our instructional and policy decisions impact the student experience. In this episode, we discuss the perceptions students with disabilities have of their learning experiences.

[MUSIC]

John: Thanks for joining us for Tea for Teaching, an informal discussion of innovative and effective practices in teaching and learning.

Rebecca: This podcast series is hosted by John Kane, an economist…

John: …and Rebecca Mushtare, a graphic designer…

Rebecca: …and features guests doing important research and advocacy work to make higher education more inclusive and supportive of all learners.

[MUSIC]

John: Our guest today is Amy Fisk. Amy is the Assistant Dean for Accessibility at the State University of New York at Geneseo. Amy oversees the Office of Accessibility Services, which coordinates accommodations and support services for students with disabilities. Prior to her role at Geneseo, Amy coordinated a support program for students on the autism spectrum at SUNY Purchase. Welcome, Amy.

Amy: Thank you. Thank you so much for having me.

Rebecca: Today’s teas are:… Amy, are you drinking any tea?

Amy: I drink tea every morning. So I have Bigelow French Vanilla black tea.

Rebecca: It’s a good way to start the day. How about you, John?

John: In honor of the holiday season, I have Christmas tea today.

Rebecca: I’m drinking Blue Sapphire from my favorite tea shop in Canandaigua.

Amy: Where’s that?

Rebecca: It’s right on Main Street. You should go there.

Amy: I should.

John: We’ve invited you to talk about the article: “Perspectives among college students with disabilities on access and inclusion,” which you co-authored with someone else… Rebecca, I think it was.

Amy: That name sounds familiar.

John: …which was published in College Teaching earlier this year. Before we talk about the article, could you tell us a little bit about your role at SUNY Geneseo.

Amy: So I oversee our Office of Accessibility Services, or OAS. I meet with students to coordinate accommodations and other kinds of support services for our students with disabilities. I monitor policies and procedures within our office. And I often work with faculty and staff on issues related to accessibility and inclusion. So for example, I might do trainings across campus, work with administrators on various committees, and having a voice on issues related to disability, education, awareness, and accessibility.

Rebecca: So prior to this project, Amy, and I didn’t actually know each other. Do you want to share the origin story?

Amy: I started my position here a month before COVID became a thing. So I was kind of thrown into some challenges I did not anticipate. But one of the things I had been thinking about, many of my colleagues were thinking about, was: How are we going to support our students with disabilities? We’re really kind of concerned about their trajectory during this challenging time. We wanted to just get some more information about students’ experiences during COVID. I started talking to Nazely about this, and she says, “You know, I know someone who does research who also might be interested in a potential collaboration.” So that’s how I got connected to Rebecca. And ultimately, we shared an interest in learning more about the impact of COVID on our students within our respective roles on our campuses. We knew that this was a really challenging time for all of us, but especially for our students with disabilities who had already been experiencing barriers pre pandemic. And so we really wanted to hear from our students about their experiences, and what can we learn about access and inclusion moving forward, even when the dust settles and we talk about things post COVID?

John: A lot of the studies that have been done have been quantitative studies. And your study is a qualitative study. Could you talk a little bit about how this qualitative research complements the quantitative research that’s been done?

Amy: Sure. So ultimately, we wanted to gather students’ stories, and many of our findings from our studies are reflective of findings from past studies on challenges and barriers students with disabilities face compared to students without disabilities. But we wanted to identify these specifically within the context of remote learning. And also within the context of navigating this challenging time just in life, we really wanted that student narrative. And we also wanted to assess the positive things that were happening, the practices that were helping our students feel successful, to really help inform tangible takeaways and recommendations to our readers. And we hoped for this information to be relevant, like I said, when the dust settles and regardless of teaching modality. And I think it’s important to highlight that despite the obvious challenges that COVID brought, it has highlighted the importance of accessibility in higher education and really gave us an opportunity to reassess what we’ve been doing, our everyday policies and practices, and we really wanted to highlight that from the student perspective. Beyond that, we also wanted to talk about the needs of our students with disabilities within the context of access and inclusion. So, often disabilities and identities, that tends to be left out of conversations related to diversity, equity, and inclusion. So it wasn’t just about how we need to provide appropriate classroom accommodations, but what are the ways that we can be more inclusive, promote a sense of belonging, proactively provide equal access? So those were the things that we had in mind as we were designing our study.

Rebecca: One of the things that comes up in a lot of conversations, at least more recently in higher ed., is this growing number of students who are registering for accommodations and also the mental health crisis. Can you talk a little bit about that to provide some context for our discussion today?

Amy: Sure. So the mental health needs of college students with disabilities was becoming really apparent before COVID hit, really significant needs related to depression, anxiety, other severe psychiatric impairments. And the studies that had been done around the time of COVID really highlighted those issues of more and more students connecting to their disability services offices, self-identifying as a student with a disability where they have a clinical levels of depression, anxiety, other debilitating mental health needs. And that theme came out in our study as well.

John: Did all the discussions of the challenges of COVID help encourage students to become more willing to declare their mental health challenges or their other needs that perhaps they might have been more reluctant to state prior to this time?

Amy: I think so. I think there is a shift in our culture, and it being okay to talk about mental health and mental illness, for students to say, “I’m having a really hard time, I’m struggling,” because mental health is a spectrum. We all experience a variety of emotions throughout the day, throughout an hour, and throughout our lifetime. And I think it’s becoming slowly de-stigmatized in talking about mental illness and the importance of promoting mental health, especially among our college-age population. A lot of college campuses are really taking seriously the wellness of their students on campus just because of the rise in numbers of students needing that extra support, because colleges across our country are noticing a pretty significant increase. And I do think COVID has propelled that de-stigmatization of talking about mental health.

Rebecca: We’ve talked in the past on this podcast with Kat MacFarlane about some of the barriers that students face in just even approaching and asking for accommodations, having to register with an office of disability services, or whatever the equivalent is on the campus, and having to self identify. And then a lot of students don’t actually choose to do that for a wide variety of reasons, some associated with stigma, but we are seeing increased registrations. So does that mean that there’s increased disability?

Amy: Yes, I think there are a variety of factors and more students connecting with disability services offices. One, I think high schools are better preparing students with disabilities to enter the post-secondary environment. Two, I think our offices are becoming more visible on campus. Again, I think there’s also a de-stigmatization of disability and accessibility services offices, and we’re becoming more visible and relevant on college campuses. And third, I think colleges are starting to talk about disability as an important facet of diversity more and more, I think there’s certainly room for improvement, but I think that conversation is starting to happen. So more students are finding their way into our offices.

Rebecca: So three key themes emerged in our research about the perceptions of students with disabilities, of our institutions, and their experience, and of belonging. And so those three themes are accommodations and accessibility, building relationships, and community, and then course structure and design. Perhaps we can take them one at a time here. Let’s start with accommodations and accessibility. Can you first start with what’s the difference between accommodations and accessibility? Because we know that this is often something that’s confusing to folks.

Amy: Sure. So an a ccommodation, by definition, is designed to remove some sort of barrier that an individual with a disability is experiencing. So an academic accommodation, for example, might be having extra time to take an exam, because timed tests can be a barrier for some students. Maybe it’s a notetaking accommodation because they need assistance accessing that lecture material. Sometimes it’s ensuring that the course materials themselves are accessible, that they can be read through a screen reader. Sometimes the accommodation is related to a course policy such as attendance for a student with a more severe chronic medical condition. So it is an individualized process to assess what an appropriate accommodation would look like. But the purpose of it is to remove some sort of barrier so that this person has equal access to their environment. And so accommodations, though necessary, is something that we’re legally required to provide for the ADA. It’s really a reactive way of ensuring equal access. It’s a floor, it’s a minimum. Accessibility, on the other hand, is about inclusion from the start, so that individual accommodation may not even be needed. And something I like to highlight is that accessibility is not about lowering standards. It’s sending a message that everyone belongs in this space and that inclusion matters.

John: What were some of the most common barriers that students reported facing related to accommodations and accessibility in your study.

Amy: Some of those barriers for students just not receiving their approved accommodations during remote learning, including extended time on tests, for example, or online course materials just not being accessible, or having to continually remind instructors about their accommodations, explain why they needed the accommodation in the first place, negotiating terms of pre-approved accommodations. And this was particularly true among students with what we might call an invisible or non-appearance disabilities such as learning disabilities, ADHD, mental health disabilities, these students are less likely to be believed and questioned about the validity of their disability or their need for accommodation. So those were some pretty significant barriers for students and just not receiving the accommodations that they were approved for.

Rebecca: I think one of the things that was also highlighted as a result of our study taking place, whilst COVID was in full force is how many campus resources students with disabilities and other students depend upon every day. So we had students reporting things like” I didn’t have access to a printer to pull up text when it was more of an image instead of an accessible text that could have been expanded digitally, or having access to a quiet space, like the library.”

Amy: Yeah, that was really significant. And then that is where you also saw some other equity disparities. So there were some students who live down near New York City in very populated areas, there was a lot going down there at the time. COVID, if we recall, some students did not have quiet spaces at home, whereas other students had quiet home offices and their parents may have been at home with them, helping to support them. And then other students who didn’t have a quiet space whatsoever took on more caretaking responsibilities, didn’t have access to WiFi. So those equity disparities continued to widen during COVID beyond the disability barrier, so that was something significant, I think that needed to be highlighted,

Rebecca: What are some of the factors related to accessibility and accommodations that actually resulted in positive perceptions?

Amy: So our students actually reported some very positive interactions with their instructors. So when receiving a student’s letter of accommodation, or like an accommodation notification that would come through our office, some would reach out and ask the student “How can I support you? How can I help provide this accommodation?” One student even noted how they appreciated that the instructor didn’t call them out in class, because that had happened before. So I think just preserving the students’ dignity, reaching out to the student, those were the kinds of things that our students reported as making a significant difference.

John: I know you’re study focused on the status of students during COVID, but in your role addressing these issues now, have the changes in faculty behavior persisted? Have faculty continued to become more sensitive to some of the accessibility and accommodation needs of students as we move back to more classroom instruction?

Amy: So in conversation with colleagues, other disability service providers across SUNY, but also across the country, I think we’ve seen a mix. I think there are some who just wanted to go back to normal, and didn’t we all. I think COVID, again, was a very challenging time and faculty too didn’t have a ton of support, and also really struggled with having that emergency shift to a remote learning modality and some didn’t have the skills or support to really deliver courses in the way that would have facilitated student success. So they were really looking forward to getting back to that in-person modality, back to the pedagogy that we’re used to, and that may have posed some new barriers for students coming back to college campuses. Conversely, we also saw instructors taking some of those learned lessons from the remote learning period and applying them when we did come back to campus. So I do know a number of instructors who, for example, are still utilizing the lecture videos they created during COVID and post them on their learning management system for students who may not have been able to attend class that day, for example, so they can still get the lecture material or recreating their course materials and documents so that they are accessible, creating videos, captioning their videos, modifying some course policies to be a bit more inclusive for students. So I think there has been a change in realizing we can still have students be successful and meet the learning objectives, but in a different and more inclusive way.

Rebecca: I think one of the things that we can highlight that also came out in the student experience, and students reported this in our study, is that some of them actually experienced better access during COVID. Not all but some, in part because some of the technology caught up. And when we first went remote, Zoom didn’t have captions available by default and now it does. And so a lot of these things have become norms that people with disabilities have fought for for a long time and never got.

Amy: And I would say that’s true as well with regard to course policies that may have been amended as well, introducing more self paced work, which is also something that students really appreciated during the remote learning period.

John: I just recently returned from the POD conference where there were many, many discussions of this very issue. And in general, the results there were pretty much the same as what you’ve described, that a lot of the changes that faculty made to better accommodate students needs persisted, but some faculty have moved back to old practices and the results are a little bit mixed. But on average, there seemed to be, in a number of studies, some substantial improvement in faculty responses to student needs.

Rebecca: Based on what students have reported, what recommendations do you have for faculty related to accommodations and accessibility to continue the forward movement as opposed to regressing?

Amy: So, actually I did a talk with faculty of one of our academic departments at the start of the semester, reviewing our office, some of the logistical pieces of implementing accommodations, that sort of thing. But before I started really getting into that, we had a discussion about how accommodations, and the dialogue about accommodations with students are approached, how it’s discussed, how it’s communicated, something as simple as taking time to actually review the portion in your course syllabus related to an accommodation, so maybe an accessibility statement. That tells students that this is important, making sure that your online materials are accessible from the start, that tells students that accessibility and inclusion is important. And students are more likely to engage in a reciprocal dialogue with you about their needs when they feel like they’re heard, when they feel like they’re a valued member of the class, that their accommodations are important and not burdensome. That’s a term we heard a lot in our study, that they’re not a burden, or it’s some sort of requirement that the faculty has to fulfill. And so I think this is probably true for most students, regardless of disability. But students in our study specifically noted how they appreciated when the instructor showed empathy and understanding and flexibility, recognizing that students have significant issues outside of the classroom. We all do, between family, finances, things that are happening in our world today. And I think this is important to acknowledge as well, given that we’re seeing an increase in students from various diverse backgrounds coming into the college environment.

Rebecca: And as we’ve talked about many times on the podcast, flexible doesn’t mean not having standards. [LAUGHTER] And it doesn’t mean a free for all. In fact, a lot of our students benefit from structure, which we’ll talk about, I think, in a few minutes, because that ties to one of our other themes. You talked a little bit about faculty workload related to this, and sometimes the perception that faculty put off is that it’s a burden to provide these accommodations. And the reality is that a lot of our students need very similar things. And so if we think about the common requests for accommodations, or digital accessibility strategies, from the start, we often don’t have a lot of one off things that we do need to accommodate, because we’ve already built it into our courses. That’s not to say that there aren’t accommodations that we need to provide additionally, but it may result in less work, ultimately, to really think about these accessibility principles upfront.

Amy: Right. And I think something as simple as making your course lecture materials available on the learning management system available to students. That can help reduce a lot of barriers for many students who might struggle with keeping up with the pace of the lecture and they end up missing material. A student who may have missed class that one day and just needs that material, other students who need to kind of re-teach themselves the material because, perhaps, they had challenges with staying focused during class. I think there’s a variety of reasons why students would benefit from that, but something as simple as that. Often, when students come to see me, there are maybe students who hadn’t needed accommodations previously, but they encountered a particular course where the policies were such that there were new barriers that arose and if the policy was different, perhaps they wouldn’t need that accommodation. That’s a concrete example of the difference between accommodation and accessibility. Some of our course policies and course design may be inadvertently barriers to students with or without disability. So this might include use of pop quizzes, not making lecture materials available to students, not permitting use of technology, not allowing students to even take breaks in class. And so although the purpose of these policies is probably to make students engaged and have accountability in the course, which these are things, of course, we want… again, we’re not lowering standards… students still need to go to class and do the work. But I think some of these policies actually might be having the opposite effect, and it does for students who request accommodations, rather than focus on learning in the course.

John: I think that many faculty who had only taught in a face-to-face modality before COVID, were able to avoid issues of accessibility by not creating digital content. When they moved to remote teaching, though, they were forced to begin developing digital materials and often received some training in creating accessible digital content. Do you think that that training received during COVID helped encourage more accessible practices by faculty in general?

Amy: I think so again, I think some of these practices have shifted over time, and I think COVID has shed light on the benefits of accessibility, not just for people with disabilities, but for all people. I mean, again, use of captions and subtitles can be beneficial for a lot of folks, whether you’re sitting in a busy Starbucks, whether you have a lot going on in the background, maybe you’re trying to juggle work and family, maybe, again, you’re hard of hearing, and so you need access to those captions. Again, accessibility is for all, not just about or for people with disabilities.

Rebecca: The second theme that kind of emerged in our research was building relationships and community, can you share some insights with faculty about the role that they can play in helping students with disabilities feel connected and included? And you highlighted some of those already: providing accommodations and showing students some dignity and respecting their dignity.

Amy: So again, I think engaging with a student and even something as simple as taking the student aside and asking, “How can I make this course more accessible to you?” speaks volumes to the student, that they are valued, they belong, that their needs aren’t burdensome, and they’re more likely to engage in a reciprocal dialogue with the faculty member when they feel like “Oh, they care about me and my success in this course.” I actually knew about a professor who did an anonymous Google form, asking students “How can I make this course more accessible to you? Are there barriers? In reviewing the syllabus, do you have concerns about something within the course?” One of my students actually told me about this, and said how it really made them feel seen and valued. And they were more likely to reach out to the instructor when they needed help, because some students fail to do so out of shame. They’re in a very vulnerable position to talk about their disability related needs to a faculty member, to an authority figure. And so when you do something as simple as asking a student, “How can I make this accessible to you? Are you experiencing barriers right now?” really opens that line of communication with the student and helps them build a positive relationship with that instructor and for maybe other instructors. It also helps to build a sense of community so that other students know that this is really important, and that inclusion matters. And that’s also sending a message to all their students within the classroom that we appreciate and respect diverse learners here in this classroom. I think that’s a teachable moment for our students as well.

Rebecca: So one of the other things that I think emerged is a desire to be connected with peers, but that faculty can play a really important role in facilitating that connection. So I think oftentimes, we just assume in a classroom that at the beginning of class students are socializing and getting to know other folks and have those contacts, but students really reported that having more structured ways of connecting with peers was really beneficial to them outside of class. And that’s something that I think we might take for granted as instructors in the classroom, that it would just kind of organically happen. But that structure, that scaffolding around that really bubbled up as being pretty important to our students,

Amy: Yeah, that peer-to-peer interaction for an even if it was virtual. One of our students said, “Our instructor had a virtual whiteboard that we could all do group work even when it was asynchronous, which is pretty neat.” So that helps set the stage for positive peer interactions, for peers to ask peers for help and mentorship, which is important. Often, students just feel that going to office hours is the only way that they can receive help. And when you provide opportunities to work together, learn together, that really helps, again, open up a line of communication among peers as well, which is a skill that we’re trying to teach our students.

John: And that was especially severe during COVID. But also, when we returned to the classroom, and students were asked to sit at least six feet away from any other student, it certainly reduced the amount of interaction and it has made it a little more challenging for all students to interact with others. That’s been improving, but I think, perhaps, that experience may remind faculty of the importance of building those types of connections. Because even before COVID, there were always some students who may not have felt as much a part of the class community. But I think we’ve all learned the importance of community during that time.

Rebecca: I think that’s just another example of something that students with disabilities have pointed out as being really important to them. But it’s also important to many other students, too.

John: The third theme that emerged from your research was course structure and design. And most of your findings in that particular category align with many other studies involving inclusive pedagogy and Universal Design for Learning. Can you highlight some of the common barriers that students with disabilities faced in terms of course structure and design.

Amy: So one of our students in the study commonly referred to one of their course LMS pages as a scavenger hunt, where they spent more time trying to find the materials and the information on the course rather than on the assignments themselves. So students in general benefit from an organized LMS and an organized syllabus for deadlines, instructions, policies are very clear and concise, but for students with disabilities, this is particularly important. Many of my students with ADHD, health or chronic medical conditions, or a learning disability, they need to plan ahead, because it might take the students double or triple the time to finish a task. So if students don’t know when their next test is, or if instructions aren’t posted a few days before something is due, we’re really not setting them up for success. And I also talked about some of those other policies and course design that might be inadvertent barriers to our students. And so some of our students reported that they did benefit from self-paced tasks, or on untimed learning assessments, having some autonomy and options for completing assignments in a different format, such as doing a presentation or a podcast, instead of a paper, working in groups or choosing to work individually on a project. Those are some of the specific practices our students highlighted as being really helpful. And again, we’re not lowering standards, they have to meet the same standards and learning objectives, as every other student, just perhaps meeting those same standards in a different way. And that’s what Universal Design for learning is all about.

John: One time in a workshop, a faculty member mentioned that they have students do a scavenger hunt in the LMS, to find various course policies, or to find materials. And I cringed at that and I suggested that it might be better to design your course in a way where the students don’t have to struggle to find things so they can focus their cognitive efforts on learning materials, rather than engaging in scavenger hunts, trying to navigate the course. Has that improved recently?

Amy: I think it has, again, in conversations with some of my colleagues who do this work and talking with faculty, I think it’s a mixed bag as it relates to how instructors are approaching course design in their policies. But other faculty are seeing that changing their pedagogy, changing their policies, changing the way they interact and see students and helping to meet those student needs have evolved, because perhaps they themselves have experienced accessibility barriers during COVID as well. And so it’s become more relevant, because they have that lived experience. And they’re seeing that adopting some of these inclusive practices are actually helping to keep their students engaged, that the students, even if they’re struggling, are more likely to tell their faculty member “I’m struggling and I need help, but I want to stay in this course, what kind of flexibility could be provided?”… rather than, we’ll use a college student term, ghosting [LAUGHTER] the class. So I think things are changing in a direction that speaks to some degree of flexibility and helping students meet those same standards, where the focus is more on learning, rather than adherence to an arbitrary policy.

Rebecca: I think the students really underscored maybe without realizing things like the transparency and learning and teaching or TILT, where being really clear and explicit about what the expectation is and how to get there and how you’re going to be assessed really helps and supports students… that structure and those guardrails is what all of us need. How many times have we worked on a paper the second before a deadline? We work on deadlines, and so if we help students with intermediary deadlines, we’re actually helping them and that doesn’t mean that we’re not flexible,and flexibility doesn’t mean not having those.

Amy: It’s about scaffolding. It’s about recognizing that not all students are coming from the same background and experiences and privilege. They’re not on the same playing field, and so providing those scaffolded learning opportunities… that can really help even the playing field, just providing those scaffolded learning opportunities.

Rebecca: And it’s really some of this scaffolded accountability, so it’s not all due at once, It’s helpful to faculty to remind them that there’s feedback throughout a process on a larger assignment, but also it’s helpful for students to hit individual deadlines to evolve their work as well.

John: And that’s something that is found, as you noted earlier, by Mary-Ann Winklemes in her research on Transparency in Learning and Teaching, and also by Viji Sathy and Kelly Hogan in their research on the importance of structure in reducing equity gaps. While transparency and structure benefits all students, it especially benefits the students who have equity gaps of some form, and it sounds as if that’s also true for students with disabilities.

Rebecca: Yeah, I think none of this is really new, but oftentimes students with disabilities aren’t necessarily included in those studies about equity always, it’s not always one of the groups that’s pulled out separately.

Amy: Part of what’s next is also hearing about the experiences of students with disabilities from other diverse backgrounds, including students of color, students from lower SES backgrounds, students in the LGBTQ+ community, that those experiences are different and that intersectionality is really key in understanding students’ experiences in the classroom and how we can be more accessible and inclusive because, again, accessibility is not just related to are we providing a legally required accommodation, but are we creating a sense of belonging in that space, and giving students an equal opportunity to demonstrate their knowledge and be successful, which is ultimately why we’re all here, I would hope.

Rebecca: So we always wrap up by asking what’s next?

Amy: I think it’s important to not just put a focus on what individual faculty can be doing in their classrooms to support students with disabilities. But how are we promoting access and inclusion at the institutional level, supporting students with disabilities and students from other diverse backgrounds is a whole campus responsibility and faculty needs support in doing that work as well. So I’m hoping what’s next is working with administration, other campus leaders and identifying ways we can really help move that needle in a meaningful way. Making accessibility into larger DEIB (or diversity, equity, inclusion and belonging) campus initiatives, our campus-wide policy, strategic planning, campus-wide faculty and staff training, and other professional development opportunities, hiring diverse faculty and staff on our campus. So not just about talking the talk, but walking the walk when it comes to access and inclusion in higher education.

Rebecca: I think that’s definitely a theme that we’ll see throughout all of higher ed. I hope that we’ll all go home and arm and move in this direction collaboratively.

John: Well, thank you for joining us. It’s been great talking to you and we’re looking forward to hearing more of your future work on this topic.

Amy: Well, thank you so much for having me today. I appreciate it.

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John: If you’ve enjoyed this podcast, please subscribe and leave a review on iTunes or your favorite podcast service. To continue the conversation, join us on our Tea for Teaching Facebook page.

Rebecca: You can find show notes, transcripts and other materials on teaforteaching.com. Music by Michael Gary Brewer.

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319. AI in the Curriculum

In late fall 2022, higher education was disrupted by the arrival of ChatGPT. In this episode, Mohammad Tajvarpour joins us to discuss his strategy for preparing students for an AI-infused future. Mohammad is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Management and Marketing at SUNY Oswego. During the summer of 2023, he developed an MBA course on ChatGPT for business.

Show Notes

Transcript

John: In late fall 2022, higher education was disrupted by the arrival of ChatGPT. In this episode, we discuss one professor’s strategy for preparing students for an AI-infused future.

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John: Thanks for joining us for Tea for Teaching, an informal discussion of innovative and effective practices in teaching and learning.

Rebecca: This podcast series is hosted by John Kane, an economist…

John: …and Rebecca Mushtare, a graphic designer…

Rebecca: …and features guests doing important research and advocacy work to make higher education more inclusive and supportive of all learners.

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Rebecca: Our guest today is Mohammad Tajvarpour. Mohammad is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Management and Marketing at SUNY Oswego. During the summer of 2023, he developed an MBA course on ChatGPT for business. Welcome Mohammad.

Mohammad: Hello, and thank you for having me here.

John: Thanks for joining us. Today’s teas are:… Mohammad. Are you drinking tea?

Mohammad: Yes. So I love tea. And from where I’m coming from, originally from Iran, tea is a big thing. So we have a big culture around tea. And it’s very interesting because we go to a coffee shop and we drink tea there. So we call it a coffee shop, but the most we get was tea. So I love brewed tea, and it’s kind of a time-consuming process, and it needs devices, tools that they don’t have here. So for a while, I tried tea bag, but I couldn’t connect well with that, so I decided to switch to coffee. But when we drink tea, we have rock candy. So we try to sweeten it with rock candy instead of sugar, because I love tea, and I’d love to drink my tea with rock candy. Now I drink coffee with rock candy, [LAUGHTER] which is a very funny mix, but it works for me. And time to time when I go to a restaurant that has middle eastern food, I get tea there and I really enjoy it. So that is a luxury for me. So it happens once a month when I get brewed tea, but I also like herbal tea, so I like mint tea and other types of herbal tea. I tried to get them mostly before bed.

Rebecca: Today I have blue sapphire tea, brewed fresh this morning.

John: And I have an English breakfast tea, but after a conversation we had earlier, I have some rock candy with saffron in it as a sweetener. So it is very good. So thank you for that suggestion.

Mohammad: Good. Good. Yeah, I have a big mix of rock candy with different flavors with different taste so I will bring you some, so you can try a different one. Good that you have the saffron one. I will bring a different version to you.

Rebecca: So we invited you here today to discuss the course that you offered last summer on ChatGPT for Business. Can you tell us a little bit about how this course came about?

Mohammad: So this course had a very interesting story. It was spring semester 2023, and ChatGPT was out from, I think, end of 2022, November, December. I was using that, and I really enjoyed how powerful the system is. I was following AI even before ChatGPT, and I was expecting such a thing to happen, but to be honest, I wasn’t expecting it to happen in 2022. I was thinking like 2027, 2030. But it happened, and I was so fascinated by the technology, by the quality of the answers that it provided. I was using it every day, to be honest, and I was trying different things with it, trying to find biases in it, trying to find how it can help me. And then it was the break, we had a week of break, spring semester, because reading break or spring break. And I made the first modules of the course event without discussing it with my department. I was so interested, I said, “Okay, let’s try,” and I said “worst scenario is I’m going to put it online for everyone to enjoy it. If the school doesn’t approve this course, then I will put this on YouTube.” So I’ve made the first module, and then we had a faculty gathering at this Italian restaurant in Liverpool, New York, called Avicolli. We were there and the director of our MBA program was there as well, Irene. So I told Irene, I have this idea of ChatGPT for Business, and I have worked this much on it. And she was so supportive, said: ”That’s a wonderful idea, let’s go for it.” So I sent her a proposal, and everything worked very well. And the school was so open to try new things, which I was very happy about. And then we made the course and submitted the proposal. It was approved, and we offered it in summer. That was the story, actually.

John: Could you tell us a bit more about the course? How many students were enrolled in it? What was the modality?

Mohammad: So, for our MBA program, most of our MBA students are professionals. They have a career already, they’re working full time, and then they’re getting their master’s degree, their MBA, actually, to move forward with their career. Many of them already have master’s degree, they may be doctors, they may be nurse supervisors, so the modality that we use for summer courses is mostly asynchronous online, which means we record the session, we put it online, they take online exams, and we go that way, we communicate online. For this course, I designed it in three modules. In the first module, we discuss the ethics and foundations of AI. We discuss how ChatGPT was trained, what was the data that they use? What are the biases that can happen? How can we use this system ethically because there are so many things that we can do with AI, which are very good things. And there are so many not right things that people can use AI for. So we wanted to make sure about the ethics first. And every course that I want to design on AI, I will start with ethics and foundations, because I think that’s the most important element. So we discussed the biases in AI, for example, gender biases, racial biases that may happen if we solely rely on these systems that are trained on biased data from internet, let’s say. So we discussed that. The second module was on prompt engineering. So as we know, prompt is the query that we sent to the AI, that’s the ChatGPT or Bard. So the quality of question that we ask is directly related to the quality of answer that we get from the system. So we want to make sure we ask questions that give us the best answers. And most of the time it’s not one question or one prompt, it’s a sequence of prompts. So we call it a prompt flow. So, at the first round, you may not get the best answer. But as you improve it, you will get closer and closer to what you want. And that’s what we did in the second module. So we designed an eight-step method for prompt engineering. And there are different stages actually in it. So for example, in one step, you have to anonymize the data to make sure that privacy of your client is considered. You want to set the context for the system, so it understands its role in helping you do the job, etc, etc. So we call it the Kharazmi prompt engineering method, which is named after the person who developed the algorithm, actually. So we made that 8-step method, and it worked very well for my students. In the third module, we went one step further. So as you know, these large language models are very efficient and very effective in writing code in different languages. So one of the things that I tested ChatGPT for in 2022, early 2023, was writing codes with it. So I gave it a task and asked it to write the code for me in R, Python, Stata. And it was so good at writing efficient code in these languages. I even used it to optimize my code. So I intentionally, for example, gave it a for loop in R, to see if it can optimize it. And as you know, in R, we can use sapply(), or lapply() to optimize for those. And it was so good at getting it. So I found that it’s very helpful with coding, with programming. And we made the third module actually on data analytics, which requires a lot of coding. And many of the MBA students, because of their background, they’re coming from degrees, or fields that have nothing to do with programming or coding. They have to use it time to time, they have to read the output, but they may not have written their own code. So in my class, I had a student who said, the last time I wrote the code was 20 years ago, that was like the diversity of my class. And I had the students who had taken economics, and they did a lot of coding. So we made the third module on data analytics and how we can use ChatGPT to write us the code and help us with data analytics. And it was wonderful to see that the students with no background in programming tin either R or Python, were able to write code, they’re able to debug code. So I intentionally gave them codes that had some intentional error. So I removed a part or I removed a small comma there, and they were able to debug it in a couple of seconds. And that was one of the fascinating parts of this course. And interesting, I had a student who told me that our company was moving actually from one software to another. And they used ChatGPT and what they learned in that class to migrate their code from one language to another. So with regards to enrollment, we had a lot of interest. So we had so many people who registered for the course and we had so many who were in the waitlist, but we had to make it small cohorts because we wanted to give very personal attention to each student to make sure that everything goes well. So we limited the enrollment to 12. And we promised the rest that we will offer this course again, and you will have a chance to take it. So we had a cohort of 12 MBA students, and understand the MBA students, as I mentioned, they’re professionals. So in class we had a very high profile journalist, three times Emmy Award winner journalist, we had a neurosurgeon, we had a CFO, we had an activist who was running for office. They had so many different backgrounds that helped actually enrich the learning for everyone. I was learning from how they are using the system for their own specific niche. And that was wonderful, I would say, learning process for everyone.

Rebecca: With the diversity of students that you had in your class, can you talk about some of the kinds of activities that they did individually or together?

Mohammad: As I mentioned, the course was asynchronous, because of the course that we have at SUNY-Oswego, most of our MBAs are professionals. So we intentionally try to make, especially summer courses, asynchronous online. But the level of enthusiasm in this class was so high. So we set up weekly meetings. And most of the time we did it during lunchtime, because everybody was working, that was the best time. In my situation, I think we set the time for 6pm, so 6pm we were on Zoom discussing the module that you have learned that week. So there was a lot of interesting discussions in those sessions. I think one of the best discussions that we had was about ethics of using AI. People from different areas were talking about how these biases can affect, let’s say, patients it has, how these AI tools can be used for fake journalism, making fake news, and what are the dangers of that. And then we discuss the inherent biases in the system. So ChatGPT was trained on data that was on internet, data on internet was created by human beings, human beings are prone to biases, those biases will be transferred to the system. So we discussed that. And we had a very healthy discussion about the need for diversity in data, and diversity on the teams who work on this data to train the models. Because if the team members are diverse and sensitive to different issues that may happen, they will make an effort to fix it. So I think the most interesting part for me was the discussion of ethics, and the wrong and right ways that we can use AI and how we can mitigate those biases or harmful uses of AI.

John: Many people in academia are talking about AI and the need to train students in the use of AI. Could you talk a little bit about some of the ways in which AI tools are already being used in business applications.

Mohammad: I will go from academia point of view and how students are using it day to day. And then some of the uses of AI in industry. So in academia, the very basic things that students use AI for are about, let’s say, summarizing a big text. And that’s what I teach them actually, in any course that I have. I’m teaching marketing research, I’m teaching principles of marketing, any course that they teach, I remind them that, okay, you have this big article, and you want to read that, you don’t have time for it, ask ChatGPT to summarize it for you. It helps us read more and more articles, more and more books. So that’s one of the things that people can use it for. The other thing that I have seen many of our international students actually use AI for, to improve their writing skills. So you’re an international student, you have wonderful idea, but you don’t have the best writing skills, writing experience in English. You can write wonderful articles in your own language, but when it gets to English, your vocabulary is limited, you may make grammar errors. So they use it to improve their writing. And in all my courses, I tell them, I’m more than happy to see you use AI to improve your grammar, to improve the flow of your writing,and to check for any writing errors in your text. So that’s totally fine, If they use it for. And there are many other things that the students use it for, for example, they use it to generate individualized examples. So let’s say you’re a student, you have a small problem with one of your courses, let’s say calculus. There is no good example in the textbook, let’s say. But you can ask AI to generate an example that will help you understand that specific niche research problem that you have. So that’s what I see from different areas, use AI for their coursework. When it comes to industry, it’s an abundance of AI use. So many marketing teams are using AI to generate content, especially a start. Because then you’re a startup and you’re a small business, you don’t have a marketing department. You’re one person, you’re the CEO, you’re the CFO, you’re the HR, you’re the marketing manager, you have to do all those jobs, and these LLMs, these large language models, these AI systems, help entrepreneurs to do the marketing and many other aspects of their business on their own. If you want to create content for your social media, ChatGPT can do that for you. You want to make a job posting, ChatGPT can take care of that for you. And then you can focus on improving and developing your business.

Rebecca: I want to circle back to some of the ethics questions that you were grappling with in class. I’m hoping that you can share some more details about the kinds of conversations that you had with students around ethics? Because this is a topic that I think comes up a lot for faculty, in particular, in thinking about how they might want to encourage or discourage students from using tools like ChatGPT.

Mohammad: Definitely. So what we did at SUNY Oswego was we set up an AI committee, I’m talking about the School of Business, I’m sure other schools are doing the same. So we set up an AI committee to make sure that we have a certain policy or certain plans on how we want our students to be trained and use AI. Because it’s the new computer, it’s the new calculator, it’s the new Wikipedia. We cannot stop people from using it. So we want to train them on the use of AI with integrity, we want to make sure that they are using it in an ethical way. So what we did was, we developed three different policies for courses. For some courses, very fundamental courses, we don’t want the students to use AI, because we want them to learn the tool. For example, in calculus, we want them to learn the mathematics behind doing the calculation. Or let’s say in marketing, we want them to understand the fundamentals of what’s the target market, how we can pick the target market, how we can make a fit between our business offering, and what the target market needs and wants. For those fundamental courses, we either ban use of ChatGPT, or we make it very limited to certain purposes, for example, you can use it to fix the grammar in your writing, you can use it to improve the writing of your assignment. Then we have a second level use of AI. Some courses, we are fine if a students uses it to generate some ideas for them to help them do assignments, create examples for them. And then we have a third layer, which is we ask them to use AI. So we tell them in the syllabus that you’re not only are allowed to use AI, you are expected to use AI, text to text AI, text to image AI, text to voice AI, all of that to improve the quality of assignment that you submit, to improve the quality of the projects that you do for this course. For example, for ChatGPT for Business, in the syllabus, it said that you’re learning text to text AI, but you’re expected to use other types of AI when you do your assignment. And many of my ChatGPT for Business students actually use that and they develop logos and many visuals for the assignments totally generated by AI.

Rebecca: Can you talk a little bit about what came up in those conversations in class about the ethics and how they’re using it in different ways. So if they’re using it for images, or they’re using it to write code, or all these other varieties of uses that you’ve outlined.

Mohammad: So one of the discussions that we had around biases, we discussed how gender bias may be inherent in those AI systems. And when we talked about it, it’s not just ChatGPT, any AI system can be prone to those biases. For example, our facial recognition systems, they’re mostly trade on Western pictures, faces from Western people. So they may not do well when it comes to let’s say, African Americans. And they may cause a lot of bias. We have cases actually of that in the news. So that was one of the things that we discussed. And one of the conclusions that we had in those discussions was that it’s not just about the data to train the model it’s about the team that is working on that. The team needs to be diverse enough. If you have African Americans, if you have different ethnicities, if you have different genders in the team, then we’ll be more sensitive to these biases, and we make sure that these are not happening. The other thing was about gender bias. So let’s say the system was trained on data that we had on the internet, go check the Fortune 500 list, the CEOs of Fortune 500 list, the majority of them are male CEOs. So if you train the system on that type of data, it will assume that males are better at doing those jobs, which is wrong. We had a very healthy discussion about that, or different ethnic backgrounds. So if you check the top 100 US companies, only eight of them have African-American CEOs. So when you train your system on that data, you are making inherent biases in the system. The bias is in the DNA of that system, let’s say. So we want to make sure that we at least have those biases in mind, so we are not solely relying on AI for any purpose that you’re using it for. So AI is now being used and ChatGPT… companies are using that, but sooner or later, governments will start using AI. They will use it for let’s say immigration purposes. Just imagine how those biases can affect people’s lives actually. Health care will start using that. So there are so many dangerous decisions that doctors can make. There’s so many things can go wrong with solely relying or blindly relying on AI. And that was one of the biggest things that we discussed. So we want to use it to be more efficient, and sometimes be more effective. But we want to use it with supervision, somebody should check the output, someone should read the output carefully. That person should be aware that these systems are prone to many errors, many biases. So that was one of the discussions that we had. The main thing, I think, that we discussed regarding biases and errors was gender biases and ethnic biases in AI. And then we discussed the wrong ways of using AI. One of the main things that we discussed was fake news. So somebody can make fake news, make a fake Twitter account, and keep posting with the same language that a certain politician is doing. And, as we know, it’s not just text to text AI, you have text to voice AI. So we can give it a sample of a person’s voice, and it can generate the same voice. So just type the speech for the AI and we’ll read it with the same voice. So there’s so many things that can go wrong, especially when it comes to disinformation and fake news.

Rebecca: it seemed like one of the other ethical areas that you talked about, based on what you had said previously, is about data, the data inputs that train the systems, and also the data that you’re putting into the system that you might be analyzing. So there’s privacy issues, copyright issues, etc. Can you share a little bit about how those conversations unfolded as well.

Mohammad: So, for example, one of the ways that people are using it, especially many doctors are actually using ChatGPT to ask it questions. For example, what are the side effects of this new medicine that I’m using. So sometimes you’re inserting private information to the system. So in the prompt engineering session that we had, one of the steps was anonymize, we write the prompt for the system, then we check it for any private information. It can be a name, it can be an address, it can be even a vehicle plate number. All of those should be removed from your prompt, before you submit it to the AI, because you never know what happens to that data. So one of the things that we did was to make sure that no personal or private data is being inserted into the system, at least for the systems that we have right now. In future, we may have private GPTs. So your organization may have an institutional GPT, that makes sure that all the data is private, it may change then. But the systems that are general purpose right now, Bard, ChatGPT, any other system, we want to make sure that the data that we insert into the system is totally anonymized, no private information is being sent to the system, even an email address. We use placeholders for that in our course, to make sure that even emails are not being fed to the system. The other important question that you raised was about copyright. So there are two things with corporate. First, the systems were trained on content that was generated by a person. So what if I asked AI to generate content similar to that? So write me a Harry Potter story, for example, exactly use the same language that JK Rowling was using? What happens then? That’s a big question. The other concern is who owns the copyright for the output that we get from Ai? For example, in my courses, I’m redesigning all my PowerPoints. And I’m removing all the images that I was using before with images that AI has generated. So when AI generates those images for me, who owns the copyright? Is it ChatGPT? Is it is Dall-E? Is it Midjourney? Or is it the person who directed the system to make those content? So at least for ChatGPT, based on what they wrote on their website, they don’t assume any copyright for themselves. The person who’s generating or giving the prompts will own the content. So at least we know that’s the answer to that question for one system, but what happens in future? There should be lots and lots of discussions on copyright, who owns the copyright of the output? And if the system was trained on somebody else’s writing, somebody else’s art, who owns the output? If I prompted it to write a JK Rowling Harry Potter for me, do I own the copyright or do the original writer usually will get the copyright of something that I’ve prompted to ChatGPT? So I think one of the biggest questions that we have had is regulations. How do we want the regulations to evolve in a way that accommodates all these questions that we have today? I think the pace of change is very fast. So policy makers, those who are setting the rules, should be very fast in responding. The technology’s not waiting for anyone, they have to be as fast as these changes in the system are, otherwise there will be chaos, there will be a lot of unanswered questions, and it will go in any direction that we cannot expect. So one of the big things that should happen, I would say, is regulation. We need to regulate the system in a way that fosters improvement, but at the same time, protects people.

John: In addition to all discussions of regulations that are going on globally, there’s also quite a few lawsuits going on in terms of potential copyright violations, which could have some really devastating implications on the development of AI. So a lot of this, I think, we’ll have to just wait and see, because it’s going to be challenging.

Rebecca: A number of interesting cases too of folks trying to register things with the copyright office that were generated by AI that have been denied. So lots of interesting things to be watching for sure.

Mohammad: Definitely.

John: Another area of a lot of concern, and a lot of research that’s beginning to take place is to what extent AI tools will enhance the productivity of workers, and to what extent it may end up replacing workers. And there are some studies now that are finding both of those. Were your students very concerned about the possibility that some of their potential jobs might disappear, or substantially alter, as a result of AI tools.

Mohammad: So I think the best saying with regards to jobs is that nobody will take your job, let me say it in different words.The CEOs who can use AI will take place of CEOs who cannot use AI. So it’s not, “you’re going to lose your job to AI,” it’s mostly about those who are not equipped, those who don’t know how to use AI, will be replaced by the ones who know how to use AI. In short term, there may be some changes in the job market, some of the jobs may be automated, but new jobs will be created. For example, now we have a lot of companies looking for prompt engineers, something that wasn’t there before, like a year ago we didn’t have such a need in the market. So the other thing that will happen is that we need to train people to use AI. But at the same time, the pace of change is so fast. So we train people for a year to take AI jobs. And by the time they finish their education, the system has changed. Now you have to retrain them. So that’s one of the things that is happening and educational institutions should find a way. They should keep updating and updating their curriculum, I would say every day, to keep up with the changes in technology. The other thing that I personally expect and hope to happen in the long run is that we will work less. In the Industrial Revolution, our working hours were reduced, we could do the same amount of productivity with less work. Same thing may happen 10 years from now, five years from now. Instead of working nine hours, we may two hours, three hours, a day, and then be even more productive than what we are right now. Because this system can make us be more efficient. There is a good metaphor that people use for AI, they call it human algorithm centaurs. So in Greek mythology centaurs are half human, half horses. They can be as fast as a horse and they can have the human intelligence and human capabilities. Now we have half human, half algorithm, we can do so many things much faster, much more effectively than before, and will increase the productivity manyfold. So I’m expecting a better life actually for human beings, morat the same time being more productive than before.

Rebecca: It’s interesting, some of the kinds of conversations I’ve had with my students who are design students about AI, have really been about is it going to replace a designer? Well, maybe in some contexts, people are going to use AI to create designs or visual elements, it’s not going to have the same thought [LAUGHTER] and strategy necessarily behind them that a designer might use. But what they’re mostly discovering is that AI is really helpful in making the process faster. So generating more ideas, finding out what they don’t want to design [LAUGHTER] and getting just a place to start and moving forward and developing their work more rapidly. And so that really gets to that efficient idea that you were just talking about.

Mohammad: That’s very true. And I agree with you, sometimes you are just thinking and you cannot start. AI can give you an idea to start with. And then you come up with ideas that you wanted. So regarding the design jobs or any job. I have students who will come to me and say, “Should I change my field to AI?” I said, “No, do what, whatever you’re interested in, if you’re doing design, keep doing design; if you’re into, let’s say, marketing, keep doing marketing; if you’re in finance, keep doing finance; but use AI in your field. If you’re doing design, see how you can use AI to design better. If you are doing marketing, see how you can use AI to make better content, to make better decisions.” So I think it’s not AI replacing people, it’s AI enhancing people. So in any field, we have to equip ourselves with the skills of using AI to do our jobs better.

Rebecca: From an experience I’ve had with my students, we’ve definitely discovered that if you don’t have the right language around the thing that you’re trying to make, it doesn’t do a good job. [LAUGHTER] So you need some disciplinary background or some basic knowledge of the thing that you’re trying to do for it to come out successful.

Mohammad: That’s very true. So one of the limitations of AI that we discussed in our classes was about different languages. So most of the content that was used to train ChatGPT was written in English. So think of other languages that didn’t have that much content on the internet. AI is not as capable in those languages. So that’s one of the things that we need to think of. So this is a system that is super capable in English language, but when it comes to languages that don’t have that many speakers, then it falls behind. So I tried it and I learned that sometimes the system tries to think in English and then translate it in the other language, and it makes so many mistakes in that process. So that was one of the things that came to my mind of what you mentioned..

John: We’re recording this in the middle of November. And in just the last few weeks, we’ve seen a lot of new AI tools come out, we’ve seen ChatGPT expand the size of the input that it’s allowed, and we now see this market they’re offering for GPTs, as they’re calling them. And the pace of change here is more rapid than in pretty much any area that I’ve seen, at least since I’ve been working in various tech fields. It would seem that this would be a challenging course to teach in that the thing you’re studying is constantly changing. Will you be offering this again? And if so, how will the course be different in your next iteration of the course?

Mohammad: That was a very good question, actually. So yes, the course is being offered in January 2024. And as you mentioned, one of the biggest challenges with this course, I would say the biggest challenge with teaching AI, is to keep the content current. So that’s not just what happened today. When I was teaching this course in summer, I made the second module, and then open AI announced the plugins. Now I had to redo the content to make sure that I can use those plugins because they were so powerful. The plugins that ChatGPT introduced were so powerful, and there are so many companies who were making different plugins. So I remember, for the second module, I had to start and re-record my content. I updated my content. I recorded everything 1am, 2am before the session in the morning, because everything was changed. So I had to incorporate that into my class. Same thing is happening with new developments. So what I learned is that every day I have to update my content, I have to update my course. So ChatGPT API was one of the things that I was thinking of as the fourth module and was working on that. Now. I think GPTs is one of the modules that needs to be there. That’s like the app store of Open AI. So, that’s a big game changer. As you mentioned, it has a larger memory right now we can provide it larger context. So that’s another capability that AI has, and it changes the way that we prompt it the way that we ask it questions. So keeping the curricular updated, I think is the biggest challenge. And this is something that we should have in mind. Every week, every day I see something new. I update my slides, update my content to make sure that everything is correct. Because if you don’t do that, let’s say two months, three months, if you don’t update your content, then you have to redo it, you h ave to start over. So that’s definitely one of the things that I do and GPTs is one of the things that I will definitely incorporate into my course for January 2024.

Rebecca: Iterative change definitely seems like a good way to go to manage that, for sure.

Mohammad: We don’t know what will be announced in December. [LAUGHTER] So, I always count on a big change.

Rebecca: But yeah, buckle up and be ready, right?

Mohammad: Yeah.

John: And we welcome our new AI overlords…

Rebecca: Yeah.

John: ///n case, by the time this is released that they have taken over.

Rebecca: Can you talk a little bit about how your colleagues in the School of Business have responded and whether or not more faculty in the School of Business are incorporating AI.

Mohammad: I see that many of my colleagues are super interested in this new technology. So what I like most about SUNY Oswego in general is that everyone is so open to accept new technology, accept new things, accept innovation, and everybody’s trying to absorb the new innovation that we have seen and incorporated one way or another into their work or into their courses. So as I mentioned, we have the AI committee, and in our meetings we have very good discussions about how we should update our curricula. I know that some of my colleagues are already doing that, are already using AI to generate let’s say, visuals for their content, or teaching or talking with the students about the ethical users of AI. So I think at least the ecosystem that they see at SUNY Oswego is very open to accepting innovation, and is very fast to incorporate it into their curricula and educate the students, or at least have discussions with the students about how to use that and how to equip themselves with the skills that they need for future.

John: Just a few weeks ago, your department scheduled a symposium on AI, could you talk a little bit about that?

Mohammad: So we wanted to take a lead in AI education at SUNY-Oswego. So we’re very focused on teaching the students and equipping them with the skills that they need to take future jobs. And we are making a big move toward AI. So we wanted to make sure that our students are exposed to the new developments in this field and understand the importance of this area. So we set up an AI symposium, Bridging Bytes and Business to show them how technology, how AI, how computer, is changing the way that we do business. So we set up a hybrid conference or symposium. They had two panels. The first part was online with scientist discussing the new technology, discussing how AI is evolving. What are the biases, what are the errors that we have in this AI? And they were discussing what is the next big thing that will happen in AI? So in the first round, we had Suroush Saghafian from Harvard. He has a lab that works on developing AI, we had Diane, Diane is a three times Emmy Award journalist, and she was one of our MBA students, actually. And she talked about how AI is used in journalism, what are the challenges of, let’s say, disinformation generated by AI, how journalists need to address those concerns. And we had Saeideh who is a computer scientist. Saeideh worked for Yahoo, Meta, and Google. And she gave us her knowledge, her experience with what these big companies are working on for the next big thing that is happening. So we had a very healthy discussion about the science part of AI. And then we had the business leaders from upstate. We had Michael Backus from Oswego Health, we had John Griffith from insurance, and we had Mohamed Khan from Constellation Energy. So they were discussing how their companies, how their industry is using AI, and what they expect students to know about AI before they go to the job market. What are the skills that they need to have? So we had this very successful symposium, and since it was a hybrid symposium, we’re broadcasting it online. It was kind of a webinar. So we had many attendees from all over the country. So we had attendees from all over U.S. I think we had California, we had Texas, we had Arkansas, New York, obviously, we had people from Canada joining us, Ireland, United Kingdom, France, Germany, and interestingly, we had attendees from Australia. It was 2 am there, I think, but they joined us, and they stated very last minute of the symposium. And that made us very happy and very proud of SUNY Oswego on taking the lead in providing this type of discussions actually around AI. And we’ll keep doing that. We’ll keep having more and more symposiums and panel discussions to keep our students current and to encourage our students to learn more and educate themselves more about AI.

Rebecca: So we always wrap up by asking: “What’s next?”

Mohammad: So we have big plans. One of the things that we’re doing is ChatGPT for Business, it will be offered again in January 2024, and hopefully summer, but aside from that, we are going one step further. We are designing a new course, more advanced than ChatGPT for Business. That course is Prompt Engineering for Artificial Intelligence. So in that course, we’ll focus on different ways that students can use prompt engineering for different purposes: for HR, or marketing, for finance, for different fields. So that course will be an advanced level to ChatGPT for business. And we are going to offer degree in our MBA program on strategic analytics and artificial intelligence. So we are incorporating AI into actually all courses that we offer in that program. And then we will have a micro credential on prompt engineering, because that’s what industry is looking for. They want somebody who is good at asking the right questions from ChatGPT, Bard, and any other AI that you’re using. So they need somebody who is good at writing good prompts for them. So that’s what we are focusing on right now, to equip our students with those skills, with the knowledge that they need to be effective and efficient prompt engineers. And I believe we will be among the very first institutions in North America to offer those courses and those degrees, actually.

Rebecca: Well, thank you so much for joining us and sharing the work that you’ve been doing.

John: We’re always curious about where this is going, and I’m sure we’ll be back in touch with you again in the future. So thank you.

Mohammad: Thank you very much. I really appreciate the wonderful podcast that you have. I time to time listen to your podcast, and I actually bought a book on ChatGPT, based off of one of your podcasts, one of the guests that you had, they wrote a book on ChatGPT, 80 Ways that ChatGPT can help you with your courses, I think. And I’m still reading that book and I’m enjoying that. So thank you for the wonderful podcast that you have.

John: And we’ll include a link to that book by Stan Skrabut, and we’ll also include a link to the recording of that symposium as well in the show notes for this episode.

Mohammad: Thanks so much.

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John: If you’ve enjoyed this podcast, please subscribe and leave a review on iTunes or your favorite podcast service. To continue the conversation, join us on our Tea for Teaching Facebook page.

Rebecca: You can find show notes, transcripts and other materials on teaforteaching.com. Music by Michael Gary Brewer.

Ganesh: Editing assistance by Ganesh.

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314. Handbook of Online Higher Ed

Since its start in the late 1990s, asynchronous online instruction has spread throughout the world and has been the subject of extensive experimentation and study. In this episode, Safary Wa-Mbaleka, Kelvin Thompson, and Leni Casimiro join us to discuss their new handbook that examines effective practices in online learning from a global perspective.

Safary is an Associate Professor of Leadership in Higher Education at Bethel University in St. Paul, Minnesota. He has authored and co-authored more than 40 scholarly journal articles and more than 20 books and book chapters. Kelvin is the Vice Provost for Online Strategy and Teaching Innovation at the University of Louisville. Kelvin developed the BlendKit Course open courseware as part of the Blended Learning Toolkit, and he co-hosts TOPcast: The Teaching Online Podcast. Leni is a Professor of Education, the Associate Dean of the AIIAS Graduate School and Chair of its Education Department and the Director of AIIAS Online, the virtual campus of the Adventist International Institute of Advanced Studies (AIIAS) in the Philippines. Kelvin, and Leni are frequent invited speakers on topics related to online instruction. They are the co-editors of The Sage Handbook of Online Higher Education.

Show Notes

Transcript

John: Since its start in the late 1990s, asynchronous online instruction has spread throughout the world and has been the subject of extensive experimentation and study. In this episode, we discuss a new handbook that examines effective practices in online learning from a global perspective.

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John: Thanks for joining us for Tea for Teaching, an informal discussion of innovative and effective practices in teaching and learning.

Rebecca: This podcast series is hosted by John Kane, an economist…

John: …and Rebecca Mushtare, a graphic designer…

Rebecca: …and features guests doing important research and advocacy work to make higher education more inclusive and supportive of all learners.

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John: Our guests today are Safary Wa-Mbaleka, Kelvin Thompson, and Leni Casimiro. Safary is an Associate Professor of Leadership in Higher Education at Bethel University in St. Paul, Minnesota. He has authored and co-authored more than 40 scholarly journal articles and more than 20 books and book chapters. Kelvin is the Vice Provost for Online Strategy and Teaching Innovation at the University of Louisville. Kelvin developed the BlendKit Course open courseware as part of the Blended Learning Toolkit, and he co-hosts TOPcast: The Teaching Online Podcast. Leni is a Professor of Education, the Associate Dean of the AIIAS Graduate School and Chair of its Education Department and the Director of AIIAS Online, the virtual campus of the Adventist International Institute of Advanced Studies (AIIAS) in the Philippines. Kelvin, and Leni are frequent invited speakers on topics related to online instruction. They are the co-editors of The Sage Handbook of Online Higher Education, which we’ll be talking about today. Welcome Safary and Leni and welcome back, Kelvin.

Safary: Thank you.

Leni: Thank you.

Kelvin: Good to be here.

Safary: A pleasure to be here.

Rebecca: Today’s teas are? Safary, are you drinking tea?

Safary: I’m having water this morning.

Rebecca: A key ingredient to tea it might add. [LAUGHTER]

Rebecca: How about you, Leni?

Leni: I used green tea, particularly this Japanese matcha. [LAUGHTER]

Rebecca: Nice. How about you, Kelvin?

Kelvin: I have deconstructed tea. That’s also called water.

Rebecca: [LAUGHTER] Popular globally.

John: And speaking of globally, Rebecca and I are both drinking Moon Bird tea, which is a gift from one of our listeners in France who sent this to us a few weeks ago. So again…

Safary: Wow.

John: …thank you, Myriam.

Rebecca: Yeah, it has a nice hint of pear and elderflower.

John: …which is also a green tea.

Rebecca: Yeah.

John: We’ve invited you here today to discuss the SAGE Handbook of Online Higher Education. Could you tell us a bit about the origin of this book project?

Safary: The origin of this project is actually something that has to do with me having worked with Kelvin several years ago at the University of Central Florida. And right after that, I decided to work in the Philippines and that’s where I met with Leni Casimiro and we worked together. And at both institutions, we were working with online education. And eventually I was transferred to work for two years in Kenya. During the COVID-19. I happened to be in Kenya, and I quickly saw the great need of people wanting to have online education. The resources went up in the place. The things were scattered all over the place. And immediately the idea came that we needed a project that captured the whole world because now this was a worldwide phenomenon, it was no longer something peculiar to Kenya or Philippines or U.S., the whole world was in need of a tool like this. And that’s how I reached out to Kelvin and to Leni.. Thankfully, they both agreed to be part of the project. And I think, from my perspective, that’s where it came from. I don’t know about them… how they think about this? [LAUGHTER]

Leni: Well, for me, it’s really a big project that we did, combining the different parts of the world. You see where Kelvin comes from, representing the West, I represent the opposite, the East. And although Safary comes from the East as well, but he can represent the African continent. And so this really makes the book a global project, really a blend of different perspectives. And so I can say that online learning is represented all over the world in this particular book. And this is indeed, a big surprise to all the readers and a big discovery for everyone.

John: Speaking of readers, what is the intended audience of this book?

Kelvin: Well, I mean, honestly, I would say anyone, anywhere, around the whole planet, who in any way touches online or digital education, should access this book. It’s great for libraries and institutions to acquire and be in their communities. It’s a big book. There’s stuff in there for everybody. So I think it’s a great resource.

Rebecca: Speaking of the size of the book, the handbook contains 50 chapters. Can you talk about how you selected those chapters?

Kelvin: I think the scope and the sequence and the layout of the chapters and the sections sources originally to Safary’s proposal with the publisher, but it was intended to be rather comprehensive with sections like fundamentals and student support and administration and instructional design, instructional delivery, regional specifics, particular regions around the world, and how online education might differ a little bit in, say, the African context versus the European context. But over time, as we were recruiting authors, and as the writing process started, you get a little bit of evolution, the sections might morph a little bit, the distinctives of a given chapter might adjust based on interest and specializations of the authors. So that’s a little bit of the insight into the evolution. But I credit Safary for the vision, which I would say, is probably about 80 plus percent of what he originally had envisioned in the layout. That’s my guess. Safary, would you agree with that?

Safary: Yeah, the thing is that, when you work on a huge book like this, especially a handbook for Sage, they want to have the complete plan when you submit your proposal. Before I can get my co-editors to agree with me, they need to have kind of ideas, okay, this is what I have in mind. So usually, when I work on a handbook like this, I come up with a rough draft. And Kelvin and Leni were very good in catching certain things that I wouldn’t have caught because of their expertise, their experience, and their regions that they represent. And so in the end, what we have here is a product of the Table of Contents was really the product of these three brains that are speaking today.

Leni: I really liked the way Safary has chosen the chapters of this book. Well, we can say that he really originated the choice of these chapters. As you can see, from the perspective of a reader, when you look at the content, you can look in the sequencing, and you will find that you are actually looking into the step-by-step development, or the step-by-step process of engaging in online education. I will say it’s almost like a manual, almost every step that you will go through in undertaking online education in your institution is covered in this book. That’s why it’s really a very important book for every school to have.

John: We had some challenges coming up with a brief intro for each of you, because each of you has done so much with online education in many different roles in many different places. But you also have an editorial board for this book, which is a little bit different than many other books that we’ve seen in terms of handbooks. What was the role of the editorial board in putting this handbook together?

Safary: Yes, we had an editorial board. When you have a project of this magnitude, it is really important to have experts from different parts, especially at the global perspective of experts, and of course, experts on the different topics that are represented in the handbook. As much as we have experience with online education, we cannot assume to know it all… areas where we definitely need help. And so we selected very well known, very well recognized experts from different parts of the world. As far as online education is concerned, all the names that are there are people who are very well respected in the field of online education within their respective countries. The role they played was, for them to be our experts in checking the accuracy and the quality and the completeness of the chapters that were submitted to us. So basically, each chapter went to two to three reviewers and the editorial board members were the primary reviewers to help us really catch everything… and the work they did, I know that some chapters had more feedback than others, but I can say that contribution they gave through their feedback was very substantive in improving this handbook. I don’t know, Leni, how you found that when you’re working with the editorial members who are assigned to you?

Leni: Yeah, actually the editors we chose, I can say they are truly excellent and helpful. During the early parts of the writing of the chapters we lead editors are having like a tug of war with the chapter authors. They tend to bargain their thoughts with us, but when the editorial board came into the picture, it gave a more balanced outlook into writing the chapters. And so we really appreciate their services. The other thing is that this editorial board members are experts in the area and so we can truly depend on them. Their feedback were truly much valued and contributed much to the excellence of the contents of this book.

Rebecca: So the handbook is divided into seven sections. Can you provide a brief overview of each of those sections to give us the lay of the land?

Leni: Oh Yeah, seven sections, it’s nice to give an overview for people to know what the book contains. First section, of course, is the fundamentals of online education. It contains the introduction to the topic of the book, online learning, and some variations in online delivery, like blended, MOOC and ERT, emergency remote teaching, we just really call it ERT, and that became popular during the pandemic. The second section, online education around the world. This section is the most colorful part of the book, at least for me. Because it tours us around the world and gives us a view of how online education grew in varied contexts like US, Canada, Europe, Asia, Latin America, Africa, Australia, and the Middle East. The third section, Online Instructional Design, this section now brings us to the T-cell of online learning, the design of online instruction with focus on how learning happens online. This is now the more serious part of the book. While we came from the most colorful, we now go to the serious part of the book. And then the fourth one, Online Instructional Delivery, this section focuses on the hammer and nail of online learning, the actual online teaching, and this is the most exciting part. Because this is now the delivery, the previous one was the most serious part, this one is the most exciting part. And then perhaps, Kelvin, can you say about the fifth section [LAUGHTER] Instructional Technology for Online Education?

Kelvin: Here’s what I would say about that, if you’ve got the most serious, you talked about the most exciting that you talked about, maybe the fifth instructional technology for online education is the most invisible, maybe that’s what it is. Nobody thinks about plumbing until it doesn’t work. [LAUGHTER]

Leni: Thank you. So that’s technology, I would say this section is essential, because you cannot teach without knowing how to use technology [LAUGHTER]. And the sixth section, Online Education Administration and Management, I would say this is the driver’s seat of online bandwagon [LAUGHTER]. Online education can never prosper without the support of the school administration. So, leading school reforms, like entering the field of online education requires certain strategies to be certain of success. Therefore, I would say this section will indeed equip the readers with those skills, perhaps Safary, can tell us what section seven is?

Safary: I would say the last section is the Customer Service, given that the students are the customers. So the customer service, how to make sure we deliver the best customer service to the online students. And so it discusses all those different aspects of how to really prepare, plan effective service to the students, because many times when people are migrating from face-to-face to online or integrating online education, they forget that online students actually need serious support. And this support definitely needs to be defined. And people who are dealing with the students need to be trained. And so the last chapter actually deals exactly with that.

Leni: For me, because I was looking at the table of contents, and I was smiling in my mind, wow, this is really neatly done. And so this works came to my mind, and I said, Oh, the seventh section, this section focuses on the heart of every online classroom, the students. And so because the students are the reason why we offer online learning, thus we ought to know how we should support them.

Rebecca: One of the things that I love about working on collaborative projects that are really big, and then you have these opportunities to reflect together, is how you summarize what you did. It’s probably really different than while you were right in the middle of it. And it’s fun watching the facial expressions and things as you guys are describing the different sections.

John: With 50 chapters, there’s a great deal of breadth and depth on these topics. In section one, though, you address two topics which are not always considered as part of traditional, at least, online education, which is the use of MOOCs and ERT, emergency remote teaching. But these have played fairly important roles. Could you talk a little bit about the role of MOOCs and Emergency Remote Teaching in the larger environment of online higher education?

Leni: As I see it, MOOC and ERT are connected to the overall theme of the book, because technically they are both delivered online. Online learning can be synchronous or asynchronous. And it’s mostly taken asynchronously while ERT is done synchronously, because it is generally a replication of the face-to-face classroom through the web. However, there are certain arguments in the field as to whether can we classify these two under online learning, because they are believed to not use the principles of effective online teaching. And they say, is their instructional design in ERT? There are more questions to raise to the point that some people believe they should not be called online learning. But for me, we have a common denominator, course delivery through the web. Maybe we can hear from my co-editors here, Kelvin and Safary, what they think about it?

Kelvin: I was thinking, John, when you asked that question, I think the combination of Emergency Remote Teaching and Massive Open Online Courses, it’s part of the popular conception of what online education is, it’s sort of like what a layperson might think, is, it’s just one big thing. So if you didn’t address Emergency Remote Teaching, Massive Open Online Courses, maybe even Blended or Hybrid learning, those mutations, it might not provide quite the same way in for the broadest possible audience. But then, once we’ve ushered you into the house, through the front door, I hope we do a good job of taking you on a more detailed guided tour through the nuances and everything that online education can be, without just being stuck at that surface level.

Safary: If I may add something to the ERT. Personally, the reason why I wanted to see this chapter there was that outside of the United States and maybe Canada, and a little bit of Latin America, when ERT came, Emergency Remote Teaching came, many people call it online education. And as we know, online education, the way we know it traditionally, is much more than translating your face-to-face class to a Zoom class or Google meet class. And let’s face it, that the word there is emergency. This was an emergency modality, which obviously emergency is never the best option, it means better than the chaos that you’re going through. And so many people who didn’t know online education, they came to believe that Emergency Remote Teaching means online education. And many people who were against online education to start with, it was like, “Okay, we have already said that this thing is really bad because it was an emergency.” So it was very important to distinguish what Emergency Remote Teaching is. And in the future, if somebody wants to use that for another calamity that happens, then they know what steps to take, but it does not replace what is known, what we define as quality online education.

Rebecca: One of the parts of your book, The second section is about online education around the world. And getting that tour around the world is not something we typically get the opportunity to have. So can you talk a little bit about what some of the global differences in how online higher education is structured and practiced across continents and regions?

Safary: This section came up as we were trying to make the book global. We really wanted to hear the voices of the people from around the world and not just the United States… the United States being the lead on online education, no question about that. We wanted to know where things are in different regions that were represented. We had to even go online to try to track people down from different countries. It was not easy finding people from certain regions where we didn’t have a network. So as a result, we’re able to bring on board chapters from different parts of the world. We had a chapter from the United States, we had a chapter from Europe, from Canada, from Asia, from Latin America, from Africa, from Australia, and from Middle East. So we were able to see what was happening in each one of them. And these chapters we had, they were kind of similar in a way where we wanted to know what is happening, what are the challenges, what are the achievements that people have in those regions, so that people from those regions who decided to do more work on online education, they have a place where they can learn of what is happening in the whole region from this book. They can have this as a reference to understand what was happening in their region. It is true that when you have one chapter, for example, I co-authored a chapter on Africa, because I was still in Africa at that time. It’s a chapter that’s covering 52 countries, you cannot really cover 52 countries, we just had to have illustration from some of African countries, because there’s no way we have data on all the 52 countries, but at least, there were some common themes that were coming up from a different African countries if I can speak from that specific region.

Leni: I can speak from the perspective of an Asian because I come from Asia. And I would say, we cannot deny that online education started in the West. But because we live in a connected world, it spread easily. Basically, I can see a lot of similarities around the world. The only differences I noticed, because your question says what are some of the global differences in how online education is structured and practiced? Now, I would say the only differences I noticed are the approaches to online learning, depending on the level of their maturity, in using this modality, and the resonance of the context they serve. Institutions that have been engaged in online learning for a long time definitely deal with issues that are different from those of newcomers, the needs of the context they serve also differ, so the strategies utilized also differ. One thing I would highlight, though, is that you can clearly see the creativity and continuity of people in different parts of the world in running online education. And we still can learn from each other. That’s why I said a while ago, the section on the global online education is really colorful.

Rebecca: One of the things that I think is really interesting about that section, is that it can also give us insight as instructors that teach a global audience about what the contexts are that students might be coming from. And that’s something that we often don’t have a little bit of insight into.

Safary: I think that is a very good point. Now that we have online education, people are teaching in many different countries. I remember just a couple of weeks ago, I was approached by one of my former students who wanted me to teach a class in the Caribbean. If things worked out for me, for that class, I would have just glanced at that chapter that covers a little bit of the Caribbean and see what I need to watch out for. So that is definitely a good point for the section on the different regions. In this handbook.

John: When online education first started, there wasn’t really that much known about what would work effectively. And as online education evolved, we saw the role of instructional design become an important part of the practice of online education. And section three deals with online instructional design. And that’s helped facilitate and inform online education, along with a lot of research that’s been done since the early stages. How have instructional design practices evolved since the early stages of online education in the latter part of last century?

Kelvin: That’s a good question. And I guess I’ve been in this field watching this first hand and touching it for about 25 years now. So I sometimes say not exactly the first floor of the building, but just one step above. And what I would say is that when I started in the late 90s, what we saw a lot was adaptation of traditional instructional systems design models and practices, that is constructs that were used quite often in corporate education. See if this takes you back to the past: CD ROM development, military learners. Those kinds of methods, practices, and models were adapted to this online context. And some of that’s constrained, like you’re making a system, like it’s a bounded system that was, quite often the context, like a CD ROM. And now you’re talking about the internet, a network open system. And I remember some of those early days, like, “Okay, what can we learn from these models? How can we adapt those?” Over time though, we learned that this is a unique context, which then began to have its own models and practices and processes and research and iterations and development. And I think of even things like much newer developments, like alongside of constructs like inclusive pedagogy, we see practices and thrusts, like inclusive design, as being a very specialized subset. So we’ve got a very robust research and professional practice literature that has grown up and these, arguably, two and a half decades of online education experience to draw upon. And I guess I’ll just say this, about that. Throughout my time in this field, what I’ve seen is that online tends to make the formerly invisible, visible; formerly implicit, explicit. And I think that evolution of instructional design and development field, it has learned from that. Online education has drawn us along in what does it mean to bring learners in from really anywhere and bring them together in a learning community, and how do we excel in that. That’s been a really rich progression over these last two and a half decades.

Safary: If I may add to that, the reason why we had this section was that many people who are new to online education, they think that online education is about uploading all the files that you have been using face to face, and then let the students read that, and that’s online education. It leads to a lot of frustration from the students because there was no instructional design for online learning. And so we needed to have a section that would guide people into that. And also for instructional designers in college and universities where they already have instructional designers. Some of them have not gotten a degree in instructional design. So they have limited knowledge. They just happen to know a little bit more than everybody else, but they don’t really have a solid foundation. And so that section helps to kind of guide people in the proper instructional design for online learning.

Rebecca: So sections four and five focus on online instructional delivery and instructional technology. These are topics that we love to talk about and have episodes of this podcast on. But given the time constraints, we probably can’t dig in fully here. But can you help us identify some of the most important changes that have occurred in how well designed online courses are taught?

Leni: That’s a nice question. Kelvin also said a while ago, he was mentioning about the early years of online instructional design, I would say, perhaps 1998 to 2000, those are the early years I’ve been involved, still in the planning stages of online delivery. Most of the online courses we developed were primarily text based, and are delivered asynchronously. That was after the military, Kelvin used, online learning, it was already in the university. Why text based? Because even our students, in the context we are serving also did not have the capability or the capacity to access videos or higher level technology tools. That’s why we designed the way they can access us. And so, yes, it was primarily text based and asynchronous. However, through the years, I would say two forces caused the major changes in the way we design online courses, first, technological developments, particularly in instructional technology. And second, changes in the needs or nature of our stakeholders, the students. Well, technological developments without a doubt have increased the repertoire of instructional media that we can use in designing truly engaging online courses. But as I’ve said earlier, technology is not the heart of online learning… it’s our students. And we saw how the nature of our online students change over time as well. While many of them were happy with plain text based asynchronous online courses during the early days, now they want more real-time meetings. And the flexibility they want is indeed tremendous, I tell you. We notice that there is a greater demand now for more flexible and personalized learning approaches. And these topics are dealt with in this handbook. I know Kelvin has written on this. And some other chapters also addressed this flexible learning, personalized learning approaches. These are now the needs and demands of the new generation of online students.

John: This is bringing me back to a time when I started back in 1997 teaching online when many of the students had 300 baud… [LAUGHTER] …or 1200 baud modems, and you couldn’t do much more than text. And I remember putting in some flash-based videos, and many students couldn’t access those because they didn’t have the download speed, especially students in more rural areas. So there was a lot of resistance to online education when it was first introduced, which is one of the reasons why I think instructional design practices became a part of early online education to help ensure the quality of that. And we do have, in most institutions a fairly elaborate process of instructional design assistance and instructional design review for online courses, which is something that’s never really happened in the same way for most face-to-face courses. Might it be time to start applying some of the techniques and practices of design that’s being used for online course delivery to in-person course delivery?

Safary: I remember about 15 years ago, I was training faculty on online teaching in the Caribbean. And I remember many of them, at the end of the training, saying, “I have improved my face-to-face teaching because of the training that I have been going through for online teaching.” So I definitely believe that if people get the proper training in online teaching, they can use that knowledge to improve face-to-face teaching. Because let’s face it, many people are teaching not because they have a degree in education, but because they have a degree in whatever field they come from, they have never learned how to teach. And so when they go through the training for online teaching, they discover a lot of principles that they should have even been using face to face. So I definitely agree with you on that one.

Kelvin: Yeah, it’s true. I say it all the time online makes the formerly implicit, explicit; formerly invisible, visible. And I think that’s why online has been a vehicle for applying thoughtful design and teaching practices and the improvement thereof. Once you sort of concretize the elements that make up an online education experience, then you can see well, how are they arrayed? Are they lined up properly? Does this cause lead to the desired effect, and you can work on improvement, no offense to anyone in this, but when we just are dealing in the ephemeral, we will walk into a space, four walls and a door, and we say words into the air, it’s much harder to see how those parts fit together or don’t. And it’s harder to be reflective. So, I think that’s the reason that online education has brought more emphasis to potential improvements, continuous improvements, and so I welcome it as a vehicle for a more thoughtful process in general. I love this elegant turn of phrase Caroline Boswell says she frames teaching as a student success intervention. Or as I put it, I’m one of those odd people who sees a connection between teaching and learning. And not everybody does.

Rebecca: You’re kind of queuing up our next question perfectly Kelvin. The final section of your book is really about student support. And our students are often distributed when we’re teaching online. So what are some of the biggest challenges in terms of supporting students that are in these online programs or online courses?

Kelvin: Yeah, I would welcome Leni’s and Safary’s viewpoint on this as well. But to me, I’ll keep it simple and say that the biggest challenge is the diversity of student profiles. The different backgrounds, the multifaceted demographics, and resource or not resource, or technological connection or not technological connection, that diversity makes it awfully hard to assure kind of an equitable experience for everyone. So that’s the gap that emerges, that student support is trying to offer… not to mention the diversity of approaches to design and development in the actual experience. But I’m curious what Leni and Safary would say to that.

Leni: I would go for the opposite, on the side of the teachers, I would say the greatest challenge in student support is personalizing your support. It’s related to your diversity. Almost every online student has her unique needs and contexts. So considering different personalities and backgrounds as well, you may be able to personalize your support. But in the name of efficiency, you’ll find yourself dehumanizing the process. What do I mean by this? Well, machines can never replace human touch. And human touch is what every online student needs.

Safary: If I may speak a little bit from experience I had in Kenya during the COVID-19, we migrated our classes to the online delivery. And I quickly realized that… and this was something that was going on in all of Africa, I know this because I was involved in different international association for online education all over the continent…. and so we were meeting and discussing some of these issues. The major challenges that were going on at that time, I don’t know about today, were dealing with infrastructure, because most universities that didn’t have online education platforms, or online education structural systems, so the technology was not in place. Many students there were not access because the internet was extremely slow, some were using loads of data to access the materials and they would run out. Some had issues with electricity. These are things we take for granted in the West. These are the not issues that we will discuss even in textbooks of online education, but they are real issues that cannot be ignored. And so that was a major challenge in supporting online students, because the infrastructure was not in place. And I think the issue is still the same. But more and more work is being done. I remember, for example, in Kenya, what the government did, they gave the free data access to all the faculty in the whole country, as long as it was used only for instructional purposes [LAUGHTER]. If you want to use it for something else, it wouldn’t work. I mean, that was quite creative, to try to help people to help education move forward, because everything was just stuck because of COVID-19.

John: Over the past year, we’ve seen a fairly explosive growth and use of generative AI large language models, including chat GPT, Claude, and a few others that have come out very recently. And that opens up a lot of interesting opportunities, but also some challenges for online education, particularly concerning the assessment of asynchronous learning. How do you see online education adapting in response to the widespread availability of tools like this, which will only become more powerful over the next few years?

Kelvin: It’s sort of the very definition and epitome of disruptive innovation or disruptive technology. And just to be clear about this, I don’t think it’s limited or focused on asynchronous online education, I think it’s everything. For me, it’s really an opportunity to address learning and assessment of learning much more meaningfully, and I’ll use one of Leni’s words, more personalized and relational. I think one of the things we’re seeing with the injection of these various forms of artificial intelligence into the learning setting is the value proposition of the human. And I think it was Cathy Davidson, years ago, from HASTAC said something like, “If we faculty can be replaced by a computer we should be.” That is, if all you’re offering is something that is easily rendered more efficient and scalable by a machine then, well, what are you doing it for? I think that the opportunity to really gauge learning, which is a very personal and a meaningful thing, we act like it’s something that’s kind of homogenized and industrialized, but learning… I don’t know what learning is, frankly, I can’t crack open a human and see what all is happening with the connections and making of meaning in all the background experiences. All I can do is get insight, but in dialogue, in the creation of artifacts I get a glimpse. If we’re product oriented, to the exclusion of the process, and to the exclusion of the human context, well, that can be certainly disrupted, maybe stolen by artificial intelligence in machines. But if we keep the emphasis on humans, on “Well, John, tell me about this…” that’s more meaningful. I learned a practice a long time ago from a faculty member that I studied under, where she adopted a practice of a learning summary. And in any course, again, that’s just one artifact, but it gives a glimpse into the articulation of what learning is really about. So I think we need to push the envelope in “What does authentic assessment mean? What does meaningful learning look like?” Now, that’s hard to do at scale. Are you going to have a personal oral defense with every student for every assignment, probably not. But if we see artifacts, and products, as breadcrumb trails leading to a destination of a more substantive dialogical process, well, then maybe that’s something. So I don’t think we know yet how this is going to play out. And I think your listeners are gonna find cold comfort from me in getting to an easy solution. But I think the future of responding to generative AI is to lean more into the human and the relational than less.

Rebecca: So we always end by asking what’s next?

Safary: Well, as far as this project is concerned, what is next really, we want to continue building a community of online higher education scholars, practitioners, so that this momentum that has been created by this book can continue, because this is one of the few maybe rare books that really have so much global contribution to online education. Many of the books that are written, they’re usually kind of regional to a specific region of the world. And so this is the first time we have a network of, I think, around 100 people who contributed to this, coming from many different countries. And I feel this has created synergy on the discussion of online education in a way that we should not let that go. So one of the things that we have been talking about is the possibility of holding a summit on online higher education in the next few months, once everybody has gotten a chance to hold a copy of this book, and to bring different experts together from different parts of the world, and try to address online education from different parts of the world, while addressing common issues such as assessment, which is one of the major controversial issues anywhere have been, everybody talks about the challenges of online assessments. So that’s things like this, and probably this artificial intelligence, which is a new thing, we may want to go deeper into that… we’re not able to dig too deep with that, although we addressed it in the book. But we didn’t go too deeply because it was still kind of new ChatGPT was just coming out when we were finishing the handbook. And so that is one of the things that we are looking into, there is another handbook in the making with SAGE that will focus specifically on instructional design in higher education. So that would be like an extension of this project. So we want to continue building on this work, because we consider it’s very important.

Leni: I’m really optimistic about the next steps on this because it’s like a seminal book that really got there’s a global perspective, as Safary says it’s not the same as the other online learning books. So we can also see a lot of developments coming up. And so I will say, this book is just step one, the next steps will really be coming up definitely, because the field is always growing. We have seen its growth, and it will still grow. And so there’s more to follow, I believe.

Rebecca: Well, thank you all for joining us. I know that our listeners will really enjoy the handbook and all that it has to offer.

John: Well, thank you, and it’s great talking to all of you and we’re looking forward to reading the book.

Safary: Thank you so much for the opportunity. Really appreciate that and wish everybody a wonderful reading experience.

Kelvin: Thanks for having us, Rebecca and John.

Leni: Thank you very much.

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John: If you’ve enjoyed this podcast, please subscribe and leave a review on iTunes or your favorite podcast service. To continue the conversation, join us on our Tea for Teaching Facebook page.

Rebecca: You can find show notes, transcripts and other materials on teaforteaching.com. Music by Michael Gary Brewer.

Ganesh: Editing assistance by Ganesh.

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312. Alice: Finding Wonderland

Many of our disciplines are unfamiliar to students until their first encounter in an introductory course. In this episode, Rameen Mohammadi joins us to discuss his first-year course that introduces students to computer science using an approachable hands-on experience.

Show Notes

Transcript

John: Many of our disciplines are unfamiliar to students until their first encounter in an introductory course. In this episode, we look at a first-year course that introduces students to computer science using an approachable hands-on experience.

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John: Thanks for joining us for Tea for Teaching, an informal discussion of innovative and effective practices in teaching and learning.

Rebecca: This podcast series is hosted by John Kane, an economist…

John: …and Rebecca Mushtare, a graphic designer…

Rebecca: …and features guests doing important research and advocacy work to make higher education more inclusive and supportive of all learners.

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Rebecca: Our guest today is Rameen Mohammadi. Rameen is the Associate Provost at SUNY Oswego and an Associate Professor of Computer Science. Welcome, Rameen.

Rameen: Thank you. Thank you both.

John: It’s good to have you here. Today, for the first time ever, we’re all drinking the same tea, which is Chimps tea, a black tea with honey flavor, fig, and thyme. And this is a gift from one of our listeners. Miriam in France. Thank you, Myriam.

Rebecca: Yeah, so far. It’s really tasty.

Rameen: Yeah, really excellent tea. We love it.

Rebecca: So we invited you here today, Rameen, to discuss your First-Year Seminar course that combines animation and storytelling using the Alice 3 programming environment. Before we discuss that, though, could you provide an overview of the goal of first-year seminar courses at Oswego?

Rameen: This is not a standard first-year seminar. First-year seminar courses are designed to extend orientation, familiarize students with resources, and things like that. Our perspective about this type of course, which we call signature courses at SUNY Oswego, is that you are welcoming students to the intellectual community that we have. So as first-year students we desire a number of outcomes to be met by these courses, one of them is critical thinking, they have to have a significant critical thinking component. Also, these courses need to have both writing and oral communication embedded in them. And one of my favorites is that they have to enhance the cultural competency of our students, we’re a very diverse student body, there’s quite a bit of opportunity to make sure students experience other perspectives. And I think courses of this type really need to address that. Our provost, Scott Furlong, brought the idea to us even during his interview at SUNY Oswego, about what they had called, at his previous institution, passion courses. Now, as I said, we call them signature courses here. But those of us who love our discipline certainly can understand when somebody uses the term passion. So what makes you excited about your discipline? That’s what the course should help students experience.

John: So, you’re using the Alice 3 programming environment. Could you talk a little bit about the types of things that students are going to be doing in the class?

Rameen: So Alice 3 is a VR programming environment. So what you do is you build a scene, you can bring avatars of various types, could be people, could be aliens, could be dogs, into a scene, and you have props, trees, mountains, buildings, that you could bring into a scene, and then you learn to program something. So they can talk to each other, they can move from point A to point B. And it actually turns out, they’re able to, and they will be, writing reactive programming, which typically is what we do when we design games. So the user acts in some way, and then you program the reaction in the VR world in that context, or things run into each other. And obviously, when you’re designing games cars, or other things may run into each other, and you have the ability to detect that and actually act on that. But at this point, they are already running about a month ahead of where I thought they could be in just about a month of the semester. So I’m really hoping we can get that far.

Rebecca: Can you talk a little bit about why you chose the Alice platform, and what you were really hoping to foster with students.

Rameen: So, just a bit of background about Alice, Alice is supported by researchers in Carnegie Mellon. I think Randy Paudsch, when he was at University of Virginia, is really the person that began the innovation with Alice. And he thern moved to Carnegie Mellon. Many people in computer science would know who he is because of his work in VR, but what he should universally be known for is The Last Lecture, which is a pretty amazing hour plus lecture he gave before he died from cancer. But that group has been working on Alice for a very, very long time, and of course, has had new actors along the way. Don Slater is one of the people that has been part of that group for a long time, and he’s very much involved and was at the time when I met him very much involved in advanced placement. And that’s something I’ve been involved in for a long time, advanced placement for computer science. So one of the things we do in AP readings, we have people do professional development activities, and he gave a talk about Alice and this is a long time ago. But when I first listened to him talk about it, and he showed the features of the system, I really didn’t have a place for it in anything I taught at the time. So it has been brewing in the back of my head as a thing to build a course around for a long time, but really couldn’t have done it until the opportunity came along to build a signature course.

John: For those students who do go on to computer science. It seems like a really nice way of introducing the concept of object oriented programming. Does it work in that way?

Rameen: So the thing to understand about object orientation is that most of us who are software engineers by discipline, database types, we are very comfortable thinking of a student information being an object and the fact that we have a container of student objects and so on. But it turns out that’s not necessarily as comfortable for students as it is for those of us who do this for a living. But when you say, here’s an avatar, and you put this on the screen, and you could tell it to go from point A to point B, that seems like a very natural idea to students, and the fact that this particular avatar, so suppose it’s a bird, has wings, and opposed to a person who has legs, you don’t have to explain that. It’s a concept as inherent in being a human being and 18,19 years old. So some aspects of object orientation that often is difficult for students that are really obvious in this context. So any object like an avatar of a person, dog, cat, whatever, they can all be moved from point A to point B. So they share a set of expectations and attributes. They have a location in a 3D world, and you can move them from A to B, piece of cake, they understand. But then you say, “Well, this one is a bird, it has wings.” So the fact that you can spread the wings or fold the wings would be a characteristic that exists only because of it’s a bird. So inheritance, which is a concept that we like to teach in computer science is just built into the way the system behaves. And no student will say, “Well, what do you mean, a bird can spread this way or fold its wing.” People just naturally know what it all means. And believe me, it’s not always natural, in some of the other things we try to do with students to teach these topics. So it does lend itself extremely well, in understanding that objects have attributes, they have functionality, and it’s all there on the screen, and they can see it.

Rebecca: I think Alice is really nice, because it is so visual. And so you get those immediate, “I can see the thing I did,” whereas I remember when I started learning some code, I was building a database for car parts, and it was completely abstract. And I cared nothing about car parts.

Rameen: Yeah.

Rebecca: So it didn’t make it that accessible to me.

Rameen: It’s not, exactly, then the other aspect of it that I think we need to think about, about the platform, is that you don’t write a single line of code, you generate 1000s and 1000s of lines of code, but you don’t write any. So if you have a particular avatar as the object that you’re processing at the time, in building your code on the screen, you could just drag and drop functionality it has into your code. If you need to loop and repeat steps, you drop a loop into your code and then put the steps you want to repeat inside that loop. So all the typical barriers a student had with syntax or various languages, whether it was Java, Python, C++ kind of wash away, because you don’t really have to know syntax at all you, need to know “what are you trying to do?” and what will enable you to do it, and then you can execute that. So far, clearly, that’s not a problem for them. Here is the screen, this part of it is dedicated to X, that part of it is dedicated to Y and they’ve been able to handle it probably from week one. So all the standard things that tend to take a long time, don’t take any time. And besides doing 3D graphics, if you are a computer science person, in my mind, is super senior level type of activity. You got to teach them an awful lot about data structures and other event handling elements that they must learn because that is what we all had to learn. But guess what, you can learn it with Alice in short order. And this is the course is proving that you can.

John: Now one of the challenges that I could imagine you might have as that students come in with different levels of prior knowledge or interest or engagement with computer science. Some students may have not written a single line of code in any language, while others may also be taking other CS courses at the same time, or have some prior programming experience. How do you address the differences in background?

Rameen: So my sample case here is small, I only have 17 students, but this is not a computer science required course. So this is one that has art students in it, it has biology students, and and it does have a few computer science students and then maybe this one with an AP computer science background from high school, and none of them are doing any better than these other kids. So I guess the point is, it levels the playing field in a pretty significant way. If you can think a thought you can probably write code in Alice. And I’m finding it quite interesting, since I’m not preparing them for another course… not only this course doesn’t have a prerequisite, it’s not a prerequisite for anything else. So the way I designed the course going into it, I went into it with thinking, okay, so if storytelling and writing a really cool story within groups is the best I can get out of them, great. If I can get them to a point where they can write new functionality for objects, and I can help them write reactive programming so they react to the mouse click or collisions of objects and so on, maybe I’m dreaming, but that would be fantastic. At this point, I’m pretty certain I can get him there without other stuff. But that was kind of the key coming into the course, I walked in with a mindset of being flexible, that if they are struggling, I’m not going to keep pushing it like I would typically do in a CS course, which is partly why you would also lose students, but at least in my experience with these kids, and I can’t say until I teach it again (and hopefully I can) whether it will be the way it works is that you show them how to do something, and then they go to work, and they start doing it and then they make mistakes, and we all do, and then you give them a little bit of a hint about potentially maybe a different technique they could have used to accomplish the same task. I’m just going to give you an example. So you want the bird to go from point A to point B, so it’s on the ground, needs to go up on top of the tree. So Alice lets you put a marker where you want it to go on the tree, because you can’t go to the tree, you’re going on a branch of a tree. So you need to know how to put a marker there. So you put a marker there. And then it just goes from point A to point B, it goes from the ground to the top of the tree, then you say “Wait a minute, that’s really not the way birds fly.” So now you got to figure out, well, how am I going to flap his wings to go from point A to point B, to go from the ground to the branch on that tree? So it turns out and I’ve come up with a solution to this myself, obviously, you can’t really teach these things if you haven’t thought about how you could possibly solve them. And one of my students, after like three weeks of instruction, she figured out how to do what we call in Alice a “do together.” So as it’s moving from point A to point B, the step that is happening at the same time is the flapping event of spreading and folding the bird’s wing and she made it very clear that the bird was flying [LAUGHTER] from the ground to the tree with no interruption. Then we need to talk about well, do they really need their legs hanging out as they’re flying? I don’t know much about birds, but I think they fold their legs back. So now we have to learn how to address some kind of a functionality that is about a part of the body of the bird. So this is the way the learning is happening in the course, kind of naturally, you’re trying to make a realistic action on the screen in the animation. Well, how are we going to do that? Well, we have to now address the joints like the hip joint or the knee joint or the ankle joint to make that much more natural in the way it works. And there’s no persuasion here, the student is trying to make an interesting thing. And then I’m there to help them figure out how do you make that much more realistic.

Rebecca: What I really love about these courses, and in what you’re describing with Alice, as someone who’s also taught code to students, particularly ones that are not in computer science, is that they’re thinking like a computer scientist, and you’re really getting them completely within the discipline, you’re hooking them right in because they’re leading with their curiosity. They’re not satisfied with the way something looks, so they’re digging in and digging in and digging in. And unlike our traditional way of structuring curriculum, where we think this is the foundational information, and this is the next thing we build on, it almost turns it totally on its head [LAUGHTER], and does it like backwards from what we traditionally do. And it’s really fun.

Rameen: Well, I think the students are at the center of that type of a decision, that for years, you see human beings that probably could do this kind of work, but shortly after they try and they get errors after errors after errors, they say, “Hey, listen, this is great that there are geeks like you would like to do this kind of thing. It’s not for me,” and they walk away from the discipline, even though they could have had great contributions in computer science. So for me if some of these concepts are introduced this way, where syntax and semantics, which is typically what slows people down when they first begin, even the systems we use… like how do you type your program? And how do you run your program? …there’s a whole bunch of instruction around how do you do anything. You just go to alice.org, you download Alice 3, but once you do, it’s here you go, you click here, and then you set up your scene; you click here, you begin writing code. Well, how you write code? Well, the object is on the left side, you drag the command from the left to the right, how far do you want it to go? Well, you gotta choose a certain distance that it needs to travel… really, really easy for students to take to right away. And I just had no idea what I should expect. You watch a lot of YouTube videos. I mean, I certainly do when I was preparing this course, of all these different people, young and old, building things and being proud of what they had built. And I thought, if I could bring that to a course for our first-year students, that would be really, really awesome. And I think that’s what has happened.

John: You mentioned that the students are able to interact. Are they all in one virtual shared space for the class? Or do they have to invite the other students into the spaces that they’ve developed?

Rameen: So this is a really good question, John. So when I imagined how the course was going to work, I had to think of a number of things. One, I asked our technology people to install Alice on all lab computers because I can’t assume or assert that every single student that will take a course like this will necessarily have the equipment that could enable them to run it. Even the Mac kids who had trouble at first installing the thing, and I needed people to help them to get it installed, even they could continue to work because we had the software on our machines. The type of collaboration that I advocate for in class is a little untraditional. At least I think you could argue that it may be. So like the other day, I gave them a 10-question quiz. So they answer the 10-question quiz. And then I said, “Find a couple of other people and persuade them why your answers are correct and their answer is wrong.” So now the whole room starts talking about the quiz. I don’t know if they’ve ever had an experience where somebody says, “This is not cheating, what I’m asking you to do.” Who gives a quiz that says, talk to everybody else to see what they answered for the quiz.

REBECCA; John does. [LAUGHTER]

Rameen: And that’s not surprising, but in my mind, is it about the learning process? Or is it about assessing or giving a grade? This is a very low-stake experience. So why exactly would I care if you talk to someone else about it? So why not persuade someone else that your answer is right? That’s a very different tactic than to say, “Do you know the answer? And are you right or wrong?” Persuading someone requires talking to them, requires thinking for yourself, first of all. Well, why is this answer right? And then opposite of that, you hear the explanation. Are you persuaded that what they said is accurate? Or do you think they’re wrong? In which case now you’re giving them back a different perspective, and then they change their answer. And of course, you could change your answer for the wrong reason. That’s just one example. I really want them to collaborate and work with each other. And every time somebody does something interesting, like the young woman who built the code that I had not been able to myself, having the birds fly from point A to point B, looking very natural. I had her come to the front of the room, plug in with a connector that is in the room and show everybody how she wrote her code. And we’ve done that at least a dozen times so far, where people just come up, plug their computer and show everybody their code. So we often are worried about students cheating and using other people’s work. And if it is about collaborative learning, then you really have to cultivate the idea that, you know, that was a really good idea, maybe I can do that. And I think hopefully, the course will continue to behave that way where I’m confident everybody’s learning from it. That’s the concern that I’m the only one who knows something, whoever I am as a student, and everybody’s just copying me or whatever. That is not my experience so far in this course. They’re just trying to do it better, and if you have a better idea, maybe I can take that and move with it. Then maybe I’ll make it a better idea. And you see that also with students. One of them figures out how to make somebody walk more naturally, and then the other one even enhances that, even makes it even more realistic in the way you would walk. And that’s kind of what I like to see happen and is actually happening.

Rebecca: So how are students responding? Are you cultivating a whole new crop of computer scientists?

Rameen: So, this is an interesting question. I am wondering, those who are not computer science students, whether or not they decide that this may be something for them. But I’m also… with Rebecca here, is good to bring this up… they might become interested in interaction design as a discipline to pursue and become passionate about. Those of us who do this kind of work for a living and have done it for 40 years or whatever, the engagement aspect is the critical aspect. If they are really invested in the learning process, they can overcome an awful lot of barriers, that frankly, I cannot persuade you to put the time in, if you’re persuaded that you could do something a little bit better, then I’m done. As a teacher, I’ve set up the environment in the way it should be where you are driving the learning process yourself as a student, and they look like that’s what you’re doing at this point. And we’re only within a month into the course and they are behaving that way. Now whether or not they will continue to take more computer science courses, and get a degree in computer science. I’m not really sure, but, hopefully, if they do interaction design, there’ll be better interaction design students, because some of the structures that they have to learn here would definitely benefit them in that curriculum too.

Rebecca: Yeah. When can I come recruit?

Rameen: Anytime. I’ve already had Office of Learning Services. That was one of the things I wanted to point out, that I’ve had Office of Learning Services, they came and they talked about the learning process. And besides what they have done for me and talking about the learning process, and it’s all research-based discussions, which is really critical for students to hear things that actually do work, and we can prove they can work. I talk about the learning process on a regular basis with them. And I’m very interested in them understanding why we’re doing anything that we’re doing. I mean, they may be used to somebody standing in front of them talking for an hour and I just don’t do that. I may talk for 10 minutes and then have them work on stuff and then as we see gaps in what they understand then I talk for 10 more minutes, maybe. I try not to talk a whole lot. I want them to be working. So the time I’ve spent is on building what they are supposed to do to learn, not so much talking to them on a regular basis during the 55 minutes that the class goes on. Unfortunately, I’m not quite sure that that’s the experience they’ll have in other courses that they take, because to me, there is a freedom embedded in the way the course is designed that is hard to replicate if you have to cover from A to Z of some topic. You get to “H” and people are having trouble, well, you just keep going. Well, I don’t if everybody has the luxury to say, well, maybe we need to pause longer because we can’t get past this point. I mean, what’s the point? We get past this point, you’ll never catch up to where the end is. So I am hoping some of them will decide to be CS majors as a result, but I’m more interested in seeing how they will do if they take more CS courses. I mean, if they take a CS 1 course, are they going to do better than a typical person taking a CS 1 course if they move on and take data structures and other courses we require? Will it come to them easier? I think it’s a really interesting question. And I think there’s a lot of research that advocates for the fact that they will do better, but I like to see it firsthand.

John: One of the things I believe was mentioned in the title of the course was storytelling, what types of storytelling takes place in the class? Is it the design of the scenes or is there some other type of communication going on?

Rameen: So the way you do animation, in general… and I probably should back up and say I spent about an ungodly amount of hours trying to learn how to do this, but I went about it backwards because I went after event-driven programming and interesting things that I knew Alice could do to write games. But then you step back from it and say, well, students can’t start there. I mean, that’s just not a good place. So then you look at the alice.org website, which gives you tremendous amount of resources and say, “Oh, designing scenes happens to be the first thing they teach you to do. Oh, maybe I should learn how to design a scene.” So you put the pieces that you want in your story on the screen, and if you don’t want them to appear, you could make them invisible. But the way Alice works, you have to put all the components in on the front end. It’s a little different than the way we do object-oriented programming. When we do object-oriented programming, you create things when you need them, you don’t think about setting up the scene on the front end. So that took a little getting used to, but that’s what you do. And then the characters you put on the screen can move, they can talk, they can fly, they can do whatever you need them to do. And my biggest interest was storytelling, when I was conceiving of the course was that I really want students, especially those from other cultures, other backgrounds, to tell their story, find a way to tell their story. And this is probably going to be starting as a group project for my students in a few weeks. And we’ll see how that actually goes. And obviously it has to have a beginning and middle and an end for it to be an actual story. But I’m just excited to see what they will actually decide to do and how they actually do it. Along the way, though, they’re going to need some tools. And that’s kind of what my contribution will be in making sure that they can tell the story the way they want.

John: It sounds as if developing this course required you to learn quite a few new things that were outside your normal teaching experiences. Do you have any advice for faculty who are working on the development of similar courses?

Rameen: So for those out there who teach for a living, the opportunity to build something from the ground up, especially something that frankly, when I first thought of it, I thought it’d be a lot easier than it turned out, because there was so much that I didn’t know how to do, but when you don’t know something you don’t necessarily know that you don’t know something. People who were doing it and I was watching them do it made it look very easy to me. But once I began to do it, I discovered how much work there was to come to a point that actually orchestrates a course, I mean something that is meaningful, and has a clear direction to it. So if you have that opportunity, even after 40 years of teaching, to start over in some ways and build something that you feel not particularly comfortable about, I really highly recommend people do that. Because that is what your students are experiencing every single day when they are trying to learn this stuff that you know so well. So having a little bit of a taste of what it takes to learn something you know very little about, I think is critical. So my message to the faculty who are listening, is that if that opportunity arises, by all means, take it.,

Rebecca: You certainly get a lot more empathy for what it feels like to not be an expert, when you’re learning something brand new again.

Rameen: Well, that’s the thing about most of the things we do. I’ve been programming for 50 years. So it’s one of those things where you’re completely in tune with the idea of: understand the problem, solve the problem, whatever. But where should the camera be in a 3D world in order for it to point at the person talking just the right way? I had to figure that out. It didn’t come naturally to me. The first bunch of programs I wrote the camera was always in the same spot and then I began learning that “Oh I have control over where this camera goes. [LAUGHTER] So maybe it needs to be somewhere else when this person is talking versus this other one.” That’s been a lot of fun to get a sensibility back into the system here that this stuff is not as obvious as it may seem.

John: We always end with the question: “What’s next?”

Rameen: So I certainly would like to teach the course more, and I also want to do some presentations with the faculty in computer science, and if there is interest in graphic design faculty to do some for them, too, because I think the platform is extremely powerful. It doesn’t cost anything, the resources that exist have been getting developed for a very long time and they’re pretty mature. And again, back to no cost. We all know how much books cost. You really don’t need one, you just use the exercises that they give you at the Carnegie Mellon site for Alice and go with it. So I really want to advocate for faculty to consider using it beyond just this first-year signature course.

John: Well, thank you. This sounds like a really interesting project that can really engage students.

Rebecca: Yeah, it sounds like a lot of fun. I can’t wait to come visit.

Rameen: Yeah. Thank you both. Really, this was fun. Thanks for the tea also.

John: Well, we have Myriam to thank for that.

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John: If you’ve enjoyed this podcast, please subscribe and leave a review on iTunes or your favorite podcast service. To continue the conversation, join us on our Tea for Teaching Facebook page.

Rebecca: You can find show notes, transcripts and other materials on teaforteaching.com. Music by Michael Gary Brewer.

Ganesh: Editing assistance by Ganesh.

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311. Upskilling in AI

With so many demands on faculty time, it can be difficult to prioritize professional development in the area of AI. In this episode, Marc Watkins joins is to discuss a program that incentivizes faculty development in the AI space. Marc is an Academic Innovation Fellow at the University of Mississippi, where he helped found and currently directs the AI Institute for Teachers.

Show Notes

Transcript

John: With so many demands on faculty time, it can be difficult to prioritize professional development in the area of AI. In this episode, we examine a program that incentivizes faculty development in the AI space.

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John: Thanks for joining us for Tea for Teaching, an informal discussion of innovative and effective practices in teaching and learning.

Rebecca: This podcast series is hosted by John Kane, an economist…

John: …and Rebecca Mushtare, a graphic designer…

Rebecca: …and features guests doing important research and advocacy work to make higher education more inclusive and supportive of all learners.

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John: Our guest today is Marc Watkins. Marc is an Academic Innovation Fellow at the University of Mississippi, where he helped found and currently directs the AI Institute for Teachers. Welcome back, Marc.

Marc: Thank you, John. Thank you, Rebecca. It’s great to be back.

Rebecca: We’re glad to have you. Today’s teas are:… Marc, are you drinking tea?

Marc: I am. I have a Cold Brew Hibiscus, which is really great. It’s still very warm down here in Mississippi. So it’s nice to have something that’s a little bit cool. That’d be refreshing.

Rebecca: That sounds yummy. How about you, John?

John: I am drinking a peppermint spearmint tarragon blend today. And it’s not so warm here. In fact, my furnace came on for the first time yesterday.

Rebecca: Yeah, transitions. And, I have English tea time today.

Marc: Well, that’s great.

John: So we have invited you here to discuss your ongoing work related to ChatGPT and other AI tools. Could you first describe what the AI Institute for Teachers is and its origins?

Marc: Sure, I think that when I was last a guest here in January of this year on your show. And it seems like 1000 years ago [LAUGHTER], but during that spring semester, I really took a much deeper dive than the original pilot with a lot of the generative AI tools in the fall. And we started noticing that the pace that big tech was deploying these tools and integrating these with existing software from Microsoft and Google was only accelerating. So in about April or May, I went to my chair, Stephen Monroe, and said, “I think we need to start training some people to get them prepared for the fall,” because we kind of thought that fall was going to be what it is right now, which is a chaotic just sort of mash up of sort of everything you can imagine that some people dive in deeply, some people tried to ban it, some people are trying to do some critical approaches with it too. So we actually worked with the Institute of Data Science here at the University of Mississippi, and we got some money. And we were able to pay 23 faculty members $1,000 apiece to train them for a day and a half about everything we knew about Generative AI, about AI literacy, ethics, what tools were working in the classroom, which wasn’t. And their whole goal was to go back to their home departments over the summer and serve as ambassadors and help prepare them for the fall semester. And we started that, we’ve had funding for one Institute, and now we’re doing workshops, and searching, as we all will, for more funding for doing,

Rebecca: How did faculty respond to (A) the incentive, but (B) also [LAUGHTER] the training that went with it?

Marc: Well, not surprisingly, they responded really well to the incentives, where you can pay people for their time, they generally do show up and do so as well. We had quite a few people wanting to take the training both internally from the University of Mississippi and then people started finding out about it, because I was posting it out on Twitter, and writing about it on my substack. So when we had interest from graduate students in Rome, interest from other SEC schools wanting to attend, and even interest from a community college in Hawaii. Definitely seen a lot of interest within our community, both locally and more broadly, nationally.

Rebecca: Did you find that faculty were already somewhat familiar with AI tools? I had an interesting conversation with some first-year students just the other day, and we were talking about AI and copyright. And I was just asking, “Hey, how many of you have used AI?” And I and another faculty member indicated that we had used AI to make it safe to indicate. And many of them really kind of shook their heads like “No, they hadn’t,” and they were unsure. And then I started pointing to places where we see snippets of it, in email and in texting and other places where there’s auto-finishing of sentences and that kind of thing. And then they’re like, “Oh, yeah, I have seen that. I have engaged with that. I have used that.” What did you find faculty’s knowledge?

Marc: Extremely limited. They thought of AI as ChatGPT. And one of the things we did with the session was basically frame it out as “Look, this was not just going to remain as a single interface anymore.” One of the things that actually happened during the institute that was completely wild to me was the last day, I woke up that morning. And I’d signed up through Google Labs, and you can do it as well, to turn on the features within the Google suite of tools, including in search and Google Docs, and Sheets and everything else. And they gave me access that last day, right before we began. And so I literally just plugged in my laptop and said, “This is what it’s going to look like in Google docs when you have generative AI activate in Google Docs. it pops up and immediately greets you with a wand with a phrase “Help me write.” And what I tried to explain to them and explained to faculty ever since then, is that it makes having a policy against AI very difficult when it shows up at an existing application with no indication whatsoever that this is in fact Generative AI. It’s just another feature that’s in the application that you have grown up with, from many of our students’ perspectives their entire lives. So yeah, we need to really work on training faculty, not just in the actual systems itself, but also getting them outside of that mindset that AI that we’re talking about is just ChatGPT. It’s a lot more than that.

John: Yeah, in general, when we’ve done workshops, we haven’t had a lot of faculty attendance partly because we haven’t paid people to participate [LAUGHTER], but what’s been surprising to me is how few faculty have actually explored the use of AI. My experience with first-year students was a little different than Rebecca, about half of the students in my large intro class had said that they had explored ChatGPT, or some other AI tool. And they seem pretty comfortable with it. But faculty, at least in our local experience, have generally been a bit avoidant of the whole issue. I think they’ve taken the approach that this is something we don’t want to know about, because it may disrupt how we teach in the future. How do you address that issue, and getting faculty to recognize that this is going to be a disruptive technology in terms of how we assess student learning and in terms of how students are going to be demonstrating their learning, and also using these tools for the rest of their lives in some way?

Marc: That’s a great question. We trained 23 people, I’ve also been holding workshops for faculty too, and again, the enthusiasm was a little bit different in those contexts, too. And I agree that faculty, I feel like they feel overwhelmed and maybe some of them want to ignore this and don’t actually want to deal with it, but it is here and it is being integrated at phenomenal rates in everything around us too. But if faculty don’t come to terms with us, and start thinking about engagement with their technology, both for themselves and for their students, then it is going to create incredible disruption that’s going to be lasting, it’s not going to go away. We’re also not going to have things like AI detection, like it is with plagiarism detection to come in and save the day for them too. And those are all things we’ve been trying to very carefully explain to faculty and get them on board. Some of them though, just aren’t there yet, I understand that. I empathize, too. This is a huge amount of time that you spend on these things to think about and talk about as well. And we’re just coming out of the pandemic, people are exhausted, they don’t want to deal with another, quote unquote, crisis, which is another thing that we’re seeing too. So there’s a lot of factors that are at play here that make faculty engagement, less than what I’d like to see.

Rebecca: We had a chairs’ workshop over the summer, and I was somewhat surprised based on our experience with other interactions with faculty, how many chairs had used AI. The number was actually a significant number. And most of them were familiar. And that to me was encouraging [LAUGHTER], it was like, “Okay, good, the leaders of the ship are aware. That’s good, that’s exciting.” But it’s also interesting to me that there are so many folks who are not that familiar, who haven’t experimented, but seem to have really strong policies around AI use or this idea of banning it or wanting to use detectors, and not really being familiar with what they can and cannot do.

Marc: Yeah, that’s very much what we’re seeing across the board too, is that the first detectors that I’m aware of that really came online, I think, for everyone was basically GPTZero, there are a few others that existed beforehand to IBM had one called the Giant Language Testing Lab. But those were all based on GPT-2, you’re going back in time to 2019. I know how ridiculous is it to go back four years in technology terms and think about this… that was a long time ago. And we really started adopting that through education or seem to be adopted in education based off of that panic. The problem is in incidents of education putting a system like that in place, it’s not necessarily very reliable. TurnItIn also adopted their own AI detector as well too. A lot of different universities began to explore and play around with it, I believe, and I don’t want to be misquoted here or misrepresent TurnItIn. I think what they initially came out with it, they were saying there was only 1% false positive rate for detecting AI. They’ve since raised that to 5%. And that has some really deep implications for teaching and learning. Most recently, Vanderbilt Center for Excellence in Teaching and Learning made the decision to not turn on the AI detection feature in TurnItIn. Their reasoning was that they had, I think, in 2022 some 75,000 student papers submitted. If they had the detector on during then that would give them a false positive grade about 3000 papers. And they just can’t deal with that sort of situation through a university level..No one can. You’d have to go through it investigating each one. You would also have to get students a hearing because that is part of the due process. It’s just too much. And that’s one of the main concerns that I have about the tools that it’s just not reliable in education.

John: And it’s not reliable both in terms of false positives and false negatives. So some of us are kind of troubled that we have allowed the Turnitin tool to be active and have urged that our campus shut it down for those very reasons, and I think a number of campuses, Vanderbilt was one of the biggest ones, I think to do that, but I think quite a few campuses are moving in that direction.

Marc: Yes, the University of Pittsburgh also made the decision to turn it off. I think several others did as well, too.

Rebecca: It’s interesting, if we don’t have a tool to measure, a tool to catch if you will, then you can’t really have a strong policy saying you can’t use it at all. [LAUGHTER] There’s no way to follow up on that or take action on that.

Marc: Where we’re at, I think, that for education, that’s a sort of conundrum. We’re trying to explain this to faculty. I think much more broadly, in society, though, if you can’t have a tool that works when you’re talking about Twitter, I’m sorry, X now, and understanding if the material is actually real or fake, that becomes a societal problem, too, and that’s what they’re trying to work on with watermarking. And I believe the big tech companies have agreed to watermark audio outputs, video outputs, and image outputs, but they’ve not agreed to do text outputs, because text is a little bit too fungible, you can go in and you can copy it, you can kind of change it around a little bit too much. So, definitely it’s gonna be a problem, too when state governments start to look at this, and they start wondering that the police officer taking your police report is writing this with their own words, the tax official using this as well, too. So it’s gonna be a problem well outside of education.

Rebecca: And if we’re not really preparing our students for that world in which they will likely be using AI in their professional fields, then we’re not necessarily doing our jobs and education and preparing our society for the future.

Marc: Yeah, I think training is the best way to go forward too and again, going back to the idea of intentional engagement with the technology and giving the students these situations where they can use it and where you, hopefully if you’re a faculty member, you actually have the knowledge and the actual resources to begin to integrate these tools and talk about the ethical use case, understanding what the limitations are and the fact that it is going to hallucinate and make things up, and to think about what sort of parameters you want to put on your own usage too.

John: One of the things that came out within the last week or so, I believe,… we’re recording this in late September… was the introduction of AI tools into Blackboard Ultra. Could you talk a little bit about that?

Marc: Oh boy, yes indeed, they announced last week that the tools were available to us in Blackboard Ultra. They turned it on for us here at the University of Mississippi, and I’ve been playing around with it, and it is a little bit problematic, because for right now, what you can do is with a single click, it will scan your existing materials in your Ultra course and it will create learning modules. It will create quiz questions based off that material, it will create rubrics, and will also generate images. Now compared to what we’ve been dealing with ChatGPT and all these other capabilities, this is almost a little milquetoast by comparison. But it’s also an inflection event for us in education, because it’s now here, it’s directly in our learning management system, it’s going to be something we’re going to have to contend with every single time we open up to create an assignment, or to do an assessment. And I’ve played around with it. It’s an older version of GPT. The image version I think is based on Dall-E, so you would ask for a picture of college students and you get some people with 14 fingers and weird artifacts all over their face, which may not be the one that would actually be helpful for your students. And while the other learning modules there are not my thinking necessarily, it’s just what the algorithm is predicting based off the content that exists in my course. We have that discussion with our faculty, we have them cross that Rubicon on and saying, “Okay, I’m worried about my students using this, what happens to me and my teaching, my labor, if I start adopting these tools. There could be some help, definitely, this could really streamline the process, of course creation and actually making it aligned with the learning outcomes my department wants for this particular class.” But it also gets us in a situation where automation is now part of our teaching. And we really haven’t thought about that. We haven’t really gotten to that sort of conversation yet.

Rebecca: It does certainly raise questions about, obviously, many ethical questions and really about disclosing to students what has been produced by us as instructors and what has been produced by AI and authorship of what’s there. Especially if we’re expecting students to [LAUGHTER] do the same thing.

Marc: It is mind boggling, the cognitive dissonance, with having a policy and saying “No AI in my class,” then all of a sudden, it’s there in my Blackboard course, and I could click on something. And, at least at this integration of Blackboard, they may very well change this, but once you do this, there’s no way to natively indicate that this was generated by AI. You have to manually go in there and say this was created. And I value my relationship with my students, it’s based off of mutual trust. I think almost everyone in education does. If we want our students to act ethically, and use this technology openly, we should expect ourselves to do the same. And if we get into a situation where I’m generating content for my students and then telling [LAUGHTER] them that they can’t do the same with their own essays, it is just going to be kind of a big mess.

John: So given the existence of AI tools, what should we do in terms of assessing student learning? How can we assess the work reasonably given the tools that are available to them?

Rebecca: Do you mean we can just use that auto-generated rubric right, that we just learned about? [LAUGHTER]

Marc: You could, you can use the auto-generated rubric separately from Blackboard. One of the tools I’m piloting right now is the feedback assistant, it was developed by Eric Kean and Anna Mills. I consulted with them on this, too. She’s very big on the AI space for composition. It’s called MyEssayFeedback. And I’ve been piloting this with my students. They know it’s an AI, they understand this. I did get IRB approval to do so. But I’ve just got the second round of generated feedback, and it’s thorough, it’s quick, it’s to the point. And it’s literally making me say, “How am I going to compete with that?” And maybe the way is that maybe I shouldn’t be competing with that, maybe it’s I’m not going to be providing that feedback. But then maybe then I should be providing my time in different ways. Maybe I should be meeting with them one on one to talk about their experiences, maybe that way. But I think you raise an interesting question. I don’t want to be alarmist, I want to be as level-headed as I can. But from my perspective, all the pieces are now there to automate learning to some degree. They haven’t been all hooked up yet and put together a cohesive package. But they’re all there in different areas. And we need to be paying attention to this.Our hackles need to be raised just slightly at this point to see what this can do. Because I think that is where we are headed with integrating these tools into our daily practice.

Rebecca: AI generally has raised questions about intellectual property rights. And if our learning management systems are using our content in ways that we aren’t expecting, how is that violating our rights or the rights that the institution has over the content that’s already there.

Marc: A lot of perspectives of the people that I speak with too, their course content, their syllabi, from their perspective is their own intellectual property in some ways. We get debates about that, about the actual university owns some of the material. But we have had instances where lectures were copyrighted before in the past. And if you’re allowing the system to scan your lecture, you are exposing that to Generative AI. And that gets at one aspect of this. The other aspect, which I think Rebecca is referring to is the issue with training this material for these large language models itself could indicate that it was stolen or not properly sourced from internet and you’re using it and then you’re trying to teach your students [LAUGHTER] to cite material correctly too, so it’s just a gigantic conundrum of just legal and ethical challenges. The one silver lining in all this, and this has been across the board with everyone in my department. This has been wonderful material to talk about with your students, they are actually actively engaged with it, they want to know about this, they want to talk about it. They are shocked and surprised about all the depths that have gone into the training of these models, and the different ethical situations with data and all of it too. And so if you want to just engage your students by talking to them about AI too, that’s a great first step in developing their AI literacy. And it doesn’t matter what you’re teaching, it could be a history course, it could be a course in biology, this tool will have an impact in some way shape or form in your students’ lives they want to talk about, I think maybe something to talk about is there are a lot of tools outside of ChatGPT, and a lot of different interfaces as well, too. I don’t know if I talked about this before in the spring, the one tool that’s really been effective for a lot of students were the reading assistant tools, one that we’ve been employing is called ExplainPaper. They upload a PDF to it, it calls upon generative AI to scan the paper and you can actually select it to whatever reading level you want, then translate that into your reading level. The one problem is that students don’t realize that they might be giving up some close reading, critical reading skills to it as well too, just like we do with any sort of relationship with generative AI. There is kind of that handoff and offloading of that thinking, but for the most part, they have loved that and that’s helped them engage with some really critical art texts that normally would not be at their reading level that I would usually not assign to certain students. So those are helpful. There are plenty of new tools coming out too. One of them is called Claude 2 to be precise by Anthropic. That just came out, I think, in July for public release, it is as powerful as GPT-4. It is free right now, if you want to sign up for it as well too. The reason why I mentioned Claude is that the context window, what you can actually upload to it is so much bigger than ChatGPTs. I believe their context window is 75,000 words. So you can actually upload four or five documents at a time, synthesize those documents. One of the things I was using it for as a use case was that I collected tons of reflections for my students this past year about the use of AI. It’s all in a messy Word document. It’s 51 pages single spaced. It’s all anonymized so there’s new data that identifies them. But it’s so much of a time suck on my time, just go through to code those reflections. And I’ve just been uploading to Claude and having it use a sentiment analysis to point out what reflections are positive from these students, in what way, and it does it within a few seconds. It’s amazing.

John: One other nice thing about Claude is that has a training database that ends in early 2023. So it has much more current information, which actually, in some ways is a little concerning for those faculty who were trying to ask more recent questions, particularly in online asynchronous courses, so that ChatGPT could not address those. But with Claude’s expanded training database, that’s no longer quite the case.

Marc: That’s absolutely correct. And to add to this rather early discussion about AI detection, none of the AI detectors that I’m aware of had time to actually train on Claude, so if you generated essay… and you guys are free to do this on your own, your listeners are too… if you generated and essay with Claude, and you try to upload that to one of the AI detectors, very likely you’re going to get zero detection or a very low detection rate for it too, because it’s again, a different system. It’s new, the existing AI detectors have not had time. So the way to translate this is don’t tell your students about it right now, or in this case, be very careful about how you introduce this technology to your students, which we should do anyway. But this is one of those tools that is massively popular, a lot of people just haven’t known about it because, again, ChatGPT just takes up all the oxygen in the room when we talk about Generative AI

John: What are some activities where we can have students productively use AI to assist their learning or as part of their educational process?

Marc: That’s a great question. We actually started developing very specific activities for them to look at different pain points for writing classes. One of them was getting them to actually integrate the technology that way. So we built a very careful assignment, which called on very specific moves for them to make both in terms of their writing, and their integration of the technology for that. We also looked at bringing some research question, building assignments that way. We have assignments from my Digital Media Studies students right now about how they can use it to create infographics. Using the paid for version of ChatGPT Plus, they can have access to plugins, and those plugins then give them access to Canva and Wikipedia. So they can actually use Canva to create full on presentations based off of their own natural language and use actual real sources by using those two plugins in conjunction with each other. I just make them then go through it, edit it with their own words, their own language too, and reflect on what this has done to their process. So lots of different examples, too, I mean, it really is limited only to your imagination in this time, which is exciting, but it’s also kind of the problem that we’re dealing with, there’s so much to think about.

Rebecca: From your experience in training faculty, what are some getting started moves that faculty can take to get familiar enough to take this step of integrating AI by the spring?

Marc: Well, I think the one thing that they could do is, there are a few really fast courses. I think it’s Ethan Mollick from even from the Wharton School of Business put out a very effective training course that was all through YouTube, I think it’s like four or five videos, very simple to take, to get used to understanding how ChatGPT works, how Microsoft’s Bing works as well too, and what sort of activities students can use it for, what sort of activities faculty could. Microsoft has also put out a very fast course, I think takes 53 minutes to complete about using generative AI technologies in education. And those are all very fast ways of basically coming up to speed with the actual technology.

John: And Coursera has a MOOC through Vanderbilt University, on Prompt Engineering for ChatGPT, which can also help familiarize faculty with the capabilities of at least ChatGPT. We’ll include links to these in the show notes.

Marc: I really, really hope Microsoft, Google and the rest of them calm down, because this has gotten a little bit out of control. And integration of these tools are often without use cases, they’re often waiting to see how we’re going to come up and use them too. And that is concerning. Google has announced that they are committed to releasing their own model that’s going to be in competition with GPT4, I think it’s called Gemini by late November. So it looks like they’re just going to keep on heating up this arms race and you get bigger models, more capable and I think we do need to ask ourselves more broadly what our capacity is just to keep up with this. My capacity is about negative zero at this point… going down further.

John: Yeah, we’re seeing new AI tools coming out almost every week or so now in one form or another. And it is getting difficult to keep up with. I believe Apple is also planning to release an AI product.

Marc: They are. They also have a car they’re planning to release, which is the weirdest thing in the world to me, that there could be your iPhone charged in your Apple Car.

John: GM has announced that they are not going to be supporting either Android or Apple CarPlay for their electric vehicles. So perhaps this is Apple’s way of getting back at them for that. And we always end with the question, what [LAUGHTER] is next, which is perhaps a little redundant, but we do always end with that.

Marc: Yeah, I think what’s next is trying to critically engage the technology and explore it not out of fear, but out of a sense of wonder. I hope we can continue to do that. I do think we are seeing a lot of people starting to dig in. And they’re digging in real deep. So I’m trying to be as empathetic as I can be for those that don’t want to deal with the technology. But it is here and you are going to have to sit down and spend some time with it for sure.

John: One thing I’ve noticed that in working with faculty, they’re very concerned about the impact of AI tools on their students and student work. But they’re really excited about all the possibilities that opens up for them in terms of simplifying their workflows. So that, I think, is a positive sign.

Rebecca: They could channel that to help understand how to work with students.

Marc: I hope they find that out, there’s a positive pathway forward with that too.

John: Well, thank you. It’s great talking to you and you’ve given us lots more to think about.

Marc: Thank you guys so much.

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John: If you’ve enjoyed this podcast, please subscribe and leave a review on iTunes or your favorite podcast service. To continue the conversation, join us on our Tea for Teaching Facebook page.

Rebecca: You can find show notes, transcripts and other materials on teaforteaching.com. Music by Michael Gary Brewer.

Ganesh: Editing assistance by Ganesh.

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309. Preparing Students for an AI Future

New technology is often seen as a threat to learning when first introduced in an educational setting. In this episode, Michelle Miller joins us to examine the question of when to stick with tools and methods that are familiar and when to investigate the possibilities of the future.

Michelle is a Professor of Psychological Sciences and President’s Distinguished Teaching Fellow at Northern Arizona University.  She is the author of Minds Online: Teaching Effectively with Technology and Remembering and Forgetting in the Age of Technology: Teaching, Learning, and the Science of Memory in a Wired World. Michelle is also a frequent contributor of articles on teaching and learning in higher education to publications such as The Chronicle of Higher Education.

Show Notes

Transcript

John: New technology is often seen as a threat to learning when first introduced in an educational setting. In this episode, we examine the question of when to stick with tools and methods that are familiar and when to investigate the possibilities of the future.

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John: Thanks for joining us for Tea for Teaching, an informal discussion of innovative and effective practices in teaching and learning.

Rebecca: This podcast series is hosted by John Kane, an economist…

John: …and Rebecca Mushtare, a graphic designer…

Rebecca: …and features guests doing important research and advocacy work to make higher education more inclusive and supportive of all learners.

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John: Our guest today is Michelle Miller. Michelle is a Professor of Psychological Sciences and President’s Distinguished Teaching Fellow at Northern Arizona University. She is the author of Minds Online: Teaching Effectively with Technology and Remembering and Forgetting in the Age of Technology: Teaching, Learning, and the Science of Memory in a Wired World. Michelle is also a frequent contributor of articles on teaching and learning in higher education to publications such as The Chronicle of Higher Education. Welcome back, Michelle.

Michelle: Hey, it’s great to be here.

Rebecca: Today’s teas are: ….Michelle, are you drinking tea?

Michelle: I’m actually still sticking with water. So it’s a healthy start so far for the day.

Rebecca: Sounds like a good plan.

John: I have ginger peach black tea today.

Rebecca: And I’ve got some Awake tea. We’re all starting the day [LAUGHTER].

John: So we’ve invited you here to discuss your August 17th Chronicle article on adapting to ChatGPT. You began that article by talking about your experience teaching a research methods course for the first time. Could you share that story? Because I think it’s a nice entree into this.

Michelle: Oh, thank you. I’m glad you agree. You never know when you’re sharing these kinds of personal experiences. But I will say this was triggered by my initial dawning awareness of the recent advances in AI tools, which we’re all talking about now. So initially, like probably a lot of people, I thought, well okay, it’s the latest thing and I don’t know how kind of attentive or concerned I should be about this. And as somebody who does write a lot about technology and education, I have a pretty high bar set for saying, “Oh wow, we actually kind of need to drop everything and look at this,” I’ve heard a lot of like, “Oh, this will change everything.” I know we all have. But as I started to get familiar with it, I thought “Oh my goodness, this really is a change” and it brought back that experience, which was from my very first assignment teaching the Research Methods in Psychology course at a, well, I’ll just say it was a small liberal arts institution, not my graduate institution. So I’m at this new place with this new group of students, very high expectations, and the research methods course… I think all disciplines have a course kind of like this, where we kind of go from, “Oh, we’re consuming and discussing research or scholarship in this area” to “Okay, how are we going to produce this and getting those skills.” So it is challenging, and one of the big challenges was and still is, in different forms, the statistical analysis. So you can’t really design a study and carry it out in psychological sciences without a working knowledge of what numbers are we going to be collecting, what kind of data (and it usually is quantitative data), and what’s our plan? What are we going to do with it once we have it, and getting all that statistical output for the first time and interpreting it, that is a big deal for psychology majors, it always is. So students are coming, probably pretty anxious, to this new class with a teacher they haven’t met before. This is my first time out as the instructor of record. And I prepared and prepared and prepared as we do. And one of the things that I worked on was, at the time, our methodology for analyzing quantitative data. We would use a statistics package and you had to feed it command line style input, it was basically like writing small programs to then hand over to the package. And you would have to define the data, you’d have to say, “Okay, here’s what’s in every column and every field of this file,” and there was a lot to it. And I was excited. Here’s all this knowledge I’m going to share with you. I had to work for years to figure out all my tricks of the trade for how to make these programs actually run. And so I’ve got my stack of overheads. I come in, and I have one of those flashbulb memories. I walked into the lab where we were going to be running the analysis portion, and I look over the students’ shoulders, and many of them have opened up and are starting to mess around with and play around with the newest version of this statistics package. And instead of these [LAUGHTER] screens with some commands, what am I looking at? I’m looking at spreadsheets [LAUGHTER]. So the data is going into these predefined boxes. There’s this big, pretty colorful interface with drop down menus… All the commands that I had to memorize [LAUGHTER], you can point and click, and I’m just looking at this and going, “Oh no, what do I do?” And part of my idea for this article was kind of going back and taking apart what that was like and where those reactions were coming from. And as I kind of put in a very condensed form in the article, I think it really was one part just purely sort of anxiety and maybe a little bit of loss and saying, “But I was going to share with you how to do these skills…” partly that “Oh no, what do I do now?” I’m a new instructor. I have to draft all this stuff, and then partly, yeah, curiosity and saying, “Well, wait a minute, is this really going to do the same thing as how I was generating these commands and I know you’re still going to need that critical thinking and the top level knowledge of “Okay, which menu item do you want?” Is this going to be more trouble than it’s worth? Are students going to be running all the wrong analyses because it’s just so easy to do, and it’s going to go away.” So all of that complex mix is, of course, not identical to, but I think pretty similar to how I felt… maybe how a lot of folks are feeling… about what is the role of this going to be in my teaching and in my field, and in scholarship in general going forward?

Rebecca: So in your article, you talk a lot about experimenting with AI tools to get started in thinking about how AI is related to your discipline. And we certainly have had lots of conversations with faculty about just getting in there and trying it out just to see how tools like ChatGPT work to become more familiar with how they might be integrated into their workflow. Can you share a little bit about how you’d recommend for faculty or how you were thinking about [LAUGHTER] jumping in and experimenting and just gettin g started in this space?

Michelle: Well, I think perhaps, it also can start with a little bit of that reflection and I think probably your listenership has a lot of very reflective faculty and instructors here. And I think that’s the great first step of “Alright now, if I’m feeling worried, or I’m feeling a very negative reaction, where’s that coming from and why?” But then, of course, yeah when you get it and actually start using it the way that I had to get it and start using my statistics package in a brand new way, then you do start to see, “Okay, well, what’s great, what’s concerning and not great, and what am I going to do with this in the future? So experimenting with the AI tools, and doing so from a really specific perspective. When I started experimenting at first, I think I thrashed around and kind of wasted some time and energy initially, looking at some things that were not really education focused. So something that’s aimed at people who are, say, social media managers, and how this will affect their lives is very different than me as a faculty member. So make sure you kind of narrow it down, and you’re a little planful about what you look at, what resources you’re going to tap into, and so on. And so that’s a good starting point. Now, here’s what I also noticed about my initial learning curve with this. So I decided to go with ChatGPT, myself, as the tool I wanted to get the most in depth with. So I did that and I noticed really that, of course, like with any sort of transfer of learning situation, and so many of those things we do with our students, I was falling back in a kind of an old pattern. So my first impulse was really funny, it was just to ask it questions, because I think now that we’ve had several decades of Google under our belts and other kinds of search engines, we get into these AI tools, and we treat them like search engines, which for many reasons, they really are not. Now, this is not bad, you can certainly get some interesting answers. But I think it’s good to really have at the front of your mind to kind of transition from simply asking questions to what these tools really shine with, which is following directions. I think one of the best little heuristics I’ve seen out there, just very general advice, is: role, goal, and instructions. So instead of coming in and saying “what is” or “find” or something like that, what perspective is it coming from? Is it acting as an expert? Is it acting as an editor? Is it going to role play the position of a college student? Tell it what you’re trying to accomplish, and then give it some instructions for what you want it to do. That’s a big kind of step that you can get to pretty quickly once you are experimenting. And that’s, I think, real important to do. So we have that. And of course, we also want to keep in mind that one of the big distinguishing factors as well is that these tools have memory, your session is going to unfold in a particular and unique way, depending not just on the prompts you give it, but what you’ve already asked it before. So, once you’ve got those two things, you can start experimenting with it. And I do think coming at it from very specific perspectives is important as I mentioned because there’s so little super general advice, or discipline-independent advice that I think is really going to be useful to you. And so doing that, I think a lot of us we start in a sort of a low-stakes, tentative way with other interests we might have. So for example, one of the first things that I did to test it out myself was I had it work out a kind of a tedious little problem in knitting. So I had a knitting pattern, and there’s just a particular little counting algorithm where to put increases in your pattern that always trips us up. And I was about to like, “Oh, I gotta go look this up,” then I thought “You know what, I’m gonna see if ChatGPT can do this.” And it did that really well. And by doing that in an area where I kind of knew what to expect, I could also push its parameters a little bit, make sure is this plausible? is what it’s given me… [LAUGHTER] does that map onto reality? and I can fact check it a little bit better as I go along. So those are some things that I think that we can do, for those who really are starting from scratch or close to it right now.

John: You’re suggesting that faculty should think about how AI tools such as this… and there’s a growing number of them, it seems more are coming out almost every week…, how they might be useful in your disciplines and in the types of things you’re preparing students for, because as you suggested it’s very different in different contexts. It might be very different if you’re teaching students to write than if you’re teaching them psychology or economics or math. And so it’s always tempting to prepare students for the way we were prepared for the world that we were entering into in our disciplines. And as you suggest in the article that we really need to prepare students for the world that they’re going to be entering. Should people be thinking about how it’s likely that students will be using these tools in the future and then helping prepare them for that world?

Michelle: Yeah, that’s a really good way to start getting our arms around this. In kind of the thinking that I’ve been doing and kind of going through this over the last couple of months… that just absolutely keeps coming up as a recurring thing, that this is so big, complicated, and overwhelming, and means very different things for different people in different fields. Being able to kind of divide and break down that problem is so important. So, yeah, I do think that and, for example, one of the very basic things that I’ve made some baby steps towards using myself is, ChatGPT is really good at kind of reformulating content that you give it, expanding or condensing it in particular. The other day, for example, I was really kind of working to shape a writing piece, and I had sort of a longer overview and I needed to go back and kind of take it back down to basics and give myself some ideas as a writer. So I was not having it write any prose for me. But I said, “Okay, take what I wrote and turn it into bullet points” and it did a great job at that. I had a request recently from somebody who was looking at some workshop content I had and said, “Oh, we really want to add on some questions where people can test their own understanding.” And you know, as the big retrieval practice [LAUGHTER] advocate and fan of all time, I’m like, “Oh, well, that’s a great idea. Oh, my goodness, and I’m gonna have to write this, I’m on a deadline.” And here too, I got, not a perfectly configured set of questions. but I got a really good starting point. So I was able to really quickly dump in some text and some content and say,”Write this many multiple choice and true/false questions.” And it did that really, really well. So those are two very elementary examples and some things that we can get in the habit of doing as faculty and as people who work with information and knowledge in general.

Rebecca: I’ve used ChatGPT, quite often to get started on things too, and generate design prompts, all kinds of things and have it revise and add things and really get me to think through some things and then kind of I do my own thing. But I use that as a good starting point to not have a blank page.

Michelle: Absolutely. Yeah, the blank page issue. And I think where we will need to develop our own practice is to say, “Okay, make sure we don’t conflate or accidentally commingle our work with ChatGPT’s, as we figure out what those acceptable parameters are.” But that reminds me too, I mean, we all have the arenas where we shine and the arenas where we have difficulty as, again, as faculty, as working professionals. I know graphic design is your background. I’m terrible. I’m great at words, but it reminds me, one of the things that I kind of made myself go and experiment with was creating a graphic, just for my online course that’s running right now, which would, for me, that would typically be a kind of an ordeal of searching and trying to find something that was legitimate to use and a lot of clipart, and I had it generate something. Now, I do not advise putting in like “exciting psychology image in the style of Salvador Dali,” [LAUGHTER] and seeing what comes out. He was not the right choice. It was quite terrifying. But after a lot of trial and error, I found something that was serviceable and there too, it’s not like I need to develop those skills. If I did, I would go about that very, very differently. But it’s something that I need in the course of my work but it’s a little outside of my real realm of expertise. So helpful there too. So yeah, the blank page… I think you really hit on something there.

John: Now did you use DALL-E or Midjourney or one of the other AI design tools to generate that image?

Michelle: Oh my goodness. Well, here again, [LAUGHTER] I was really out of the proverbial comfort zone for myself is really going to show. I did use DALL-E and I really wrestled with it for a couple of reasons. And so, as a non-graphic person, it did not come easily to me. Midjourney as well, if you’re not a Discord user, you’re really kind of fighting to figure out that interface at the same time and those that are familiar with cognitive load concept of [LAUGHTER] “I’m trying to focus on this project, but all this other stuff is happening. And then I had a good friend who’s a computer engineer and designs stained glass as a hobbyist [LAUGHTER] and kind of took my hand and said, “Okay, here’s some things you can do.” It actually came up with something a lot prettier, I have to say.

John: You had just mentioned two ways in which faculty could use this to summarize their work or to generate some questions. Not all faculty rely on retrieval practice in an optimal manner. Might this be something that students can use to fill in the gaps when they’re not getting enough retrieval practice or when they’re assigned more complex readings then they’re able to handle.

Michelle: Yeah, having the expertise is part of it, and I think we’re going to see a lot of developing understanding of that really cool tradeoff and handoff between our expertise and what the machine can do. I’m kicking around this idea as well, so I’m glad you brought that up. A nice side effect could be a new era for retrieval practice, since that is something of a limiting factor is getting quality prompts and questions for yourself. It’s funny, one of the things that I did do while taking a little prompt engineering course right now to try to build some of these skills and the facility with it. And one of the things they assigned was a big dense article [LAUGHTER] on prompt engineering, which was really great, but a little out of my field, and so I’m kind of going “Well, did I get that?” And then I thought, I better take my own medicine here and say, “Well, what’s the best way to ensure that you do and to find out if you don’t have a good grasp of what you were assigned?” And I was able to give it the content, I gave it, again, a role, a goal, and some instructions and said “Act as a tutor or a college professor, take this article, and give me five questions to test my knowledge. And then I told it to evaluate my answers [LAUGHTER] and see whether it was correct.” So that was about as meta as you can get, I think, in this area right now. So I’ve done it. And here again, it does a pretty good job, actually an excellent job. Do you want to use it for something super high stakes, probably not, especially without taking that expert eye to it. But wow, here’s something, here’s content that was challenging to me personally. It did not come with built in retrieval practice, or a live tutor to help me out with it. I read it, and I’m kind of going, “I don’t know, I don’t have a really confident feeling.” So I was able to run through that. And so yeah, that could be one of the initial steps that we suggest to students as a potentially helpful and not terribly risky way of using these really powerful new tools.

Rebecca: One of the things that this conversation is reminding me of and some of the others that we’ve had about ChatGPT is we have to talk a little bit about how students might use it in an assignment or something, or how we might coach a student to use it. But we don’t often talk a lot about ways that students might just come to a tool like this, and how they’re just going to use it on their own without us having any [LAUGHTER] impact. I think, often we jump to conclusions that they’re gonna have a tool write a paper or whatever. What are some other ways that we can imagine or roleplay or experiment in the role of a student to see how a tool like this might impact our learning?

Michelle: So that is another kind of neat running theme that does come up, I think, with these AI tools is role playing. I mean, this is what it’s essentially doing. And so having us roleplay the position of a student or having it evaluate our materials from the perspective of a student, I think, could be useful. But, it kind of reminds me let’s not have a total illusion of control over this. I think, as faculty, we have a very individualistic approach to our work. And I think that’s fine. But yeah, there’s a lot happening outside of the classroom that we should always have in mind. So just like with me on that hyper planned first course that I was going to be teaching, it just happened and students were already out there experimenting with “Oh, here’s how I can complete this basic statistics assignment with the assistance of this tool I’m going to teach myself. So that could be going on, almost certainly is going on, out there in the world of students. And it’s another time to do something which I know I have to remind myself to do, which is ask students and really talk to them about it. Early on, I think there was a little bit of like, “Oh, this is a sort of a taboo or a secret and I can’t talk to my professors about it and I want to broach it and professors, they didn’t want to broach it with their students because we don’t want to give anybody ideas or suggest some things are okay where they’re not. But I think we’re at a good point to just kind of level with our students and ask them “How do you think we could bring this in?” I think next semester, I’m going to run maybe an extra credit assignment and say, “Oh, okay, we’re gonna have a contest, you get bragging rights, and maybe a few points to “What is a good creative use of this tool in a way that relates to this class? Or can you create something, kind of a creative product or some kind of a demonstration that in some way ties to the class?” And I’ve learned through experience when I’m stumped, and I don’t quite know where to go with a tool or a technique or a problem, take it to the students and see what they can do with it.

Rebecca: I can see this is a real opportunity to just ask the students, how are they using it, and then take a look at the results that it’s creating. And then this is where we can provide some information about how expertise in a field [LAUGHTER] could actually make that better why that result is in what they think it is.

Michelle: Absolutely, and some of the best suggestions that I’ve seen out there, I’m kind of eagerly consuming across a lot of disciplines as much as I can to look at those suggestions. The most intriguing ones I’ve seen are kind of with things with a media literacy and critical thinking flair that tells students “Okay, here’s something to elicit from your AI tool that you’re using, and then we, from our human and expert perspectives, are going to critique that and see how we could improve it. So here too, critical thinking and those kinds of evaluation skills and abilities are some of the most prized things we want students to be getting in higher education. And they are simultaneously. for many different reasons, they are some of the hardest. So if we can bring that to bear on the problem, I think that can be a big benefit.

John: In the article, you suggested that faculty should consider introducing some AI based activities in their classes. Could you talk a little bit about some that you might be considering or that you might recommend to people?

Michelle: One of the things that I am going to be teaching, actually for the first time in a very long time, is a writing in psychology course, which has the added challenge of being fully online asynchronous, so that’s going to be coming up pretty soon for me. It’s still under construction, as I’m sure a lot of our activities and a lot of things are that we’re thinking about in this very fluid and rapidly developing area. I think things like outlining, things like having ChatGPT suggest improvements, and finding ways for students to also kind of track their workflow with that. I do think that one of the things that in our different professional [LAUGHTER] lives, because as I mentioned in the article, I think that should really lead the way of what work are we doing as faculty and as scholars in our particular areas. One of the things we’re going to have to be looking at is alright, how do I manage any output that I got from this and knowing what belongs to it and what was generated by me. What have I already asked it? If they’re particularly good prompts, how do I save those so I can reuse them? …another really good thing about interacting with the tools. But, I’m kind of playing around with some different ideas about having students generate maybe structures or suggestions that they can work off of themselves. And having CHATGPT give them some feedback on what they’ve developed so far. So one of the things you can ask it to do is critique what you tell it, so [LAUGHTER] you can say, “Okay, improve on this.” And then you can repeat, you can keep iterating on that, and you can keep fine tuning in different areas. You can also have it improve on its own work. So once it makes a suggestion you can, I mean, it’s virtually infinite what you can tell it to go back and do: to refocus, expand, condense, add and delete, and so on. So that’s kind of what I am shaping right here. I think too, at the Introduction to Psychology level, which is the other level that I frequently teach within, I’m not incorporating it quite yet. But I think having students have the opportunity or option to create a dialogue, an example, maybe even a short play or skit that it can produce to illustrate some concepts from the book and there ChatGPT is going to be filling in kind of all the specifics, the student won’t be doing it, but it’ll be up to them to say, “Well, what really stood out to me in this big, vast [LAUGHTER] landscape of introductory material that I think would be so cool to communicate to another person in a creative way?” And this can help out with that. I’m also going to be teaching my teaching practicum for graduate students coming up as well. And, of course, I want to incorporate just kind of the latest state of the art information about it. But also, it’s supposedly, I haven’t tried it myself yet, but supposedly it’s pretty good at structuring lesson plans. We don’t do formal lesson plans the way they’re done in K through 12 education, of course, but to give it the basics of an idea and then have a plan that you’re going to take into a course since that’s one of the things they do in that course is produce plans for courses and I gotta say it’s not a critical skill, the formatting and exactly how that’s all going to be laid out on the page, is not what they’re in the class to do. It’s to really develop their own teaching philosophy, knowledge, and the ability to put those into practice in a classroom. So if it can be an aid to that, great, and I also want them to know what the capabilities are if they haven’t experimented with them yet, so they can be very aware of that going into their first classes that they teach.

Rebecca: When you mentioned the example of a writing intensive class that’s fully asynchronous online, I immediately thought of all of the concerns [LAUGHTER], and barriers that faculty are really struggling with in really highly writing intensive spaces, and then fully online environments, especially around things like academic integrity. Can you talk a little bit about [LAUGHTER] some of the things that you’re thinking about as you’re working through how you’re gonna handle AI in that context?

Michelle: As I’m been talking with other faculty right now, one of the things that I really settled on is the importance of keeping these kind of threads of the conversation separate and so I’m really glad we’re kind of piecing that out from everything [LAUGHTER] else. Because once again, it’s just too much to say, well, on the one hand, how to prepare students and give them skills they might need in the future? How do I use it to enhance learning and oh my gosh, is everybody just going to have AI complete their assignments? It’s kind of too much at once. But once we do piece that out, as you might pick up on that I’m a little enthusiastic about some of the potential, does not mean I don’t think this is a pretty important concern. So I think we’re gonna see a lot of claims about “Oh, we’re going to AI proof assignments and I think probably many of your listeners have already run across AI detection tools and the severe problems with those right now. So I think we have to just say right now, for practical purposes, no, you cannot really reliably detect AI written material. I think that if you’re teaching online especially, I think we should all just say flat out that AI can take your exams. If you have really conventional exams, as I did before [LAUGHTER] this semester in some of my online courses, if you’ve got those, it can take those. And just to kind of drive home to folks, this is not just simple pattern matching, looking up your particular question that floated out into a database, no, it’s processing what you’re putting in. And it’s probably going to do pretty well at that. So for me, I’m kind of thinking about, in my own mind, a lot of these more as speed bumps. I can put speed bumps in the road, and to know what speed bumps are going to at least discourage students from just dumping the class work into ChatGPT. To know what’s effective, it really helps to go in and know what it does well and what it really stumbles on, that will give you some hints about how to make it less attractive. And that’s kind of what I’m settling on right now myself, and what I’ve shared with students, as I’ve spoken with them really candidly to say I’m not trying to police or catch people, I am not under an illusion that I can just AI proof everything. I want to remove obvious temptation, I want to make it so a student who otherwise is inclined to do the right thing, wants to have integrity and wants to learn doesn’t go in feeling like, “Oh, I’m at a disadvantage If I don’t just do this, it’s sitting right there.” So creating those nudges away from it, I think, is important. And yeah, I took the step of taking out conventional exams from the online class I’m teaching right now. And I have been steadily de-emphasizing them more with every single iteration. I think those who are into online course design might agree well, maybe that was never really a good fit to begin with. That’s something that we developed for these face-to-face environments, and we just kind of transplanted it into that environment. But I sort of ripped off that [LAUGHTER] bandaid and said, “Okay, we’re just not going to do this. I’ve put more into the other substance of the course, I put in other kinds of interactions. Because if I ask them Psychology 101 basic test questions, even if I write them fresh every time, it can answer those handily, it really can.

John: Recently, someone ran the Test of Understanding in College Economics through with the micro and macro versions. And I remember on the macro version ChatGPT-4 scored at the 99th percentile on this multiple choice quiz, which basically is the type of things that people would be putting in their regular tests. So it’s going to be a challenge because many of the things we use to assess student’s learning can all be completed by ChatGPT. What types of activities are you thinking of using in that online class that will let you assess student learning without assessing ChatGPT’s or other AI tools’ ability to represent learning?

Michelle: Well, I’ll share one that’s pretty simple, but I was doing anyway for other reasons. So just to take one very simple example of something that we do in that class, I really got an a big kick with Kahoot!, especially during the heyday of fully hybrid teaching where we were charged, as faculty, I know at my institution, where you have to have a class that can run synchronously with in-person and remote students at the same time, and run [LAUGHTER] asynchronously for students who need to do their work at a different time phase. And that was a lot and Kahoot! was a really good solution to that. It’s got a very K through 12 flavor to it, but most students just really take a shine to it anyway. And it is familiar to many of them from high school or previous classes right now. So it’s a quiz game, runs a timed gamified quiz. So students are answering test questions in these Kahoot!s that I set up. And because it has that flexibility, they have the option to play the quiz game sort of asynchronously on their own time, or we have those different live sessions that they can drop in and play against each other and against me. So that’s all great. But here’s the thing, prior to ChatGPT, I said I don’t want to grade this on accuracy, which feels really weird, right, as a faculty member to say, well, here’s the test and your grade is not based on the points you earn for accuracy. It’s very timed, a little hiccup in the connectivity you have at home can alter your score, and I just didn’t like it. So what students do is for their grade, they do a reflection. So I give the link to the Kahoot!, you play it, and then what you turn into me is this really informal and hopefully very authentic reflection, say, “Well, how did you do? What surprised you the most? Were there particular questions that tripped you up?” And also kind of getting them to say, “Well, what are you going to do differently next time?” And for those who are big fans of teaching metacognition, I mean, that comes through loud and clear, I’m sure. So every single module they have this opportunity to come in and say, “Okay, here’s how I’m doing, and here’s what I’m finding challenging in the content.” Is it AI proof? Absolutely not. No, it really isn’t. But it is, at least I think at that tipping point where the contortions you’d have to go through to come up with something that is gonna pass the sniff test with me, and if I’ve now read 1000s of these, I know what they tend to look like. And Kahoot!s are timed. I mean, could you really quickly transfer them out and type them in? Yes. It’s simply a speed bump. But the time would make that also a real challenge to kind of toggle back and forth. So I feel good about having that in the class. And so it’s something again, I’ve been developing for a while, I didn’t just come up with it, fortunately, the minute that ChatGPT really impinged on this class, but it was already in place. And I kind of was able to elevate that and have that be part of it. And so they’re doing that. I do a lot of collaborative annotation, I continue to be really happy with… I use Perusall. I know, that’s not the only option there is, but it’s great. They’ve got an open source textbook. And they’re in there commenting and playing off each other in the comments. So that is the kind of engagement I think that we need in force anyway, it is less of a temptation. And so I feel like that’s probably better than having them try to quickly type out answers to, frankly, pretty generic definitions and so on that we have in that course. Some people are not going to be happy with that, but that’s really truly what I’m doing in that course instead.

John: Might this lead to a bit of a shift to more people using ungrading techniques with those types of reflections as a way of shifting the focus away from grading, which would encourage the use of ChatGPT or other tools to focus on learning, which might discourage it from being used inappropriately?

Michelle: What a fantastic connection. And you know what? When I recently led a discussion with faculty in my own department about this, that is actually something that came up over and over just, it’s not ungrading, because not everybody is even kind of conversant with that concept. But how there are these trends that have been going on for a while of saying, you know, is a timed multiple choice test really what I need everything to hinge on in this online course. Ungrading, this idea of kind of, I think there’s this emerging almost idea I’ll call both sides-ism, or collaboration between student and teacher, which I think was also taking root through the pandemic teaching and that came to the forefront with me of just saying, “Okay, we’re not going to just be able to keep running everything the same way traditionally it’s been run,” which sometimes does have that underlying philosophy of, “Okay, I’m going to make you do things and then you owe me this work, and I’m going to judge it and you’re going to try to get the highest points with the least effort. I mean, that whole dynamic, that is what I think powers this interest in ungrading, which is so exciting, and it’s gonna maybe be pushed ahead by this as well. Ultimately, the reason why you’re going to do these exercises I assign to you is because you want to develop these skills. You are here for a reason, and I am here to help you. So that is, I think, a real positive perspective we can bring to this and I would love to see those two things wedded together, especially now that tests can be taken by ChatGPT, then, we should relook at all of our evaluation and sort of the underlying philosophy that powers it.

John: One of the concerns about ChatGPT is it sometimes makes mistakes, it’s sometimes will make stuff up, and it’s also not very good with citations. In many cases, it will just completely fabricate citations, where it will get the authors of people who’ve done research in the field, but will grab other titles or make up other titles for their work. Might that be a way in which we could could give students an assignment to use one of these tools to generate a paper or a summary on some topic, but then have them go out and verify the arguments made and look for citations and document it just as a way of helping prepare them for a world where they have a tool which is really powerful, but is also sometimes going off in strange directions, so that they can develop their critical thinking skills more effectively.

Michelle: Yeah, looping back to that critical thinking idea. Could this also be a real way to elevate what we’ve been doing and give us some new options in this really challenging and high value area? And yes, this is another thing that I think faculty hopefully will discover and get a sense of as they experiment themselves. I think probably a lot of us have also experimented with, just ask it about yourself. Ask it, what has Dr. Michelle Miller written? There’s a whole collaborator [LAUGHTER] I have never heard of, and when it goes off the rails, it goes. And it’s one thing to say really kind of super vaguely to say like, “Oh, AI may produce output that can’t be trusted.” And that has that real like, okay, caution, but not really, feel to it. That’s a whole other thing to actually sit with it and say, alright, have it generate these citations. They sure do look scholarly, don’t they really look right? Okay, now go check them out. And say, this came out of pure thin air, didn’t it? Or it was close, but it was way off in some particular way. So as in so many areas, to actually have the opportunity to say, okay, generate it and then look at it, and it’s staring you right there in the face some of the issues. So I think that we will see a lot of faculty coming up with really dynamic exercises that are finely tuned to their particular area. But yeah, when we talk about writing all kinds of scholarly writing and research in general, I think that’s going to be a very rich field for ideas. So I’m looking forward to seeing what students and faculty come up with there.

Rebecca: That’s a nice lead into the way that we always wrap up, Michelle, which is to ask: “what’s next?”

Michelle: Well, gosh, alright. So I’m continuing to write about and disseminate all kinds of exciting research findings. I’ve got my research base substack, that’s still going pretty strong. After summer. I actually focused it on ChatGPT and AI for a couple of months. But now I’m back to more general topics in psychology, neuroscience, education, and technology. So articles that pull in at least three out of four on those. I’ve got some other bigger writing projects that are still in the cooker. And so I’ll leave it at that with those and I’m continuing to really develop what I know about and what I can do with ChatGPT. As I was monitoring this literature, it was really very clear that we are at a very, very early stage of scholarship and applied information that people can actually use. Those are all things that are very much on the horizon for my next couple of months.

Rebecca: Well, thank you so much, Michelle, we always enjoy talking with you. And it’s always good to think through and process this new world with others.

Michelle: Absolutely.

John: It certainly keeps things more interesting and exciting than just doing the same thing in the same way all the time. Well, thank you.

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John: If you’ve enjoyed this podcast, please subscribe and leave a review on iTunes or your favorite podcast service. To continue the conversation, join us on our Tea for Teaching Facebook page.

Rebecca: You can find show notes, transcripts and other materials on teaforteaching.com. Music by Michael Gary Brewer.

Ganesh: Editing assistance by Ganesh.

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305. 80 Ways to Use ChatGPT in the Classroom

Faculty discussions of ChatGPT and other AI tools often focus on how AI might interfere with learning and academic integrity. In this episode, Stan Skrabut joins us to discuss his book that explores how ChatGPT can support student learning.  Stan is the Director of Instructional Technology and Design at Dean College in Franklin, Massachusetts. He is also the author of several books related to teaching and learning. His most recent book is 80 Ways to Use ChatGPT in the Classroom.

Show Notes

Transcript

John: Faculty discussions of ChatGPT and other AI tools often focus on how AI might interfere with learning and academic integrity. In this episode, we discuss a resource that explores how ChatGPT can support student learning.

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John: Thanks for joining us for Tea for Teaching, an informal discussion of innovative and effective practices in teaching and learning.

Rebecca: This podcast series is hosted by

John: , an economist…

John: …and Rebecca Mushtare, a graphic designer…

Rebecca: …and features guests doing important research and advocacy work to make higher education more inclusive and supportive of all learners.

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John: Our guest today is Stan Skrabut. Stan is the Director of Instructional Technology and Design at Dean College in Franklin, Massachusetts. He is also the author of several books related to teaching and learning. His most recent book is 80 Ways to Use ChatGPT in the Classroom. Welcome, Stan.

Stan: Well, thank you ever so much for having me on. I have been listening to your podcast since the first episode, you guys are crushing it. I recommend it all the time to my faculty. I’m excited to be here.

John: Thank you. And we very much enjoyed your podcast while you were doing it. And I’m hoping that will resume at some point when things settle down.

Rebecca: Yeah, we’re glad to have you here.

Stan: Yeah, thanks.

John: Today’s teas are:… Stan, are you drinking any tea?

Stan: A little bit of a story. I went over to the bookstore with the intent of getting tea. They had no tea in stock. I went to the vending machine on the same floor. The vending machine was down. I went to another building. I put in money. It did not give me tea. I’m stuck with Mountain Dew. I’m sorry. [LAUGHTER]

Rebecca: Not for lack of trying. Clearly. [LAUGHTER]

Stan: I tried. I tried.

Rebecca: I have some blue sapphire tea.

John: And I have Lady Grey.

Rebecca: You haven’t drink that in a while John,

John: no. [LAUGHTER]

Rebecca: Little caffeine today huh. [LAUGHTER]

John: Yeah well i am back in the office, I’ve returned from Duke and I have more options for tea again.

Rebecca: That’s good. So Stan, we invited you here today to discuss 80 Ways to Use ChatGPT in the Classroom. What inspired you to write the book?

Stan: Well, I’m an Instructional Technologist and my responsibility is to help faculty deliver the best courses possible. And in November 2022, ChatGPT came onto the scene and in December, faculty are up in arms, “Oh, my goodness, this is going to be a way that students are going to cheat and they’ll never learn anything again.” And as an instructional technologist, I see technology as a force multiplier, as a way to help us do better things quicker, easier. And so I didn’t feel threatened by ChatGPT. I’ve been looking at the horizon reports for the last 20 years. And they said, “AI is coming. It’s coming. It’s coming. Well, it’s here.” And so it was just a matter of sitting down in January, write the book, publish it, and provided a copy to all the faculty and we just started having good conversation after that. But the effort was that we should not ban it. That was the initial reaction; that this is a tool like all the other tools that we bring into the classroom.

Rebecca: Stan, I love how you just sat down in January and just wrote a book as if it was easy peasy and no big deal. [LAUGHTER]

Stan: Sell, I will have to be honest, that I was using ChatGPT for part of the book, it was a matter of I asked ChatGPT kind of give me an outline, what would be important for faculty to know about this, so I got a very nice outline. And then it was a matter of creating prompts. And so I’d write a prompt and then I would get the response back from ChatGPT. It was a lot of back and forth with ChatGPT, and I thought ChatGPT did a wonderful job in moving this forward.

John: Most of the discussion we’ve heard related to ChatGPT is from people who are concerned about the ability to conduct online assessments in the presence of this. But one of the things I really liked about your book is that most of it focuses on productive uses by both faculty and students and classroom uses of ChatGPT because we’re not always hearing that sort of balanced discussion about this. Could you talk a little bit about some of the ways in which faculty could use ChatGPT or other AI tools to support their instruction and to help develop new classes and new curriculum?

Stan: Yeah, absolutely. I guess first of all, I would like to say that this is not going anywhere. It is going to become more pervasive in our life. Resume Builder went out and did a survey of a couple thousand new job descriptions that employers were putting out. 90% of them are asking for their employees to have AI experience. As higher education, it’s upon us to make sure that the students that are going out there to be employees know how to use this tool. With that said, there has to be a balance. In order to use the tool properly, you have to have foundational knowledge of your discipline. You have to know what you’re talking about in order to create the proper prompt, but also to assess the proper response. With ChatGPT sometimes it doesn’t get it right… just how chat GPT is built, it’s built on probabilities that these word combinations go together. So it’s not pulling full articles that you can go back and verify, kind of like the human mind has been working. We have built up knowledge all these years. My memory of what happened when I was three, four or five years old is a little fuzzy. Who said what? I’m pretty confident what was said. I’m pretty confident, but it’s still a little fuzzy. And I would need to verify that. So I see ChatGPT as an intern, everybody gets an intern, now. They do great work at all hours, but you as the supervisor still have to verify the information is correct. Back to the classroom, students can’t or should not, or regardless of who’s using it, should not just hit return on a prompt, and then rip that off and hand it in to their supervisors or instructor without verifying it, without making it better, without adding the human element to working with the machine. And that is, I think, where we can do lots of wonderful things in the classroom. You know, from the instructor side of go ahead and use this for your first draft. Now turn on the review tools that track changes and show me how you made it better, as you’re working towards your final product. Instructors can go ahead and craft an essay, craft out some supposedly accurate information from ChatGPT. tThrow it in the hands of the students and say: “Please, assess this. Is this right? Where are the policies? Where are the biases? Tell me where the gaps are. How can we make this better?” And using it to assess it.” Those are some initial ways to start asking students or using it in the class. I don’t know if I’m tapping into all the things. There’s just so many things that you could do with this thing.

John: And you address many of those things in the book. Among those things that you address was having it generate some assignments, or even at a more basic level, having it develop syllabi, or course outlines and learning objectives and so forth, for when faculty are building courses.

Stan: Oh, absolutely. We have a new dean at our School of Business. And he came over and wanted to know, “Tell me a little bit more about ChatGPT, how we can use this. They’re looking at creating a new program for the college. And it’s like, “Well, let’s just start right there.” What are the courses that you would have for this new program and provide course descriptions, titles, and descriptions? Here comes the list of 10, 12 different courses for that particular program. Okay, let’s take this program, what are the learning outcomes for this particular program? So we just copied and pasted, asked for learning outcomes, here comes the list of outcomes. Now for these different outcomes, provide learning objectives. And it starts creating learning objectives. And so you can just continue to drill down. But this moves past the blank page. Normally you’d bring in a group of faculty to work on that program, what are your ideas and send everybody off, and they would pull ideas together and you would start crafting this. This was done in 30 seconds. And now okay, here’s the starting point for your faculty. Where are the problems with this? How can we make it better? Now go. Instead of a blank page, starting with nothing? That was one example. But even for your course, using ChatGPT, having a course description, you can ask it to say, provide me a course plan for 16 weeks. What would I address in this? What would be the different activities? Describe those activities. If you want it to have the activities use transparent assignment design, it’ll craft it in that format. It knows what transparent assignment design is, and it will craft it that way. And then going back to assessment, you can build content. So looking at that OER content, open education resources, that it can get you a jumpstart on that OER content. What are gaps that I want or taking content that’s there and localizing it based on your area to say here we are in New England, Massachusetts, specifically, I need an example. Here’s the content that we’re working with. Give me an example, a case study, and it will craft a case study for you. It allows you to go from that zone of drudgery to your zone of genius very rapidly. I’ve been working on a new book, and got down to the final edits, and I was like, “Oh, I’m missing conclusions to all these different chapters.” I just fed the whole chapter in and said, “Could you craft me a conclusion to this chapter?” And it just knocked it out. I mean, I could do it. But that’s my zone of drudgery, and I’d rather be doing other things.

Rebecca: It’s interesting that a lot of faculty and chairs and administrators have been engaged in this conversation around ChatGPT quite a bit, but many of them haven’t actually tried. ChatGPT. So if you were to sit down with a faculty member who’s never tried it before, what’s the first thing you’d have them do?

Stan: This is an excellent question because I do it all the time. I have a number of faculty members that I’ve sat down, looked at their courses and say, “What is the problem that you’re working with? What do you want to do?” And that’s where we start. We say “What is the problem that you’re trying to fix?” ChatGPT version three had 45 terabytes of information it was given. They say the human brain has about 1.25 terabytes. So this is like asking thirty-some people to come sit with you to work on your problem. One class was a sports management class dealing with marketing. And they were working with Kraft enterprises that has the Patriots, and working on specific activities for their students and developing marketing plans and such. We just sat down with ChatGPT and started at a very basic level to see what we could get out of it. And the things we weren’t happy with, we just rephrased it, had it focus on those areas, and it just kept improving what we were doing. But, one of the struggles that I hear from faculty all the time, because it’s very time consuming, is creating assessments, creating multiple choice questions, true and false, fill in the blank, all these different things. ChatGPT will do this for you in seconds. You feed all the content that you want, and say, “Please craft 10 questions, give me 10 more, give me 10 more, give me 10 more. And then you go through and identify the ones you like, put them into your test bank. It really comes down to the problem that you’re trying to solve.

John: And you also know that it could be used to assist with providing students feedback on their writing.

Stan: Absolutely

John: …that you can use it to help generate that. Could you talk a little bit about that.

Stan: We’re right now working with the academic coaches. And this is one of the areas to sit down. I’m also not only the Director of Instructional Technology and Design, but also my dotted line is Director of Library. So I’m trying to help students with their research. And the writing and the research go hand in hand. So from the library side, we look at what the students are being assigned, and then sit down and just start with a couple key terms or phrases, keywords that we want and have ChatGPT to give us ideas on these different terms. And it’ll provide ten, twenty different exciting ideas to go research. Once again, getting past the blank page. It’s like “I gotta do an assignment. I don’t know what to do.” It could be in economics, I don’t know what to write about in economics, it’s like, well, here pull these two terms together, and what does it say about that?” So we start at that point. And then once you have a couple ideas that you want to work with, what are some keywords that I could go and start researching the databases with, and it will provide you these ideas. It’ll do other things, it’ll draft an outline, it’ll write the thing if you want it to, but we try to take the baby steps in getting them to go in and research but getting pointed in the right direction. On the writing side, for example, I have a class that I’m going to be teaching at the University of Wyoming to grad students. I’m going to introduce ChatGPT. It’s for program development and evaluation, and I’m going to let them use ChatGPT to help with this. One of the things that academic writers struggle with is the use of active voice. They’re great at passive, they’ve mastered that. Well, this will take what you’ve written and say, “convert this to active voice” and it will rewrite it and work on those issues. I was working with one grad student and it was after playing with ChatGPT a couple of times, she finally figured out what really was the difference and how to overcome that problem and now she is writing actively, more naturally. But she struggled with it. With ChatGPT, you can take an essay, push it up into ChatGPT and say, “How can I make this better?” And it will provide guidance on how you can make it better. You could ask it specifically, “How can I improve the grammar and spelling without changing any of the wording here.” It’ll go and check that. So for our academic coaches, because there’s high volume, this is another tool that they could use to say, “Here’s the checklist of things that we’ve identified for you to go work on right away,” not necessarily giving solutions, but giving pointers and guidance on how to move forward. So you can use it at different levels and different perspective, not where it does all the work for you but you could do it incrementally and say, “here assess this and do this.” And it will do that for you.

Rebecca: Your active and passive voice example reminds me of a conversation I had with one of our writing faculty who was talking about the labor that had been involved previously of making example essays to edit of to work on writing skills. And she just had ChatGPT write things that [LAUGHTER] are of different qualities, and to compare and also to do some editing of as a writing activity in one of her intro classes.

Stan: Absolutely. What I recommend to anyone using ChatGPT is start collecting your prompts, have a Google document or a Word document, and when you find a great prompt, squirrel it away. Some of the workshops that I’ve been giving on this, I demonstrate high-level prompts that are probably two pages long that you basically feed this basic information to ChatGPT and it talks everything about the information that you’re going to be collecting, how you want to collect it, how you want it to be outputted, what items are you going to output, and you’re basically creating this tool that you can then call up and say, for example, developing a course, that it will write the course description, give you a learning outcomes, recommended readings, activities, and agenda for a 16 week, all in one prompt. And all you do is say “this is the course I want” and let it go. It’s amazing what problems that we can build this tool just like we build spreadsheets, we build these very complex spreadsheets, to do these tasks. We can do the same with Chat GPT, we just have to figure out what the problems we’re trying to solve.

John: Our students come into our classes with very varied prior preparation. In your book, you talk about some ways in which students can use ChatGPT to help fill in some of the gaps in their prior understanding to allow them to get up to speed more quickly. Could you talk about some ways in which students can use ChatGPT as a personalized tutor,

Stan: I’m going to take you through an example that I think can be applied for students. A student comes to your class. Ideally, they’re taking notes, one of the strategies that I use is I have my notebook, I’ll open my notebook, and I’ll turn on otter.AI, which is a transcription program. And I will go over my notes, I will basically get a transcription of those notes, I can then feed that transcription into ChatGPT and say clean it up, make a good set of notes for me. And it will do that. And then I can build this document and then I can review what we did in class, build a nice clean set of notes, and have that available to me. Over a series of setw of notes, I could do the same thing by reviewing a textbook and highlight and talk about, transcribe key points of the textbook or I can cut and paste. And then I can feed that information into ChatGPT and say, “Build me a study bank that I can build a Quizlet, for example, or I need to create some flashcards on what are the key terms and definitions from this content?” Here you go. Create some flashcards from that material. It could be that no matter how great the instructor is, I still don’t get it. They introduced a term that is just mind boggling, and I still don’t get it. And so I can then ask ChatGPT to explain that at another level. They talk about non-fiction, some of the best non-fiction books or the most popular that are out there getting on the bestsellers list, they’re written at a certain grade level. And I know that I write typically higher than that grade level, I can go ask ChatGPT to rewrite it at a lower grade level. I could, as a student, ask ChatGPT, to give an explainer at a level that I do get to understand. Those are certain ways that you can do this. And you basically can build your own study guides that have questions that have examples of all the materials, so you can feed that material in and get something out, just enhance it. And I think for faculty, this is also an easy way to create good study guides, that you can get the key points and build the study guides a lot easier, just going with the blank page and trying to craft it by hand, can be very difficult. But if you already have all your material, you feed it in there, and then say here, let’s build a study guide out of this year with some parameters, definitely much more useful.

Rebecca: We’ve talked a lot about how to use ChatGPT as an individual, either as an instructor or as a student. Can you talk a little bit about ways that instructors could use ChatGPT for in class exercises or other activities?

Stan: Absolutely. And I’m sorry, some of the examples other folks have actually contributed first, and I saw him and I thought they were just brilliant, but I don’t have their names right in front of me. So I apologize ahead of time. But as an instructor, I would invite ChatGPT into the classroom as another student. We call it Chad, Chad GPT and bring Chad into the classroom. So you could have an exercise in your classroom, ask the students to get into groups, talk about an issue, and then up on the whiteboard, you start getting their input, you start listing it. And then once you’re done, you can feed Chad GPT the same prompt and get the list from Chad GPT, and then compare it to what you’ve already collected from the students, what their input has been. And from there, you can do a comparison, like “We talked about that, and that, and that, oh, this is a new one. What do you think about this?” And so you can extend the conversation by what Chad GPT has provided? …and there I go, Chad, I’ll be hooked on that for a while. But you can extend the conversation with this or if students have questions that are coming up in class, you can field that to the rest of the class, get input and then say “Okay, let’s also ask Chad, see what Chad has to say about that particular topic?” Those grouping exercise we typically do the think-pair-share exercise, well part of that is each student gets to get Chat in that group. So, each group you can have Chad come in where they have to discuss, they have to think about it first, write something down, pair, discuss it, then add ChatGPT into the mix, talk about it a little bit more, and then share with the rest of the class. Lots of different ways that you can bring this into the classroom, but I bring it right in as another student.

Rebecca: Think-pair-chat-share. [LAUGHTER]

Stan: Yep. And that’s that mine that actually somebody was clever enough, they found that. I just happen to glom on to it. But yeah, definitely a great way of using it. It’s a new tool. We’re still figuring our way, but it’s not going away.

Rebecca: So whenever we introduce new technology into our classes, people are often concerned about assessment of student work using said technologies. So what suggestions do you have to alleviate faculty worry about assessing student work in the age of ChatGPT?

Stan: Well, students have been cheating since the beginning of time. That’s just human nature. Going back to why are they cheating in the first place? In most cases, they just got too much going on, and it becomes a time issue. They’re finding the quickest way to get things done. So ensuring that assignments are authentic, that they’re real, they mean something to a student ,is certainly very important in building this. The more it’s personally tied to the student, the harder it is for ChatGPT to tap into that. ChatGPT is not connected to the internet yet. So having current information, that’s always a consideration. But I would go back to the transparent assignment design, and part of the transparent assignment design that is often overlooked is the why. Why are we doing this. If you use ChatGPT to do this, this is what you’re not going to get from the assignment. So, when building those assignments, I recommend being very explicit that yes, you can use ChatGPT to work on this assignment, or no, you cannot, but here’s why. Here’s what I’m hoping that you get out of this. Why this assignment’s important. Because otherwise, it just doesn’t matter. And then when I have an employee that just simply hits the button and gives me something from ChatGPT, I’m going to ask, “Why do I need you as an employee? Because I could do that. Where’s the human element? …bringing that human element into it, why is thisimportant?” What learning shortcut or shortcutting you’re learning, if you just rely on the tool and not grasp what the essence of this particular assignment is. But I think it goes back to writing better assignments… at least that’s my two cents on it.

Rebecca: Thankfully, we have ChatGPT for that.

John: For faculty who are concerned about these issues of academic integrity, certainly creating authentic assignments and connecting to individual students and their goals and objectives could be really effective. But it’s not clear that that will work as well when you’re dealing with, say, a large gen-ed class, for example. Are there any other suggestions you might have in getting past this?

Rebecca: John? Are you asking for a friend? [LAUGHTER]

John: [LAUGHTER] Well, I’m gonna have about 250 students in class where I had shifted all of the assessment outside of the classroom. And I am going to bring some back into the classroom in terms of a midterm and final but they’re only 10 and 15% of their grade, so much of the assessment is still going to be done online. And I am concerned about students bypassing learning and using this, because it can do pretty well on the types of questions that we often ask in introductory classes in many disciplines.

Stan: That’s a hard question, because there’s certainly tools out there that can identify where it suspects it’s been written by AI. ChatGPT is original text so you’re not dealing with plagiarism, necessarily, but you’re dealing with, it’s not yours, it’s not human written. There are tools out there, but they’re not necessarily 100% reliable. Originality.AI is a tool that I use, which is quite good, but it tends to skew, everything is written AI. TurnItIn, they’ve incorporated technologies into being able to identify AI, but it’s not reliable. This honestly comes down to really an ethics issue, that folks who do this feel comfortable in bypassing the system for the end game, which is to get a diploma. But then they go to the job and they can’t do the job. And a recent article that I read in The Wall Street Journal was a lot of concern about employees not having the skill sets that they have, and how to convince students of this, that “why are you here? What’s the whole purpose of doing this? I’m here to guide you based on my life experience on how to be successful in this particular discipline, and you don’t care about that.” That’s a hard problem to fix. So I don’t have a good answer for that. I’m always on the fence on that because it’s hurting the integrity of the institution that students can bypass, but it’s harder. Peer review is another tool, you know, to have them go assess it. They seem to be a lot harder [LAUGHTER] on each other. Yes, this is a tough one. I don’t have a good answer. Sorry.

John: I had to try again, [LAUGHTER] because I still don’t have very good answers either. But certainly, there’s a lot of things you can do. I’m using clickers.I’m having them do some small group work in class and submitting responses. And that’s still a little bit hard to use ChatGPT for just because of the the timing, but it was convenient to be able to let students work on things outside although Chegg and other places had made most of those solutions to those questions visible pretty much within hours after new sets of questions have been released. So, this perhaps just continues that trend of making online assessment tools in large classes more problematic.

Stan: Well, I mean, one of the strategies that I recommend is master quizzing. So master quizzing is building quiz that are 1000s of questions large and randomly drawn from it. And they get credit when they ace it. And then the next week, they have another one, but it’s also cumulative. So they get previous questions too. And you have to ace it to get credit. Sorry, that’s how it is, cheat all you want, but it’ll get old after a while.

John: And that is how my course is set up. And they are allowed multiple attempts at all those quizzes, and they are random drawings. And there’s some spaced practice built in too, so it’s drawing on earlier questions randomly, but, but again, pretty much as soon as you create those problems, they were very quickly showing up in the online tools in Chegg and similar places. Now, they can be answered pretty well, using ChatGPT and other similar tools. It’s an issue that we’ll have to address, and some of it is an ethics issue. And some of it is again, reminding students that they are here to develop skills, and if they don’t develop the skills, their degree is not going to be very valuable. I

Rebecca: Wonder if putting some of those like Honor Code ethics prompts at the beginning or end of blank bigger assessments would [LAUGHTER] prime their pump or just cause more ChatGPT to be used. [LAUGHTER]

John: That’s been a bit of an issue because the authors of those studies have been accused of faking the data. And those studies have not been replicated. In fact, someone was suspended at Harvard, recently, and is now engaged in a lawsuit about that very issue. So the original research that was published about having people put their names on things before beginning a test hasn’t held up very well. And the data seems to have been… at least some of it seems to have been… manipulated or fabricated. [LAUGHTER] So right now, ChatGPT allows you to do a lot of things, but they’ve been adding more and more features all the time. There’s more integrations, it’s now integrated into Bing on any platform that will run Bing. And it’s amazing how well it works, but the improvements are coming along really rapidly. Where do you see this as going?

Stan: November 2022, was ChatGPT built on GPT3 , we’re now into four. And this is only half a year later, basically, that we got into four. I mean, it’s everywhere. For example, in selling books, one of the things that you want to do is try to sell more books. So I went back to Amazon, pulled out all the reviews that I had, sent them into ChatGPT and said “Tell me what the top five issues are.” In seconds it told me it just assessed it where this would take large amount of time for me to do this and it just did it nice and neatly. Everything is going to have AI into it. Grammarly AI is being built into it. All the Microsoft products are going to have AI built in. We’re not getting away from it. We have to learn how to use this in our professions, in our disciplines. With ChatGPT4, it was said somebody had drawn a wire diagram of a website buttons and mastered and text and took a picture of it, gave it to ChatGPT4 and it wrote the code for that website. It’s gonna be exciting. Buckle up, and we had consternation about January, we’re gonna have a lot more coming up. It’s just part of what we do. We have to figure out how to stay relevant, because this is so disruptive. In the long line of technologies that has come out, this is really disruptive. We can’t fight against it, we have to figure out how to do it appropriately, how to use this tool.

Rebecca: The idea of really having to learn the tool resonates with me because this is something that we’ve talked about in my discipline for a long time, which is design. But if you don’t really learn how to use the tools well and understand how the tools work, then the tools kind of control what you do versus you controlling what you’re creating and developing. And this is really just another one of those kinds of tools.

Stan: Well, even in the design world, I’ve gone to Shutterstock. And there is something that allows you to create a design with AI. So the benefit for a designer is they have a certain language, tone, and texture. Their language is vast, and for them to craft a prompt would look entirely different from me, a snowman sticks for arms, it’d be entirely different. But getting the aspect ratio of 16 x 9, everything that you craft into this prompt and feed it in, somebody who does design and knows the language would get something then a mere mortal like me putting that information in. So for somebody who’s in economics, you have a whole language about economics. Somebody who is trying to craft a prompt related to that discipline has to know the foundationals, the language of that discipline, to even get close to being correct in what they’re gonna get back. And students have to understand this, they cannot bypass their learning because they will not have the language to use the tool effectively.

John: And emphasizing to students the role that these tools will be playing in their future careers, might remind them of the importance of mastering the craft in a way that allows them to do more than AI tools can. And at some point, though, I do wonder [LAUGHTER], at what point AI tools will be able to replace a non trivial share of our labor force.

Stan: It’ll affect the white collar force a lot quicker. And I look at it… a nice analogy for the AI was in the Marvel, you have Iron Man, Tony Stark. And it is the mashup of the human and the machine. He’s using this to allow himself to get further and faster in his design, and to do things that we hadn’t thought about before. And I see this tool, being able to do this, that we’re bringing so much information and data to this, it’s mind boggling that suddenly you see a spark of inspiration that you couldn’t get there by yourself without a lot of labor, and suddenly it’s there. And you can take that and run with it. For me. It’s tremendously exciting.

Rebecca: So we always wrap up by asking, what’s next?

Stan: Great question. Right now, I’m getting edits back from my editor for my next book, it’s Strategies for Success: Scaling your Impact as Solo Instructional Technologists and Designers. I’ve been doing this for about a quarter century and mostly as someone by myself, helping small colleges on how to do this, how do I keep my head above water and try to provide the best support possible? So sharing what I think I know .

Rebecca: Sounds like another great resource.

John: Well, thank you, Stan. It’s always great talking to you, and it’s good seeing you again.

Stan: Yeah, absolutely. And also, free book… I’mgonna give a 100, first 100 listeners, but I can go more. Yeah, so there’s a link it’s bit.ly/teaforteachinggpt . And so it’s in that set of show notes to share, but the first 100 gets a free copy of the book.

John: Thank you.

Rebecca: Thank you.

John: We’ll stop the recording. And, and we’ll put that in the show notes.

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John: If you’ve enjoyed this podcast, please subscribe and leave a review on iTunes or your favorite podcast service. To continue the conversation, join us on our Tea for Teaching Facebook page.

Rebecca: You can find show notes, transcripts and other materials on teaforteaching.com. Music by Michael Gary Brewer.

Ganesh: Editing assistance by Ganesh.

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304. ChatGPT Inspired Course Redesign

AI tools such as ChatGPT have the potential to significantly disrupt how we work and how we learn. In this episode, Don Donelson joins us to discuss a course redesign strategy that could help prepare students for a world in which AI tools will be ubiquitous. Don is a senior lecturer in the Miami Herbert Business School at the University of Miami. He is a recipient of the Spring 2016 University of Miami Excellence in Teaching Award and the Dean’s Excellence in Teaching Award from the Miami Herbert Business School.

Show Notes

Transcript/h3>

John: AI tools such as ChatGPT have the potential to significantly disrupt how we work and how we learn. In this episode, we discuss a course redesign strategy that could help prepare students for a world in which AI tools will be ubiquitous.

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John: Thanks for joining us for Tea for Teaching, an informal discussion of innovative and effective practices in teaching and learning.

Rebecca: This podcast series is hosted by John Kane, an economist…

John: …and Rebecca Mushtare, a graphic designer…

Rebecca: …and features guests doing important research and advocacy work to make higher education more inclusive and supportive of all learners.

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Rebecca: Our guest today is Don Donelson. Don is a senior lecturer in the Miami Herbert Business School at the University of Miami. He is a recipient of the Spring 2016 University of Miami Excellence in Teaching Award and the Dean’s Excellence in Teaching Award from the Miami Herbert Business School. Welcome back, Don.

Don: Glad to be here.

John: Today’s teas are: …Don, are you drinking tea?

Don: I am. It’s the same tea that you’re drinking, black currant, and it’s great.

Rebecca: It’s a John favorite for sure. I have a Tazo Awake tea today.

John: Does that mean you’re woke? That may be an issue down in Florida.

Don: …not in a private school.

Rebecca: It means that I couldn’t make a pot of tea. I didn’t have time. So I had to use a single tea bag. [LAUGHTER] That’s what it means.

John: And I am still using the mug from Australia that Clare McNally gave me with kangaroos all over it.

Rebecca: I like that mug.

John: I do too.

Rebecca: I look forward to seeing it in person.

John: Soon.

Rebecca: Yeah, you’ll be back soon, right? A couple weeks.. I’ve got my grad studies mug. We’ve invited you here today to discuss your plans to revise the graduate and undergraduate core courses in critical thinking and business communication at Miami Herbert. Can you tell us a little bit about this course?

Don: So this course started at the grad level, MBAs in particular, in 2008. That’s what I was hired to teach. And it grew with the program, expanding into specialized master’s programs. And then it went out into the undergrad program. And it’s a core course required for all full-time business students, undergrad and graduate. This past year, we had 46 sections of undergrad courses and 21 sections of graduate courses, about 900 students or so in total.

Rebecca: So a really small situation going on here.

Don: Oh, yeah, very small, [LAUGHTER] no problems with scaling or anything like that.

John: What was the typical focus of this course in the past before this revision that you’re working on?

Don: So the course was called “Critical Thinking and Effective Written and Oral Communication,” and it lived up to its name. It was about those three things. At the time that we started in 2008, we called them soft skills. We don’t use that phrase anymore. We like to call them fundamentals, something of the sort. We think that soft skills sends a bad message. But it’s been overhauled three times, this will be the third overhaul since. And the things that we would do in the courses, from the very beginning, the main evaluations would be based on writing memos and giving presentations

Rebecca: Which should be about the kind of communication you’d be doing in business. [LAUGHTER]

Don: Yeah, it’d be based on hypothetical cases, some non-hypothetical cases, the standard Harvard Business publishing 10, 20 page case on “How did Netflix beat Blockbuster?” or something of the sort.

Rebecca: What prompted this big overhaul?

Don: Well, the accreditation body, AACSB, required program evaluation. And it’s sometimes an annoying task that people do just to go through the motions. But what we found, the first time I went through it, was that we actually learned a lot from going through those motions. And so in my department, at least, we institutionalize curriculum audits on a semester basis. And so, in between the fall and spring semesters, we have a shorter meeting, where we kind of look at what happened in all the instructors, faculty teaching in that space in the fall, what happened and what worked, what didn’t work, and we might make some minor revisions. And then at the end of the spring semesters, we’d have a little bit of a longer meeting. And the last few of those had turned out some opportunities for change.

Rebecca: Can you talk a little bit about what some of those opportunities were?

Don: Yes. So we found that this is a challenging course to get buy-in from the students. And so we still haven’t figured out 10% of what we can figure out about teaching in this space, I’m sure. But one of the things that we’ve seen is that it is somewhat of an innovative curriculum, and one of the challenges with being innovative is students haven’t had material like that before. It’s a core course. And so students have to take it. And there’s always challenges with that. But this is a bit of a different challenge. And so I was talking with John the other day, he has some core required economics courses for business students, and some of the challenges that come with that. But this is a bit different in that those students know that economics is a field of study. And they know that people take economics courses, and there’s a textbook and critical thinking and communication. They’ve been taught kind of as separate. They’ve been add ons in other courses, not as a discrete course itself. And so we think there’s some challenges with that. And really, the challenge that we’ve seen, in addition to that, is that from the faculty view, critical thinking and communication are not separate things, they are one thing. And so critical thinking, I would call it problem solving, is really what we’re teaching. But communication is a component of that. And from the student view, we’ve had a hard time getting them to see those as integrated. And so when they do a memo, that’s an evaluation metric, they see it as: “Well, that’s just looking at the writing and not critical thinking.”

Rebecca: That’s interesting. Some of the things that we’ve done in our design courses around critical thinking and writing across the curriculum, my department, which is art and design, is doing some of those same things. We would do projects and embedded in those projects would be things like memos and other ways of communicating as a way to critically think about the decisions that our designers were making on things. But we would run up sometimes against the same kinds of challenges, like how do you really make that feel practical, that’s relevant, and then also keep it interesting. And it helped, I think, in those cases, because it was tied to a project. So is that a challenge that you face in this particular class is because there are these kind of standalone case studies, and it’s hard for students to buy in or get them into a business space?

Don: That’s one of the things actually I think that’s going to be changed is more of an arc to the course. And one of the things that I’m looking at is more integration of assignments. And so things building more towards the other assignments, and so we have skills building on top of each other. But, ideally, the assignments that they’re doing all build towards one culmination assignment, capstone type project.

Rebecca: Where does this course fit into their other required courses? Is it something that happens in the beginning? or in the middle? towards the end?

Don: So that’s partially an administrative question that is dependent on staffing. We see some students wait until the very last semester to take it, particularly the students who don’t have English as a first language, but they can start taking it as early as their sophomore year. But usually, it’s junior.

John: What’s the difference between the undergraduate and the graduate versions of the course?

Don: So the graduate versions are taken on a quarterly basis, and the undergraduates on a semester basis and so there’s more contact time in the undergraduate version of the course. They use different materials, and they’re more in depth. And so much like you would see with undergraduate economics classes, the graduate version of the economics classes might have similar titles, but go far more in depth into the material.

John: So one of the main issues is that students don’t see the critical thinking aspect of it as being important in their writing. How are you going to change your course to focus a bit more on the development of those critical thinking skills?

Don: Well, this is where I need to go back and add more to what Rebecca asked before about what prompted this because of course, ChatGPT prompted a lot of the revisions as well. And so ChatGPT, AI in general, while it’s kind of an independent axis of revision, we were thinking about some of these other problems well, before ChatGPT even became a thing that people were aware of. But they go hand in hand, really. A lot of the problem that I’ve seen with the writing assignments, and why students don’t necessarily view them as critical thinking and focus on the writing, is because there’s writing for aesthetic, and then there’s writing for substance. And if you’re teaching anything about writing, you kind of have to be teaching both. But when you’re teaching both together, the students tend to focus more on the aesthetic. And they connect it back to English composition classes that they might have taken in ninth grade or 10th grade. And those classes are certainly very important. But they’re a bit different than what we’re doing in these classes. And so I think it primes them to approach the course in a way that is not really conducive to getting what we want out of it. And so with AI, well, it remains to be seen, but it looks to me like you don’t need to be teaching the aesthetics of writing so much anymore in a class like this. And so I’m going to experiment with just not. [LAUGHTER]

Rebecca: It’s interesting, because in design classes where we were doing some similar kinds of things, aesthetics obviously always come about, because if we’re doing visual design, aesthetics are a part of that conversation. But we would have the same thing. It was like, “Well, that looks nice. That reads nice. It just doesn’t say anything.” [LAUGHTER]

Don: Right. Yeah. [LAUGHTER]

Rebecca: So it’s interesting that we bump up against these same kinds of challenges across a wide variety of disciplines. And that ChatGPT does offer some opportunity to focus on some different things.

Don: Absolutely.

Rebecca: I’m curious what exactly you’re going to focus on and how you’re gonna leverage ChatGPT in the context of this class.

Don: So I think ChatGPT is an insane, wild, amazing tool. And it’s going to only be more wild, more insane, more amazing next month, [LAUGHTER] or six months from now. But I see it really changing the way that I teach, the way I prepare for teaching. So kind of on the end of creating lesson plans and what it does for me as a teacher and the kinds of things that I can do in a class that I wouldn’t be able to do in a class before without a lot more hours in the day. And then also, from the student side, changing the way that they do assignments. They’re not going to be writing memos outside the classroom in the way that they have in business for decades and centuries. They’re going to be using ChatGPT. And so if, in this course, which is meant to be a practical course, we can’t make it practical if we’re not allowing them to use the tools that they’re not only going to be encouraged to use, they’re going to probably be required. And so if they don’t use ChatGPT in the future, they’re going to have bosses saying, “Why are you spending X amount of hours on this client memo instead of doing something else.” And so we really need to prepare them for that world. There’s been some early research and I’ll get John the citations, but we looked at research over the break between fall and spring, this past year, some preliminary research about the kinds of jobs in the way the labor market is going to be affected in the future by AI and ChatGPT and the jobs that were predicted to be the hardest hit in terms of reduced wages, and just reduced demand are jobs that involve writing and the jobs that were predicted to be the most insulated from Ai were jobs that involve problem solving and critical thinking. And so really, when you look at that research, it doesn’t even give us a choice. Even if we weren’t thinking about making some kind of revisions before, we’d probably need to just on that alone.

John: So is the focus now shifting more to the critical thinking skills and a little bit less on the basic structure of writing?

Don: Yes. And that’s really where even though the impetus for the revisions were independent, in practice, they’re not going to be that independent. And so it really dovetails nicely. And so I’ll give you an example, if a student is writing a memo, where a business is making a decision between two or three different courses of action, and one of the main criteria is the profitability of those courses of action, the structure is kind of guided by the math of profitability. So if you’re not talking about revenues, independently of talking about costs, you’re not proving profitability. And so when we talk about structure in this course, that’s really what we mean. But students very often, because of some of the things I’ve talked about previously, they’re looking at it as far as like the five-paragraph structure. And that’s not really what we mean. And so by being able to focus less on the aesthetics of writing, and more on the substance, I think we’ll be able to undo some of that priming,

Rebecca: …almost like this shift to articulating the decision making…

Don: Yes.

Rebecca: …rather than talking about writing, because articulating, it could be verbal, it could be in written language, it could be in a lot of different formats. But the point is that you thought critically about the issue, and how you made the decision. [LAUGHTER]

Don: Yes, exactly. In presentations, I’ve never had as much of the same problems as we have in the memos. Part of that, I think, it’s because of contemporaneous feedback. My students early on learned that this comment is kind of a trolling comment. And it’s not really meant as a attaboy or attagirl. But, sometimes a student will give a speech, and when they’re done, I’ll say, “I’m very impressed with your public speaking skills.” And they think, at first in the early parts of the class, that that’s a compliment. But they realize that that’s actually not a compliment. What I really mean is “No one would be buying what you’re selling, no one would be buying this stock, no one would be making a decision based on this, but you have very impressive charisma and confidence.” And that’s not really what we’re about, maybe in politics, but that’s a different question.

Rebecca: I’m curious about integrating ChatGPT as part of the process. Are you thinking about requiring students to reveal and discuss how and why they use ChatGPT in particular instances, and how they leverage the tool.

Don: So I think part of it is going to be first showing them how ChatGPT is not a critical thinking tool. And so I think it’ll be kind of walking on the escalator backwards for a bit just so that we can walk forward. It’s not going to be ChatGPT’s here, so you should use it. Go. ChatGPT is like a personal assistant, who is extremely capable and competent, but will do precisely what you tell it to do, and nothing else. The input you give it determines the quality of the output. And so if you go to ChatGPT, and you say, “I’m writing a letter of recommendation for Rebecca, and she was a great student, and she’s applying to law school period,” it’s going to give you about what you would imagine…it’s going to make up some stuff about Rebecca, it might even not get what program you’re in right. It’s not going to use the last name because I didn’t give it one. And it’s going to give you a very fluffy, perhaps disingenuous response. Now if I give ChatGPT a really robust stream of consciousness almost about Rebecca Mushtare was a student in the spring of whatever and she got this grade and she did phenomenal in these areas. And this assignment she really stood out most because of this, this, and this, it might give me a much more usable response that I can then play with. And so I think that’s going to be the first to instruct students on: what it does not do, which is critical thinking. And from there, I think they’ll have to use it however they feel comfortable. We’re still going to have some writing assignments that are scored. But what I’m hoping for is that these changes will make it so that they’re focused much more on the critical thinking parts of it. And so for some students that might look like writing a fairly complete draft on their own, and then putting it into ChatGPT and telling it to edit this for brevity and clean up grammar mistakes or do something of the sort. For some students, it might be much more of a back and forth kind of a conversation with ChatGPT, which I think a lot of students will be surprised to learn that it functions in that way. And when I find myself using it, it’s mostly as a conversation. Like, I didn’t like what you did here, cut that part out and do this again.

Rebecca: It’s funny that we don’t always think about it as a chat tool, despite the fact that chat is in its name.

Don: Yeah, exactly.

John: Before making this major change in your curriculum, have you experimented with any changes in this course recently to put more focus on critical thinking skills before introducing ChatGPT?

Don: Yes, so in some of the sections, especially at the graduate level, since we have so many different master’s programs, when I first started, it was MBA, and pretty much that’s it. Now with where the business world is going, there’s a lot more demand for specialized skill sets. And so we have, in addition to MBAs, we have a Masters of Science in Finance, a Masters of Science in Sustainable Business, so on and so forth. And each of those sections afford some opportunity to take things in a different direction, really, not even just an opportunity, but we kind of want to, to be more responsive to those fields. And so in the graduate sections, we’ve had some isolated ability to experiment with more problem-based learning, which I think ChatGPT goes really, really well with on the faculty end as far as creating problem-based learning curriculum. But we haven’t experimented with the AI component of it yet, really, because it’s so new, and it doesn’t feel like it right now…it kind of feels like it’s 20 years old, but yet haven’t used it. But it’s very new. And so I don’t know about every other institution, but we don’t move at the pace of jets when it comes to curriculum revision at the University of Miami. We move, I think, faster than probably most but still, it takes time. And so we haven’t had the opportunity to do anything with the AI yet. But we’ve revised in the past couple years to focus more on some of the problem solving in some of the graduate sections.

Rebecca: The faculty member in me heard I can use ChatGPT to help me with problem-based learning classes, and I want to know more about that.

Don: Oh, yeah. [LAUGHTER] So if you type into ChatGPT, you have to give it really, really good direction: the who, what, when, where, why…that you are a professor teaching a negotiation class. And it is a upper-level, undergraduate course. And you are going to create simulation practice for negotiation in which you play one role and the student plays the other, and you will create a scenario and interact with the student, but wait for the student’s response after each of your responses. And then at the conclusion, give the student feedback based on what you know about the science of negotiation from a management sciences perspective, as well as a legal perspective. And then you hit go, you will be blown away with what ChatGPT starts to create. And so it will give you a little blurb. A couple of weeks ago, I did something of the sort, and it said, Sally is the owner of a handmade furniture manufacturing company in North Carolina and has been contacted by so and so that owns a furniture retail store. And so and so has been impressed with Sally’s furniture and wants to arrange a distribution agreement. The meeting begins over the phone and so and so ask Sally what her goals are in this arrangement. And then that’s where I would type in and I said my goals are to reach this level of profitability and to have a productive long-term relationship with the other party, and it responded back. So it can create an entire dialogue that you can then ask afterwards, once you tweak it and say, “Well, I liked this part of it. I didn’t like this part of it, write the Python code for this, and it will write the whole Python code and allow you to turn it into a web-based interactive program. It’s really quite wild.

John: So basically, it gives every faculty member the ability to create interactive simulations for their classes, which could be done for pretty much any topic I would think.

Don: Absolutely. In the past that kind of thing was in some courses, probably a bit aspirational. It’s the kind of thing that would probably require some kind of course leave to develop it. And for faculty who become really comfortable with it, it will get to a point where it’s doable within a day or two of a lesson. And so you can on kind of miniature scale, you can do these on a daily basis, really high quality ones.

Rebecca: It sounds like something that we can use in a lot of contexts in higher ed, including if we want to do simulations for interviews for new positions or other things as well, if you’re trying to better understand how someone might approach a problem.

Don: Absolutely. I think that’s a very good application, in fact.

John: One of the things though, that I think has generated some panic for a lot of faculty is the effect that this may have on how we assess student learning. So how can faculty address issues related to the ethical use of artificial intelligence?

Don: Well, I’ve never known any faculty to ever panic over a technological innovation…sarcasm ended. So I think faculty have to assess this on their own, but also part of the community. One thing that I think’s going to be an early problem are faculty doing things in a different way, I think that’s probably unavoidable. And so I say all that as kind of a disclaimer that my approach and what I think our approach is going to be in my department, and even if the disclaimer applies to that, I don’t even know that for sure, is perhaps going to be different than others’ approach. And so since this course is supposed to be so much of a practical course, and the writing is on the wall, no pun intended, well, it’s in the AI software, I view that we really have no choice. And so there’s been a lot of commentary in The Atlantic magazine, a lot of commentary in the higher education journals. And most of that I have seen focused on this question, but using as an assumption that it’s wrong to use ChatGPT. And so the easiest way to make it not a question of cheating is to allow it to be used, and then it’s not cheating. And so that’s the direction that I’m leaning in. And I think, ultimately, for the practical tools, for the practical courses, that’s going to be the direction it goes. But again, I can’t even speak for my own department on that, because we’re so new in this.

John: And that will be an issue, I think, everywhere, as it has been in the past with things like calculators, or smartphones, or even Apple watches, I remember getting all these memos coming in from various places at one point to make sure your students are not using a smartwatch while they were taking an exam, because somehow the answers are going to miraculously appear on that tiny little screen for the test that you’re giving them.

Don: Right. And I think you can’t really separate the assessment design and the student response to the assessment in this. There are going to be some courses, I can imagine, in different disciplines, that they’re focused on more fundamental foundational skills, that it’s going to be more of a challenge for them. Well, I’m not saying that students don’t need to know and learn about the aesthetics of writing; that has to keep happening, but not in this course. And so I don’t know how the faculty in those spaces and really the 9th and 10th grade composition teachers that I talked about before, I don’t know how they deal with it, probably in person assessments, that sort of thing. But for this practical application course, I would view it really as kind of training track runners to hop on one foot. And so that wouldn’t be very practical. And so if you have a cheating or plagiarism or honor code policy that requires them to only use one foot, then it would be plagiarism for them to run on both feet. But that wouldn’t be very helpful. And so I really viewed ChatGPT as the same thing in a practical sense, if you’re plagiarism or honor, code policy defines ChatGPT as out of bounds, you’re training them to run on one foot.

Rebecca: So we’ve talked a lot about the writing component, and really building in stronger structures to focus on critical thinking. One of the other issues that you identified was that students don’t necessarily see the intrinsic value of the course or like get the buy-in. Can you talk a little bit about the ways that you’re redesigning to help with that piece of it as well?

Don: Yeah, and so certainly a lot of students do get that. But it really depends on how intrinsically motivated they are. And I think it requires faculty to kind of sell it somewhat. And so in my courses, I’ve found success with selling it in that way, which I really don’t like to do. And it’s something that a lot of faculty probably think is kind of an icky thing to do. But for instance, I will repeatedly tell students, I’m not here to make myself feel good. I’m not here to make myself feel smart by putting you all down. I’m here to help you all get jobs and to get promotions at those jobs and do well in your careers. And so I will focus a lot on kind of pointing things out as criticism that I also tell them these are not affecting your grade, however, X, Y and Z. And so little things like in a presentation if they go…you know, we have to have time limits for presentations because it’s basic math, we have X number of students, 75 minutes in a class session, we have to have time. And so when it comes to a student has five minutes and they go over, what do you do? I’m not going to take off on grades for that. But I am going to point out for a student that, in some settings, if you’re given a time limit, that’s because the CEO has another meeting five minutes after you start and you will be cut off, not because they don’t like what you’re saying not because you haven’t followed the directions, but because they’ve got somewhere else they need to go. And so a lot of the problem I think, is just students are so focused on grades, to the shock of everybody, [LAUGHTER] that when the things that you’re grading and are affecting their grades are these kind of…and aesthetic isn’t the right word, but they would view grading something like that as a bit ticky tack. And when you’re scoring things like that, it’s much harder to have a serious conversation about the nitty gritty substance, and how, if you’re trying to prove that this course of action is more profitable than the others, and you didn’t provide any support for the change in costs, you really can’t have accomplished your goal. You don’t get the same attention from the students in the same response, if you’re also talking about things like, well, “you went five and a half minutes when you only had five minutes,” or “You didn’t use 10 point font when you were told to use 10 point font and that ChatGPT, with that second example with that 10 point font, if the instructions said 10 point font and the students input the instructions it produce it in the appropriate formatting.

John: And I know in the past, when I’ve graded student papers, I, as many other people do, spend far too much time correcting grammatical errors, reminding them that there’s a difference between singular and plural or the difference between all the various homonyms out there. Might be easier for us to evaluate student work when we can actually focus on the arguments they’re making, and their ability to engage in critical thinking, rather than getting ourselves so tied up in all this minutia, which I always try to avoid doing, but when I see so many errors in student work, it’s hard not to at least correct some of it so that they could become more proficient. In the future, they may not need to have that type of correction.

Don: Yeah, John, I think you really hit the nail on the head there. You really feel like you have an obligation to correct those. And when communication or writing is one of the titular topics of the course, even more so. But I have always felt that you get diminishing returns on the things that you focus on. And every time you’re talking about grammar, you are not talking about the critical thinking, and the grammar does matter. I can tell you that I have lots of conversations with CEOs with HR directors, etc, in the ongoing effort to make sure that my curriculum is responsive to what’s happening in the market. And one thing that I consistently hear is grammatical errors, spelling errors on slides or in cover letters are catastrophic. And it’s not because they’re nitpicky, it’s because the markets are so competitive, that they get a window that’s maybe 5% or less of what someone’s actual quality as a candidate may be. And that’s just something that there’s going to be some other candidate that is just as qualified and equal in every other way that didn’t make grammatical mistakes in their PowerPoints, and so on and so forth. And so it is important, but it doesn’t matter how good your grammar is, how compelling your vocabulary is, if you are missing some of the logical components of the argument, you cannot be correct.

John: And when students get feedback, where they see dozens of comments on it, the easiest strategy is to focus on correcting those small grammatical errors that are riddled through it. You might also have told the student that they don’t have a very substantive argument. But if they’re going to make a lot of corrections, it’s easier for them to focus on correcting the grammar and ignoring the more fundamental problem.

Don: Right. The very first writing assignment I ever did as a graduate student was a 50-page memo and I got back no comments anywhere except for on the front page: “Do you talk like this?” I think probably somewhere [LAUGHTER] in between those two is ideal. But you’re exactly right, that the more that we focus on things like grammar and tense and such things, the less we can focus on the meat and the critical thinking.

Rebecca: It’s funny how that often is the level of polish would be something that goes from someone that’s got like a really high grade to like an excellent grade.

Don: Right, exactly.

Rebecca: Something that’s foundational, that’s often not how our feedback structures work. And even if we keep form and function feedback separate and even weight them very differently. It’s really easy to address the form issues, because it’s almost like a series of checkboxes and it doesn’t require a lot of thought because the critical thinking part’s the hard part. And so it’s funny that even if they’re weighted differently, and to keep the comments separately, students will always flock towards the thing that’s kind of easy to fix. I mean, who wouldn’t? Then it becomes a checklist.

Don: And that’s exactly really kind of where this boils down to me, it’s not to say that those things aren’t important. They’re still very important. But in the world in which ChatGPT is a real thing, which it now is, and will continue to be and only be more powerful than it is, the juice that we get out of spending time in class or in feedback, in office hours, whatever it may be, talking about those sorts of things, is getting much less of a return than it did before ChatGPT. I am not a walking detector of 100% perfect polish by any means. But it seems to me that the product that ChatGPT can produce, in terms of those things that you were speaking about, Rebecca, is pretty dang good and hard to distinguish for me from highly polished products. But again, where it is easy to distinguish is this is a load of crap [LAUGHTER] that is fluff and has no substance to it, but a very polished load of crap, but nonetheless…

Rebecca: It’s pretty crap. [LAUGHTER]

Don: Exactly. It’s very pretty crappy with a nice bow,

John: …which reminds me of some work that I graded just the other night, where spelling and grammatical issues have mostly disappeared in student essay responses since the advent of ChatGPT, but the substance is not always there. And there were many responses that I provided feedback on which said, “this is a really nice response, but not to the question that you were asked to address.”

Rebecca: Yeah, or you spent two paragraphs and you haven’t actually said anything yet.

John: So teaching students how to use ChatGPT or other AI tools more effectively might allow them to be more productive in their learning as well as beyond their college experience.

Don: And might allow us to make for more productive learning environments as well.

Rebecca: So we’ve talked a lot about course content, and what to maybe focus on and not focus on. One of the most important things a course has is its syllabus or course outline. Can you talk a little bit about course policies and the way that you might make change in that realm?

Don: Yeah, so I think you’re gonna have to be more detailed than you probably are used to being in terms of putting language and syllabi, very specific and upfront. And so some of the policies that I’ve seen that I’ve liked elements of and are going to end up including in the syllabi the explicit weaknesses of ChatGPT. It is not a critical thinking device, it will produce responses only as deep or as shallow as you instruct it to. You are still responsible for the critical thinking, essentially, and very explicit in terms of what’s allowed, what’s not allowed. And I think also, it would probably be a good idea for faculty to be putting in explicit language that what is allowed in this course, is not necessarily the same as what will be allowed in other courses, and it is incumbent on students to navigate those differences themselves.

Rebecca: And part of the reason why things might be different across courses is because the focus of those courses is different and really helping students understand that there’s reasons why policies might be different in other classes. It’s not necessarily arbitrary.

Don: Right, exactly.

Rebecca: So we always wrap up by asking: “What’s next?”

Don: Well, what’s next is I figure out how to do all this stuff, [LAUGHTER] and not just to talk about it.

Rebecca: …and you’re gonna send us a memo, right with that in it. [LAUGHTER]

Don: Oh yeah. Yeah, I’m happy. [LAUGHTER]

John: …or at least have ChatGPT generate a memo explaining….

Don: Exactly. So yeah, what’s next is to put this stuff into action. Of course, as I mentioned, some of the things here have already been experimented with, the non-ChatGPT parts of it at least, but really kind of integrating them and seeing if what I am imagining is what comes to fruition in terms of do these things dovetail as well as I think. I really think that they do. …that kind of pre-existing urge to go more towards the critical thinking element, and really, I think, does dovetail well with the AI, but putting it into practice, it will be over the course of probably all of next year. And so there’s going to be some experimental sections, most of the sections are probably not going to look very different than they did in the spring. And I think that’s probably a very good plan. But there’s going to be some experimenting in some of the sections at the undergraduate level, and part of a faculty learning community on problem-based learning. This course is going to be participating in that in the fall. And so a lot is going to come out of that, I think, as well.

John: Do you think there’ll be much buy in from other people teaching the course?

Don: So, students, by and large, do not like writing. Faculty, by and large, do not like grading writing. And so I don’t think this is one of those political monsters of how are we going to get this through? How are we going to make these changes work? I think there’s probably a lot of people who have nervousness about how you would make these changes. But with those two facts that I don’t think you’d get much disagreement from, I think even across disciplines, I don’t think it should be that difficult for this to be implemented

Rebecca: Well I hope you’ll join us after you’ve implemented some of the things to share some of your reflections and let us know how it went.

Don: I’m happy to.

John: Well, thank you, Don.

Don: Thank you.

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John: If you’ve enjoyed this podcast, please subscribe and leave a review on iTunes or your favorite podcast service. To continue the conversation, join us on our Tea for Teaching Facebook page.

Rebecca: You can find show notes, transcripts and other materials on teaforteaching.com. Music by Michael Gary Brewer.

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303. Higher Ed Then and Now

Teaching practices have gradually evolved as we’ve learned more about how humans learn. From one year to the next, these changes may appear small, but the cumulative effect is profound. In this episode, Todd Zakrajsek joins us to reflect back on the changes that have occurred in higher ed during our careers.

Todd is an Associate Research Professor and Associate Director of a Faculty Development Fellowship at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He is also the director of four Lilly conferences on evidence-based teaching and learning. Todd is the author of many superb books, and has published four books in the past four years. His most recent book is a fifth edition of Teaching at it’s Best, a book he co-authored with Linda Nilson.

Show Notes

  • Zakrajsek, T. and Nilson, L. B. (2023). Teaching at its best: A research-based resource for college instructors. 5th edition. Jossey-Bass.
  • Zakrajsek, T. D. (2022). The new science of learning: how to learn in harmony with your brain. Routledge.
  • Harrington, C., Bowen, J. A., & Zakrajsek, T. D. (2017). Dynamic lecturing: Research-based strategies to enhance lecture effectiveness. Routledge.
  • EdPuzzle
  • PlayPosit
  • ChatGPT
  • Wayback Machine

Transcript

John: Teaching practices have gradually evolved as we’ve learned more about how humans learn. From one year to the next, these changes may appear small, but the cumulative effect is profound. In this episode, we reflect back on the changes that have occurred in higher ed during our careers.

[MUSIC]

John: Thanks for joining us for Tea for Teaching, an informal discussion of innovative and effective practices in teaching and learning.

Rebecca: This podcast series is hosted by John Kane, an economist…

John: …and Rebecca Mushtare, a graphic designer…

Rebecca: …and features guests doing important research and advocacy work to make higher education more inclusive and supportive of all learners.

[MUSIC]

John: Our guest today is Todd Zakrajsek, and I am with Todd here in Durham, North Carolina. Todd is an Associate Research Professor and Associate Director of a Faculty Development Fellowship at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He is also the director of four Lilly conferences on evidence-based teaching and learning. Todd is the author of many superb books, and has published four books in the past four years. His most recent book is a fifth edition of Teaching at it’s Best, a book he co-authored with Linda Nilson. Welcome back, Todd.

Todd: Well, thank you, John. Well, this is exciting. And Rebecca may be a long ways away, but I have never been arm’s length from a person who interviewed me for a podcast before.

Rebecca: Isn’t that cool?

John: And we’ve really done that before either at a conference or at Oswego,

Todd: I feel very special.

Rebecca: Well, we can celebrate with our teas. So, today’s teas are:… [LAUGHTER]

Todd: I’m drinking a peach mango that I got from some teas that John brought, which are fantastic.

Rebecca: John, how about you?

John: I am drinking a Tea Forte black currant tea, which I brought from Oswego, in a new mug that was given to me by Claire McNally, when she visited this area last week.

Todd: Love Claire, she’s fantastic.

John: And it has kangaroos on it.

Todd: Yeah.

Rebecca: And I can’t see it. Let me see it, John. Oh, that’s a cool mug.

Todd: It’s a good mug. I got a mug from her university. But I didn’t realize I should have brought it. So I feel bad about that. But it is a podcast. So I didn’t think about what it would look like.

John: That’s true, we generally don’t do a lot of visuals on here.

Rebecca: And I have a blue sapphire tea in my Tea Rex mug.

Todd: Well, that’s a nice mug,

John: We’ve invited you back to talk a little bit about how some of the changes you’ve observed in college teaching across your career have impacted how you teach today. When did your work in higher ed begin?

Todd: Actually, it started when I was a graduate student. So back in 1987. So there’s no reason to try to figure out how old I am. Now I’ve basically specifically dated myself here. I started teaching, I got to teach an introduction to statistics course. And I had so much fun that I taught again the following year. And by the time I left my graduate program, I had taught more courses in that program than any other graduate student had ever taught in the psychology department there. I really loved teaching right from the beginning, when from the beginning, very concerned about student learning, and just getting rolling.

Rebecca: What was it about the teaching, Todd, that really got you hooked?

Todd: Just watching the studentsis. it’s the same thing as it is today, when you have an individual who’s struggling with something, and suddenly they get it and you realize that they may eventually get it on their own, but you realize how much you’ve helped them to move that along very quickly. And facilitating the learning process, I just really love that. That doesn’t mean I was fantastic at it. But I really did love it.

Rebecca: Sometimes the things we love the most are things that we’re not great at to start with.

Todd: That’s true.

John: My experience was similar, actually, I started in 1980, with a course where I had a fellowship, so I didn’t have to teach. But there was a sudden shortage in the department. And they asked me to fill in. And I was planning to go on into research. But it was just so much fun teaching that I’ve never stopped.

Rebecca: I taught as a graduate student too, and taught the whole time I was there. But I started a little bit later in 2003.

Todd: Alright, so that was a couple of years later.

Rebecca: Just a couple.

Todd: Yeah, I had kind of a funny start, I will mention that when I first started that after the first semester of teaching, my students got almost all As and Bs. And the department chair called me in and he said, “I’m not going to have you teach any more courses.” And I said, “why not?” And he says, “Well, you give grades away like candy, we have to have better standards than that.” And I said, “Well, how are you basing that?” And he says, “Well, you know, we looked at the grade point averages.” And I said, “Well, how about if I bring in my final exam, and just walk through it, and then you can tell me how it could change to be more rigorous.” And so it was great. I showed it to him at the beginning. And like the bottom of the first page, the students had to calculate a statistical value, then I had them explain how they came about that number. But if they had used a different test how might it been inappropriately found and what the interpretation might have been, based on the fact that they had done it wrong with a different test. I thought it was important for them to understand how these things can change. The Chair said, “I can’t believe you have your students in the first class actually talk about various tests like that.” And I said, “Yeah, I did. Then we turned the page he says “You did nonparametric tests?” I said, “Well, yeah, we did parametric tests, but then I thought they should know the equivalent.” And he said, “We never do that.” And then he turned the last page and he said “You had them do a two-way ANOVA? You’re only supposed to go through one-way ANOVA.” I said, “Yeah, but we’d finished everything and we still had a week left. And I figured I might as well introduce the next concept to them. And so I showed them how to do a two-way ANOVA and they ended up with all As and Bs. So if you could help me in how to push their grades down and give them lower grades, I’m perfectly happy to do that.” And he then set me up with two courses the next semester, but it’s that reliance on the teaching evaluations is always funny.

Rebecca: Todd, it’s just funny, as we’ve gotten to know you through the podcast [LAUGHTER] it sounds so perfect that that was your first experience. [LAUGHTER]

Todd: Yeah, I’ve lived my entire career on the edge. [LAUGHTER]

John: And those sorts of arguments are still occurring in a lot of classes today about rigor and the need to keep grades lower.

Todd: Yeah.

John: They’re less severe than they were a few years ago.

Todd: Yes, but also looking at how well a person’s teaching based on student evaluations. I mean, we should be looking at authentic assessment. Some things have changed through the years, some things have not changed through the years.

Rebecca: Well, technology is one of those things that has changed.

Todd: Woosh, yeah.

Rebecca: Can you talk a little bit about what tech was like in the classroom when you first started and how it’s evolved a bit?

Todd: Yeah, I know you have some listeners who have been teaching for a very long time. So those of you have been teaching for like 30 to 40 years, just stop and think back about what it was like when we first started. For those of you who have been teaching like Rebecca since 2003, let’s just mention that technology back then was mostly pens and chalk and chalkboards. So back then, of course, there’s technology, there’s always technology, but we were using overhead projectors. This was long before the internet came along to really be used in the classes. LCD projectors were not out yet. Canvas, Blackboard, Sakai, all those learning management systems were not around. We didn’t have any of the ways to email individuals, you couldn’t email your students back then. And there was no ChatGPT to write your papers for you.

Rebecca: But there were calculators that could do all the work for you.

Todd: Yes, but this is the cool part. Back when I started teaching statistics, I’m glad you mentioned the calculators, huge debate back then was whether or not the students should calculate the statistical values by hand using the calculator, because computers had just come onto the scene and we could punch the data into a computer and have a computer run an ANOVA for you. Should you calculate it by hand? Should you run it to the computer? And there was a huge camp that said you should do it by hand or you will never understand a statistical value. And I said, “You know, we’ve got the technology there. Why don’t we have the students use the computer to do the mundane stuff, and we’ll have more time to talk about the theoretical and the important implications.” But even back then we were having the discussions about whether to use the technology at hand or not. Oh, and by the way, we are also hanging grades on doors. So we would figure out the grades, we’d tack it to the door, and then the students who want to know what their grades were for the class would swing by and look at the door.

John: And they were sorted alphabetically, to make it easier for people to find where they were in the grade list.

Todd: Yeah, it was great. We listed them according to their social security number, [LAUGHTER] which was a little different back then. And yeah, we actually did that back then. But as John pointed out, they were listed by number so nobody knew whose number went with whom, except, surprisingly, they were alphabetical on the door. So not only could you figure out Armstrong’s exam score, you’d get Armstrong’s social security number as well. Yeah, times have changed.

John: And it was also back in the day of dittos and mineos as well, which was the only way of disseminating information on paper.

Todd: This is so much fun. We’ll get to some real meat of this thing. But that walk down memory lane has some fun stuff too. The dittos…

Rebecca: I remember dittos, just for the record, okay.

Todd: Yes. So you probably remember, if you dittoed just before class, and you handed it out in class, the students would all pull the ditto up to their face, so they could smell the ditto fluid. And they got that smell. I was running dittos one time in the graduate student office, and I noticed when I looked down because it ran out of fluid, and I had to put some more fluid in, and I looked down and I noticed that the floor was kind of eaten away by this ditto fluid. And then… this is the best part… About a month later, I was digging for something in the closet and I found extra tiles and I thought they should put these tiles down to replace the ones that are all eaten and on the side of the box it said these tiles were long lasting and durable, reinforced with asbestos. So that ditto fluid was eating through asbestos tiles. That’s some strong stuff.

John: …to make it a little bit more friable so that it would disseminate in the air nicely.

Todd: Well, there had to be something to help the faculty members who were running all their own dittos to not mind doing it, and one way of doing this is to have them use ditto fluid, because I’ll tell you, you may not have liked it when you started, but by the end, it was all right. [LAUGHTER]

Rebecca: It’s funny that we’re taking this walk down memory lane, because on our campus, I was in our historic lecture classroom today in Sheldon Hall.

John: What are some of the other changes that have occurred and how have they influenced how we teach?

Todd: Yeah, so it’s interesting, I did the walk down memory lane and we were chatting about this stuff. It’s all fun, but thinking about how the changes have taken place. I think that’s really important. So there have been massive changes. I think that we tend to forget, it’s so easy to communicate with students now. Heck, people are texting now so that you can text back and forth with students. But think about how that has transcended or gone through time. There was a time when I would have to call and leave a message for a student on an answering machine, and then they would call back and we would try to find a time that we could talk on the phone. If we wanted to have a conversation. I could either leave a note for the student or I could call and leave a message that says least come see me after class. So even having a conversation with a student was difficult, then it became easier with email because you could start emailing back and forth. And now we have Zoom. And the equity in the way that this has changed, just think about the difference of this, if I’m leaving a message for a student, they may not even have an answering machine, if they’re living off campus with limited means back then. So even getting in touch with a student would be challenging. Now I can have a Zoom conversation with a student who doesn’t have to hire a babysitter, who doesn’t have to find reliable transportation, who doesn’t have to drive across town and burn gas, and to do all of those things that it would take to have a 15-minute conversation that in the past would have been really hard, and even four or five years ago would have been challenging. The grades, why in the world would a person have to leave… and I was teaching in very northern Michigan, there were days that the wind chill was 75 degrees below zero… and students would leave their dorm rooms and walk across campus to see a grade on the door. It’s actually physically dangerous. And now we have learning management systems, we could post things for students. Interlibrary loan used to take weeks to get a document that you can now go on and get. People can lament all of these technological changes at times, but we’re actually creating more and more equity within the higher education system as we make certain things easier. Not saying that we’re anywhere near an equitable system yet, but we’re moving in a really good direction. And a lot of those changes are helping us to get there.

Rebecca: I’m thinking about all the times when I get to go to the door or meet after class, it really assumes that students are a certain kind of student, they’re full time, they have time. And our students now are working [LAUGHTER], and where they’re juggling a lot of different schedules and things.

Todd: Yeah, and I mean, we want to be careful too. And I agree with you 100%. But they were juggling back then too. But some of the things we were doing, for instance, I taught a night class. Now I would probably suggest if I was going to teach a class from 7 to 10pm that I would teach it through zoom, because there’s a lot of reasons that it’s good to do. But I had students that I noticed in class, would very quickly at the end of class would start talking to other students and I couldn’t figure out what it was doing because a lot of buzzing and stuff. And what I found was that there were certain students who were uncomfortable, and we were in a very safe campus, but they were uncomfortable walking to their car at 10 o’clock at night. So I started saying to the students, “Hey, I’m gonna park a car… and when we showed up, there were quite a few cars there… but I’ll be under the second light, I drive a little red Chevette, not a Corvette, a Chevette, but I’ll have my car there. If you want to park near me, we can walk out together.” And there were students that were not paying attention to almost any of the class because they were fearful of how they were going to get to their car safely. When you think about Zoom and stuff, it’s even safety factors, I would never have a review session now like I used to at 8 to 9 pm the night before the exam because I’m exposing people to potentially dangerous situations. Now we’d have zoom sessions. But I could tell you 40 years ago, there was no even concept of what zoom would be and how it would work. Even Star Trek didn’t have stuff like that.

John: And there was also, besides the inequity associated with people who were working, many campuses had a lot of commuting students who could not easily get back to campus for office hours. Or if they were just taking classes on Monday, Wednesday, Friday and your office hours was on a Tuesday, they’d have to come in that extra day, arranging childcare, or their work to be able to fit that into the schedule.

Todd: Yeah, it really did start to change that system. So we got a little bit more equity, and like you were saying too, the commuting students, the part-time students, the students taking distance courses. When I first started teaching, I was writing… oh my word, remember the correspondence courses? …and you mail away and get a packet of material, you take a test at a local library and, and they talk about distance education being not as good as on campus, but at least better than nothing. And now we’re finally getting to a system where we can stop assuming that those folks who are coming in for part-time courses and stuff are just getting something better than nothing. They’re actually getting something similar to full college courses, which some of those online courses are actually as good or better than college courses that are on campus. But all that’s changing with the technology. It’s crazy.

John: And there’s a lot of research that supports that in terms of the relative learning gains with online and face-to-face, as well as hybrid courses, which seemed to outperform others in a few meta studies that have been done. But those were options that just weren’t available back then. And the early online courses were often designed to be replicas of face-to-face classes, and they probably didn’t work quite as well. But we’ve learned since that, which brings us to the issue of research. During the time that you’ve been teaching, there’s been a lot of research on teaching and learning. While some of it was taking place, it wasn’t very widely disseminated to faculty.

Todd: Yeah, that is true, too. It’s so much easier to get technology out. It’s easier to gather data, it’s easier to write it up. It’s easier to edit it so all of those types of things that are happening now that couldn’t happen before. And as a result, we’re learning a lot more about how people learn, you know, the book I did on the New Science of Learning, looking at a lot of the ways that students learn. And part of it’s just the ease of getting to information. But also part of it’s just being able to investigate how people process information. I used to teach Introductory Psychology back then, we would talk about the stages of sleep. And nobody really knew, for instance, what REM sleep was about, we knew that you had to have it or else it caused some problems. Deep sleep we knew was important, we now have indications that deep sleep for consolidation is necessary for semantic memory. If your sleep is interrupted, you can get eight hours of sleep. But if you don’t get deep sleep, the information doesn’t get consolidated. Procedural memory, how to give shots and kick balls and do anything procedurally looks like it’s more solidified during REM sleep. So again, the different types of sleep are associated with us learning long term, different types of information. We never knew that before all this technology was running around. In fact, back then I gotta say, I remember from my intro psych class being told that you were born with a certain number of neurons, and as you live through life, neurons would die. And if you killed them by drinking or doing something like drugs or something, they were gone forever, and you would never get more. And if you broke a connection, it was broken forever. That’s just simply not true. But it’s what we thought back then. So technology has really allowed us to look better at how people learn, different ways of helping them to learn and different ways they can even study. By the way, before we move on, we now have this physiological demonstration that staying up all night and cramming the night before the test. Even though it gets you slightly higher grades on the test, we now know that because the information is not consolidated that it won’t be there a week later or two weeks later. So we’ve always told students, you shouldn’t do it, but now we can actually show them why it doesn’t work.

John: And the LMS itself has offered a lot of ways of giving more rapid feedback to students with some automated grading with some things to give them more low-stakes testing opportunities. And those were things that we just couldn’t easily do back when you started teaching.

Todd: No, John, that’s a really good one. And we know that one of the most consistent findings right now in all of learning and memory stuff is that the more often you do something, the easier it becomes, long-term potentiation. Which means the more frequently you retrieve information from your long-term memory, the easier it is to retrieve. And just like you’d mentioned, we can now do LMS systems that are set up so that you could do practice quizzes, you could do dozens or hundreds of practice quizzes and keep pulling that information out over and over and over again. That was just not possible before this. And so the LMS helps with that, it helps by giving feedback, really good feedback so that students know what they’re doing well, and what they’re not doing well. And it helps faculty members to design feedback specifically for certain types of projects, and so that I can more easily give more feedback without spending a lot more time on it. So LMSs have done a tremendous amount of work. And that’s not even mentioning the fact that you can have all of the LMS systems loaded with the content. So students can log in and get their information without leaving their house. If there’s fiscal challenges with your class, you can put in articles, the students may not have to buy a book, they could read the articles. And so we’ve got students who were able to come to classes because they can afford to be there. By the way, I remember being on a committee when I was a graduate student, and we were looking at financial aid and different financial systems. And I remembered asking the Chief Financial Officer, I said, “What increase in tuition does there need to be before you start to see students drop off because they can’t afford to be here?” And this was about 40 years ago, but he said $100 for a year, if they have to pay $100 this year more than last year, some students won’t come back. If we look at the price of textbooks now, textbooks can cost $400. So, a book like that is definitely going to make a difference between some students being able to take the class or not. So LMS systems make this possible.

John: And they also make it easier to share OER resources that don’t have any cost for students, or some less expensive adaptive learning platforms, giving all students that first-day access. I remember, not so long ago, when I was still using textbooks in some classes, students would wait several weeks before they got that book. And that put them at a severe disadvantage. And the people who were being put at a disadvantage. were generally the students who came in with the weakest backgrounds because they came from lower resourced school districts.

Todd: Yeah, if they had the resources, they would have the better background foundational material, but they’d be able to buy the books. And you mentioned OERs. So open educational resources are really another thing that are really valuable because back then, before the technology, you couldn’t produce something that would be readily available like throughout the world. And so this project that’s going on now where they’re doing introductory level books in all the different disciplines, you can get an OER introductory psychology textbook that students can log in and read. None of that was possible before the technology. So even the creation of OERs has changed so much.

Rebecca: Well, speaking of digital materials, libraries have changed significantly too over time from having completely physical collections and interlibrary loans and things that take a lot of time to having a lot of digital resources, which changes access to research and materials that you can populate into your classes, but also can aid students in the work that they’re doing. Can you talk a little bit about the change in libraries and how that’s impacted how you’ve taught?

Todd: Yeah, you know, libraries have been fascinating to watch over the last 40 years, because it used to be the biggest challenge librarians had before them was which books to put on the shelves because there was a finite amount of shelf space. And there were lots and lots of books. And so that was the big thing. We used to take out journals that weren’t used very much to make room for other journals. Through time, little by little, they started digitizing all that stuff. And I can remember chatting with librarians, one conversation I had was back around 2001. I said, gonna be interesting, because there’s gonna come a day where there’ll be no books in the library, and the Dean of Libraries said “Well, there’s always going to be books.” I said, “Not always, potentially.” But even if we reduce them, I said, “What is your foresight? How is the library going to change?” And so he had a couple of ideas. But what it basically boiled down to our conversation is, I always felt like a library was like the brain of the campus, it had the books, and it had all of the information that you could go and get. As the books left, and things were diversified in a way that you could find this stuff, you could get all the information right from your dorm room, or from your apartment, when the internet came along, you could get anything you needed, then the library was still a physical space that was in the middle of campus. And what it should become is a learning commons, a place where people go to share and to learn from one another. And I think that’s what’s really changed is individuals still just pile into libraries and use the space, but they use it in different ways. They go there to meet other individuals to work, which they did before. But they took away that aspect of going there for the book part. And it meant all of those shelves got emptied, and they started pushing them out. And you can go into libraries right now that have very few shelves. But they have webcams, they have smartboards, they have spaces where folks can plug in their computers and share with one another. They’ve got screens set up so that you can project and have students sitting around a table, they’ve got Google Glass set up, all of these types of things that bring students together to use technology to learn from one another.

John: And they have cafes to help support that to make it easier for people to gather.

Todd: Yeah, you could swing by and get a cup of tea.

Rebecca: It’s funny, even when I was in high school, my sister and I would rely on going to the library to have access to a computer so that we could even type of paper, because we didn’t have one at home. And that kind of place of having the technology started a long time ago, but it’s amped up quite a bit over the last 20 years.

Todd: Yeah, and I agree completely. And the computers that are there. I mean, even right now, with the books dissipating, there a’re still large numbers of computers. And oftentimes, they’ll even be an area in a library that’s carved out with really high-end computers. But it gives students an opportunity to go. We make this assumption that everybody has a computer and they don’t. But libraries give them that opportunity.

John: Yeah, for those students working on smartphones or Chromebooks, that gives them access to all the tools that students with $2000 or $3000 or $4,000 computers.

Todd: Yes, because smartphones can work for lots of things. But they’re a little tough to write a paper on

John: When I started teaching, and probably when you did too, the predominant mode of instruction, which actually still is often the predominant mode of instruction in many departments, was lecture. That’s changed quite a bit since then. Could you talk a little bit about the shift from lecture-based courses to courses that involve much more active learning activity?

Todd: Yeah, or they just involve a lot more of everything. The concept of flipped classrooms, which was almost impossible 30, 40 years ago, because you really couldn’t get the information to the students. Yes, it was kind of possible, but whoo, if it was hard now, it was really hard back then. But the ability to get information out to students that they can read it before they come to class. But coming back to the lectures… So I’m going to take this moment and those of you who know me know that I’m going to do this, is that we still have no evidence that lectures are bad, but there’s something that we need to really keep in mind. I think this is vital. I do think it’s important for us to be able to talk about buzz groups and jigsaws and fish bowls and lectures and Socratic lectures, discussion lectures, all those different methodologies out there so that we know what we’re talking about when we chat with one another. But I do think it’s time that we stop talking about lectures being more effective than one thing or fishbowls being more effective than something else and look at the components of what is valuable in a learning experience.

John: And a good reference for that is a book on Dynamic Lecturing, which you happen to be a co-author of.

Todd: That is true and in fact that there’s the Dynamic Lecturing. And then there’s a chunk in that about The New Science of Learning. And then there’s a whole chapter in that about Teaching at its Best, because that’s a good point, John, thank you.

Rebecca: It’s almost like you’re trying to slip it in everywhere you are.

Todd: Because the research… people keep talking about one methodology being better than another. Here it is, folks, you can be a hideous lecturer, you can be a phenomenal lecturer. And if you’re a hideous lecturer, you’re not going to learn anything. If you’re a phenomenal lecturer, students will learn from you but they won’t learn all the time, it depends on some student factors. I’ve actually been exposed to group work in flipped classrooms that were awful. And so that concept is we start thinking about and this is why it’s going to come back to the technology, we think about the elements that need to be there, that are necessary for learning to take place. I’m just going to do this, because it’s not the topic I’ll make it very brief, is let’s just go with three things. If you don’t have your attention, as a teacher, if my learners aren’t attending to what I’m saying, if they’re on their phone or thinking about bacon, then they can’t process what I’m presenting. And if you’re having a think-pair-share, if they’re not attending to the person they’re sitting next to, you have to have attention. Number two, they have to have some value. If I’m hearing somebody or I’m reading something, and this has no value to me, it’s really hard to get it into your long-term memory and to learn it. And number three, I have to have a clue of what’s happening, I got to understand some aspects. Now if we think about attention, value, and understanding, now we can flip back to the technology. This is why gaming works. Gaming draws the attention, it increases the value, because you want to win the game, and it has understanding. We have all played games. You open up the old board games, and now it’s digital, where you don’t have a clue what the game is. It’s like, if you advance a player four pieces and the opponent advances five pieces, you have to go back three spaces, unless it’s a Tuesday. When those instructions are that complicated, you don’t understand. So we can use technology to help with attention, we can use technology to help with the value of what’s going on. And we can use that technology to help with understanding. Those are things that were very difficult before. And they allow us to do things like a mini lecture and then shift over to an active learning exercise, and then say, take all this information and create a Zoom session tomorrow that will go over it again. So the technology has really helped us to be able to do all of these things to get at the core of learning, a topic I barely care about. [LAUGHTER]

John: That’s an important one, because people often see this as this binary issue where you lecture or you use active learning. And there are some really effective ways to combine them. And in fact, in that book on dynamic lecturing, it was suggested that lecture can be more important in introductory courses, when students don’t have as much of a knowledge base.

Todd: You’re absolutely right. Discovery learning is a really great way to learn if you’ve got a lot of time. I can just put you into a room with some other people and say, “Here’s some data, and here’s some things we need to know. Go.” And if you don’t have any foundational knowledge at all, it takes forever to figure it out, you go online, you know what to look for, I could do a five-minute lecture, and at the end of five minutes, set it up and say, “Now go and work with your neighbors. In fact, here’s what we’re going to do, we’re going to have you each work in small groups in class, I’m going to open up a Padlet. At each table, I want you to go in and add your information or put it into the column that corresponds with your group number.” As an instructor, I can watch everything develop in front of me. While I’m in the room, I can look at my laptop and see it and walk over to a table and say, “looks like you’re struggling a little bit.” I’ve lectured, I put them into small groups, I’ve had them use technology, I’ve created a little bit of competition on who can come up with what and I’ve had a way for me to monitor it and give them feedback. That is so different than what teaching used to look like. So pulling it all together, that’s what we do.

Rebecca: The tools to be able to monitor have been really helpful in my own teaching and being able to get a better pulse on what’s going on and get a nice overview and then be more targeted in how to interact with small groups rather than just kind of wandering around more aimlessly like I think I did initially. [LAUGHTER]

Todd: Yeah, and this is all going to be great until we get our cognitive load headbands that I’m waiting to be developed. So anybody who’s listening, take this idea, run with it, you can make a bazillion dollars and then take me out to dinner or something. I want a headband and the headband has a light and it measures brainwave activity. And then as I’m teaching, if you start to be a little bit like it’s a little bit too much, you’re moving out of that zone of proximal development, the light turns from green to a yellow. And then when it hits red is like when you’re trying to put together an Ikea bookcase and someone comes by and says “What do you think of this?” and you say, “Errr, I’m working on an Ikea bookcase right now.” …that shutting down with that red light. I’m telling ya, that’s going to be the technology we’ll want next.

Rebecca: It would be so helpful. [LAUGHTER]

Todd: You can actually look and see somebody else’s zones of proximal development and their cognitive load. Whoof. Which by the way, there’s a little party game that they’ll do periodically at parties. It’s like if you’re a superhero, what would you want your superpower to be? And I was in a room one time and one person said they wanted to fly and somebody else said that they wanted to be invisible, which real quickly in my head, I’m thinking, what could you possibly gain that wasn’t illegal or creepy if you’re invisible. So aside from that, transporting and everything else, and they got to me, and I said, “I want to be able to see people’s zones of proximal development. If that were my superpower, I’d be the best teacher.”

John: I bet that went over really well at those parties. [LAUGHTER]

Todd: Yeah, my friends all said “You are amazingly smart and quite insightful.” They used different words, but that’s what I heard. [LAUGHTER]

Rebecca: They didn’t start with what is that? [LAUGHTER]

Todd: As soon as I start talking, most of my friends just shake their head and drink whatever beverage they have near them. [LAUGHTER] So yeah, it’s good times, good times. They’re all impressed. They don’t say it all the time, but I know they are.

Rebecca: I think one of the things that often happens with technology is that it allows us to get things quickly and move through things quickly. But sometimes, as you just noted, learning doesn’t happen quickly.

Todd: Yeah.

Rebecca: Can you talk a little bit about speed and the difference between maybe not having all the technology and all the things really quick versus maybe now where we have it at our fingertips, but do we always want it at that speed?

Todd: So there’s another study that I’m waiting to see. This is an easy study, folks, somebody can run this one quickly. We all know that students are listening to any recorded lectures or recorded material that they have to watch, 1.7 is about the best speed that we tend to see people listening. 2.0 is a little bit fast for some folks. 1.0 is like normal speed, that’s no good, too slow. So what I’m curious about is the space between words and between sentences that our brains, because they move so fast, we can listen faster than somebody can talk. And we have all this other stuff going on is I can be thinking and processing while you’re talking to me. But if I bumped that up to one seven, I think we close the gaps. And I hear it a lot faster. But what I don’t think is happening is the cognitive processing while I’m listening. The active listening component to it. So I think technology can create concerns in those directions. And students who do try to process material too fast… we’ll wait and see.

John: And that’s especially important in flipped classrooms where students do watch these videos outside. One of the things I’ve been doing with those, though, is embedding questions in the video so they can watch them as quickly as they want. But then they get these knowledge checks every few minutes. And then if they find they’re not able to answer it, they may go back and get their attention back and watch that portion again.

Todd: Yeah, I think that’s a really good way to go. EdPuzzle’s kind of a fun technology to use. I don’t know if that’s the one you used.

John: I’m using Playposit, which is a bit more expensive, it works beautifully. I love it, they did just double the price this year, though, it was bought by a new company.

Todd: This is the tricky spot now as the prices are going up. You know, inflation is a terrible thing to waste. Anytime somebody can raise prices now it’s like, “ooh, inflation”. So you know, prices double, inflation is 8% with runaway, now it’s back down around three. But when inflation was 8%, they doubled the price and say, “Hey, we’ve got to,” but yes, it’s some of them are expensive. There’s lots of things that are less expensive. Oftentimes we pay for functionality that help us but the freemiums kind of thing. So stuff that’s inexpensive. I just wanna let everybody out there know just about anything you want to do in class or can think about doing it, there’s a way to do it for either free, or probably under $100 a year, which I know $100 can be expensive for some people, it’s about eight bucks a month. And so things like Padlet that I think might be up around 140 now, so maybe $12 a month, can change how much time you spend doing things, and how much time for students. But yeah, I love the embedded questions to help slow things down.

Rebecca: I think that the cognitive load can happen really quickly if we’re piling lots of information in but not always providing the time to process and use that information in some way in the kind of activities that you were talking about. Or knowing when everybody’s red light is going off in the class.

Todd: Or when people try to do multiple things. I mean, now you’ve got the technology around. So if students are trying to listen to an assignment while they’re texting their friend and have a TV on, I mean, we’re living in an age where there is a lot going on, and people believe they can process lots of things. Evolution doesn’t happen quite that fast. And so I think we have to be careful with that one.

John: One other thing that’s happened is back when you and I both started teaching, the only way students generally communicated their learning was either on typed pages or on handwritten notes. Now we have many more types of media that students can use. And also we’ve seen a bit of an expansion of open pedagogy. How does that help students or how does that affect student learning?

Todd: Wow, that’s really changed a lot as well. Blue Books. Remember the blue books? I think they still sell blue books in the library. They may cost more than the I think it was eight cents when I started, but the concept of writing things down, you turn them into the faculty member, the faculty member would grade them and turn them back. One of the big things that I caught years and years ago was so much wasted cognitive energy in terms of what they produced. I’d read a paper from a student and think this is amazing, and no one will ever see it. It was written for me, I graded it. And now it’s done. I think the technology has changed so many things. One of the biggest things, I would encourage all the listeners, any faculty member out there is, whenever possible, create something that will take the students’ work, the things that they’re doing, and use it to make society better. It’s not that hard. There’s assignments that you can do on Wikipedia. Anybody who wants to complain about Wikipedia, if you don’t like it, I’m gonna go back to Tim Sawyer, who is a faculty member of mine, my very first time I ever did TA work. I was complaining about some students. And he said, “You can complain three times. And after you’ve complained three times, either stop talking,” he was a little bit ruder about that, “or do something about it… just shut up or do something.” And so I complained about Wikipedia for a while, that it wasn’t all that effective. And I thought, well, if I don’t like the page on cognitive load on Wikipedia, I could give an assignment of my cognitive Psych class to go on to Wikipedia and fix it. And so you can have Wikipedia assignments, there’s so many things you could do. Here’s one for you. If you’re doing one on communication, you could have your students go and take pictures or short videos somewhere on campus of something that’s meaningful to them, and then jot down why it’s meaningful, take that compilation of stuff and send it over to the office on campus that does publicity. What better way of drawing students to campus than to have all of these students that have said, I love sitting by the pond because… and in the past, we would have had students write a paper about someplace on campus that you think is effective, put it in the blue book, we would grade it, we turn it back to the students. And that is a waste of possibilities. And so I think we do have lots of ways that we can get the students involved in helping through technology,

John: One of our colleagues in SUNY, Kathleen Gradel, had an assignment for a first-year course, where the students went out, took pictures, geocoded it and added it to a map layer that was then shared with other first-year students about useful resources on campus and their favorite spots on campus, which is another great example of that type of authentic learning.

Todd: Yes, for the authentic learning, there are just so many possibilities because of the technology. If anyone doesn’t have ideas, ask deans, ask the provost, ask the president on your campus, like what kind of information would be helpful, either for the next round of accreditation or for just helping the campus and we can design those things. Another one I did was we took students to the museum. We’d go to the museum, almost any class could kind of find some way to tie museums in, and through the museum, not only would they write stuff that the folks at the museum who did curation would help use, but also just helping the students to see how issues from the museum, how artifacts and things can be used in their own life, to better understand.

Rebecca: When I first started teaching, community-based learning was popular, in fad at the time, and I think having the experience of being a student in a class like that, but then also a faculty member teaching classes like that has really informed the kinds of projects that I do. Maybe they’re not always community-based learning, but they’re often community oriented, whether it’s the campus or even the surrounding community that the campus is situated in to help students get connected. There’s so many nonprofits that need partners and love, there’s always a project that can be done. [LAUGHTER]

Todd: There is. And I used to be a director for a service learning component of the campus. And yeah, there’s just so much out there that we can do to help others.

Rebecca: And students always had such a strong connection. And they didn’t want to fail because other people were depending on them. And so there was a real investment in the work that they did on projects like that.

Todd: I will admit that I’ve never experienced it myself. I’ve never even heard of anybody that if the students are doing some kind of authentic learning, that their authentic learning is then used to help somebody else. I have never heard students say “What a waste of time” or “I hate that class,” or “those assignments are just busy work.” They’ve never used those terms.

John: One common sort of project is to create resources that could be shared with elementary or secondary school students in the disciplines. And again, they can see the intrinsic value of that.

Todd: Yeah. Students could write short manuals on how to learn and then pass that on to the first-year students. And so upper-division students could be helping the lower-division students because not everybody can get a copy of The New Science of Learning, third edition.

John: …available from… [LAUGHTER]

Todd: Available at… used to be Stylus. Since Stylus was sold to Routledge, now it’s available at Routledge. [LAUGHTER]

Rebecca: Given the historical background that we’ve walked through today, what if we think about the future? Where do you see technological changes or learning theory changes impacting the future of higher ed?

Todd: Yeah, we’re living at an interesting time. I like to point out to folks that when you go back to Socrates, Plato kind of time there was a thought that if you wrote something down, it would weaken the mind so we shouldn’t write things down. Luckily, some individuals wrote things down or we never would have known. We’ve gone through several iterations of those kinds of things. Samuel Johnson, I believe it was, who said “With the ready availability of books, teachers are no longer needed. If you want to learn something, you could go get a book on it.” Well, that was a couple of 100 years ago. And we still have faculty members, we have students writing things down, we’re reading, I don’t imagine how you could teach without writing things down and having books. The internet came along, as we were discussing earlier, while we were teaching, we watched the internet show up. And there were people who said, “Well, with the internet, there’s going to be no need for teachers anymore, because students can get whatever they want.” I can’t imagine teaching without the internet right now. So as we’ve gone through each of these iterations, there’s been this fear that maybe we’d be supplanted by some technology followed by “I don’t know how I’d work without that,” it’s a little trickier now, because with generative AI, we’re talking about not just something being available, but actually creating something. I don’t know what that’s going to look like. But there’s some real possibilities that the generative AI ChatGPT, could do things like help students who have writer’s block, get started. And that’s an individual that maybe could produce something really cool, but just can’t get started. I didn’t publish my first book until about seven or eight years ago, because I’m one of those individuals who has a terrible time from a blank screen. I just have a terrible time with that. And so now, I don’t use ChatGPT to actually write anything significant. But I will tell you that I will use it for the first paragraph. That’s all, just one paragraph. And then I completely rewrite that. And there’s no actually trace of it. But it’s something that gets me going.

John: So can we count on more than a book a year going forward? [LAUGHTER]

Todd: No, no, no, no, you can’t. So exhausting. But the concepts that will help students that can do that, I think that’s going to be helpful for them. So there’ll be a type of student who couldn’t have produced before, but now can. We are definitely going to run into some challenges, though, with students who are going to just use generative AI and use artificial intelligence to actually create and to hand something in instead of doing the work. So I do think we’re in a challenging time right now. And I wouldn’t make light of that. There’s actually something that I find fascinating from this. Right now, more than ever before, we can actually have artificial intelligence create something for us, especially in higher education, this hasn’t been done before. The tricky thing is that we were the ones to be able to make that possible, because we learned things. If we let a machine do that work for us, we’re not going to be put into the situation or our students coming along, will not be put into a situation where they’re intelligent enough to do the things that need to be done when they need to be done. And so I do think we’re facing a real dilemma right now. If my students, for instance, always do use some artificial intelligence to create a paper and hand it in, if I can’t catch it, they may end up with an A in that portion of the class. But there’s going to come a day when they’re going to have to write something or be able to read something and tell if it’s written well. And so I’m a little bit nervous, we’re entering a phase where by bypassing some cognitive processing that needs to be done, we may be limiting what we’re able to do in the future. Wrapping this up, though, I don’t want to be the person who says if you use a calculator, you’ll never understand this statistical test. So I don’t know where the balance is. But I do think we’re going to have to have decisions coming up that we’ve never had before.

John: Generative AI is drawing on that wealth of knowledge that has been produced. And for that to continue to grow in the future, we do need to have some new materials being created. So that is an interesting challenge, unless it goes beyond unless….

Todd: …unless it creates it. So that was one I thought about, by the way, sometimes you’re sitting around just thinking about stuff and it’s interesting. I was thinking how do I acquire new information. And the way I acquire new information is I go read articles, I read books, I read a ton of stuff. And then I say I think this is valuable, I don’t think that’s valuable. And then I put it together and say here’s what I’m thinking. And now I’m looking at this generative AI who goes out and scans the environment and pulls these things and then creates something new. It doesn’t have the cognitive processing that I have at this point, but…

John: it’s in the early stages.

Todd: We have some folks who are very concerned out there, especially in European countries that are starting to put some guardrails out, because at the point that it keeps grabbing stuff, and then generating and then it grabs the stuff it generated, then it’s going to be interesting. But as of right now, I just read another article, I think it was yesterday, that they’re going out and grabbing the most popular or most frequently written things and then putting it down as if that is right.

Rebecca: The way that you might prioritize as a human with an expertise in something, is going to be really different than a system that’s prioritizing based on popularity, [LAUGHTER] or like how current something is like when it was last published. That’s a really different value system that really changes priorities.

Todd: Yeah, and I think it changes how we teach. I think the way we teach is going to fundamentally shift because we’re going to have to work with students with all these things being available and explain to them and talk to them about the learning process and the value of the learning process. And keep in mind, this isn’t just about ChatGPT writing papers, everybody’s freaked out about that right now. We shouldn’t lose sight of the fact that you could get fresh, cleanly written papers that have not been plagiarized at all, we’d be able to do that for 20 years. There are paper mills, I can either write away or contact somebody and say, “Please write me a 10 page paper on Descarte, and they would write it, I could turn that in. What actually has happened recently is that everybody can do it, even those who can’t afford to have a paper written at $10 a page or whatever it’s costing. And so equity comes back again. [LAUGHTER] Now we’re an equal opportunity cheater. So we have to be careful with that. But I think the way we teach is going to change because all that information is going to be available, kind of like the internet on hyperspeed. And then what do you do with that? It’s going to be really intriguing. I think it’s an exciting time.

Rebecca: So Todd, this episode’s gonna come out right at the beginning of this semester. So you’re saying we need to be thinking about how to change our teaching. ChatGPT’s here, what are you doing for the Fall differently?

Todd: Well, I think the biggest thing is what we were just talking about, looking more at the learning process, which has been a big thing for me for the longest time, is explaining and talking through the learning process, I can hand you all this information, but if I hand it to you, you don’t learn. In fact, one of my favorite examples came from a friend of mine, and it was the gym, if you want to get in better shape, I could pay somebody to go do sit ups for me. And then I could somehow log in the book at the gym that 100 Sit ups were done, use the passive voice there, and somebody else did them for me, I’m not going to get in better shape unless I do the situps. So I have to do the work, I have to run, lift weights, do the situps in order for me to be able to gain. We need to just turn that into a cognitive process for our students to really gain cognitively they have to do the work. And so I think more than ever, it’s how do we convince students of that? And for the faculty members who say, “Well, that’d be great, but my students just want the grade.” If that’s the case, we have a bigger problem than whether or not some technology can write a paper for them.

John: So how do we convince students that it is important for them to acquire the skills that we hope they get out of college?

Todd: I think this is probably going to come down to the community building, it’s been there forever. If you really want your students to do the work, the best thing you can do in my view, and that’s why I’m gonna say, Rebecca, I don’t think a lot for the way I teach, has changed. You build a community, you build relationships, you talk to the students about importance of things, if you’re sincere about that, and they get that then yes, there’s going to be some students that are going to mess with the system, they have always been there. But you’re also going to get a lot of students who will say, “Yeah, that’s a good point.” And then they’ll do the work. I don’t teach as many undergraduates as I used to, I’m teaching more faculty than ever because of being the faculty developer. But there were years that I would have to tell my students don’t put more time than this in on your paper, you have other classes, you need to do the work in the other classes. Because, and I’m telling you, I am very proud of this, my students would spend a ton of time on this stuff for my class, because they didn’t want to let me down. And I would say you’ve already got an A, I’m proud of what you’re doing, please go work on your other classes. That kind of scenario happens when you build community. And I’m not saying it’s easy, I would never say it’s easy. And it’s not going to happen for everybody. But it is the foundation of good teaching.

Rebecca: So we always wrap up by asking, what’s next?

Todd: There’s just so much going on right now. I think that what’s next for me is I am still in that headspace of coming kind of back from the pandemic, anybody who says, “Yeah, but the pandemic’s all over,” wait for November, we won’t know, we’re going to see. But I still think that’s next is kind of thinking about how we teach and learn in this environment. So moving in that space, it’s probably not surprising. I’m working on the next book here. One of the things I want to do now is the last couple of books that I’ve done had been pretty heavy books. And now I want to write something that’s a little bit lighter. So it’s going to be more of a quick guide with more narrative and having some fun, I love telling stories. I love having fun with people. So I’m going to try to create a book that’s kind of like a science of learning and teaching at its best but really accessible and more of a story-based kind of way of looking at things.

Rebecca: Who is your audience for that book?

Todd: Anybody who will read it? [LAUGHTER] Anytime I write anything, I have to have the audience firmly in mind and think about who am I talking to. And I really believe there is a pretty big overlap with students and faculty who don’t know specific things. And I’m not saying this in a mean way toward any of my faculty colleagues at all. But there’s a lot of people who aren’t taught about things like long-term potentiation and deep sleep in terms of semantic memory, and looking at depth of processing and those types of things. So the same type of thing we can say to a student, we know you shouldn’t cram, but here’s why you shouldn’t cram… faculty learn a lot from that as well. And so my audience for this book is going to be faculty and students, students, because I think it’ll be more fun to read about how to learn in a narrative form like that. And faculty because it’s more fun to learn when you read in that kind of a format for some people. we’ll see.

John: And if faculty design their courses to take advantage of what we know about learning, it can facilitate more learning.

Todd: Wouldn’t that be cool? We could just keep rolling, rolling. What a great amount of work. I mean, a huge amount of work that faculty do. They’re hard working folks that are just cranking away all the time. Number one, making their life a little bit easier by helping to understand things would be great. And just having a little bit more fun would be fun, would be nice way to go to0.

Rebecca: Hey, anytime you can save time, so that we can have more play in our lives is better.

Todd: Yeah, just to do whatever you want to do.

John: Yeah, ending on a note of fun is probably a great way to end this.

Rebecca: Well. It’s always great talking to you, Todd. Thanks for chatting with us and going on the Wayback Machine.

Todd: Oh, you know, I love the Wayback Machine.

Rebecca: I love it too.

Todd: For those of you who don’t know about that, you should check out the Wayback Machine

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John: If you’ve enjoyed this podcast, please subscribe and leave a review on iTunes or your favorite podcast service. To continue the conversation, join us on our Tea for Teaching Facebook page.

Rebecca: You can find show notes, transcripts and other materials on teaforteaching.com. Music by Michael Gary Brewer.

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