Students can use AI tools to support or short-circuit their learning. In this episode, Tim Curry joins us to discuss how he uses AI tools to support students with diverse prior knowledge in a carefully curated framework.
Tim is a lecturer in the Department of Health Sciences at Northern Arizona University. He is developing AI applications for autism research and tribal health service while building Northern Arizona University’s Applied Health Analytics program. He’s also working on the completion of his PhD degree in health equity technology.
Show Notes
- Betsy Barre (2021). Student Workload. Tea for Teaching podcast. Episode 183. April 14.
- Betsy Barre. Course Workload Estimator 2.0 at Wake Forest College (the workload estimator that Tim referred to)
- Adam Tauman Kalai, Ofir Nacghum, Santosh S. Vempala, and Edwin Zhang (2025). Why Language Models Hallucinate. September 4.
- ASD3 Outcomes Project
Transcript
John: Students can use AI tools to support or short-circuit their learning. In this episode, we examine how one instructor uses AI tools to support students with diverse prior knowledge in a carefully curated framework.
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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 Tim Curry. Tim is a lecturer in the Department of Health Sciences at Northern Arizona University. He is developing AI applications for autism research and tribal health service while building Northern Arizona University’s Applied Health Analytics program. He’s also working on the completion of his PhD degree in health equity technology. Welcome Tim.
Tim: Hey, John, it’s great to be here.
Rebecca: Today’s teas are:… Tim, are you drinking any tea today?
Tim: Yeah, I am, actually. I’ve got one here that is this really nice licorice root spearmint mixture.
Rebecca: That’s an interesting combination. I don’t know that I’ve heard of that.
John: And I have just a plain old oolong tea today.
Rebecca: A nice choice. I’ve swung back to old habits, and I have an English afternoon tea.
John: Must have been a tough day, huh? [LAUGHTER] Today, you’ve been doing some interesting work in which you’re planning to have students work through a learning portfolio constructed for each course module in a health science course in which they’ll complete a structured sequence of interactions with a chatbot tutor that you’ve created. Before we discuss the details of this course, can you tell us a little bit about the course? How large is it? What’s the course level? And who are the students that generally would be taking this course?
Tim: Yeah, absolutely. So this course that we’re focused on today is HS 300 which is our human diseases course. It’s quite an interesting course. A typical class is usually about 40 students, usually juniors, although I do get sophomores and seniors in there. And why I say it’s an interesting class is even though it lives within our department’s program of public health I would say, in the average term, I only have about half the class filled with public health majors. The rest of them are a mixture between students who want to go pre med, so nursing students or med school, DPT, biomedical engineering, and then also a smattering of psychology majors. So it’s quite a diverse group I’ve got in this class, to be very honest, with a range of different backgrounds.
Rebecca: Can you talk a little bit about your general approach to how you’re planning to address the class? A little bit about the portfolio and the structure overall?
Tim: Yeah, do the objectives of this class are for students, broadly speaking, I won’t get into the full curriculum guide here, but broadly speaking, is for them to better understand not only a wide range of human diseases across all of our systems, but also the application of that knowledge to both the clinical side, so think more like Western care and also the public health side. So we have this interesting mixture here. In terms of the portfolios, the reason I chose to start with this class with this concept was, as you can probably imagine, with the varied degrees I have in there, I have students walking into this class with everything from having completed anatomy and physiology I and II and maybe a pathophysiology course, all the way to students who haven’t seen biology since high school, because they just haven’t reached that point yet. That makes it a challenge. It’s a little hard to talk about congestive heart failure if they don’t know the anatomy of the heart. So that is the reason I chose this approach, is because, and I know we’ll get into this, really is focused around meeting the student where they’re at in their current process of learning, which I think is really the best approach, especially in a course like this, where background knowledge is so critical.
John: Could you walk us through the steps that students would take through in a typical module? And I believe each one of these modules is for one week?
Tim: Yes, that is right. So, the way I prefer to build my Canvas shells, and it’s the same in person or online for the general layout, is that I start off each week, beginning in week two, where they have to do the content first before we actually dive into the meat of the week. So the first thing that they have is they are given a portfolio to work from. And the way that these actually works is that they are handed a file, and this file is the thing that I have produced for each week, and it starts off with some core basics about that particular body system, and then we progress into the diseases, and then progress into more application of their work. And they’re going to take that file and not only work to fill out all of the spots that I have included in there, but they’re going to take that file and give it to this AI bot that I have built out, which is going to act as their own personalized Socratic form of a tutor to actually help them work through the entire file. So that’s the general layout with the portfolio. Once they actually go and turn that in, that actually unlocks the rest of the week’s work. So for an in-person class, this means they got to do the portfolio before they show up to class. For an online class, it means they have to do it before they can engage with the more advanced application we would be doing that week.
Rebecca: Can you talk a little bit about why you chose this approach and how this counters how a textbook is designed for a typical student?
Tim: Yeah, absolutely. I know I alluded to this briefly earlier, but when we have a course like this where in, effectively, I’ll call it 14 weeks, we’re going through every body system and covering well north of 100 different ways that we get sick, ill, and die.
Rebecca: Sounds really exciting, [LAUGHTER] all the ways you can die.[LAUGHTER]
Tim: That’s actually the way I kind of go and bring it in, was like, we’re going to go through so many things, and it’s going to convince you that nobody is normal. There’s just no possible way. But students actually really like it, and I hope not too many of them are freaked out by the time they [LAUGHTER] leave my course. So the reasons for this, I found that with a class like this, we really kind of have two options. The first one is, is that it falls into this very, what I’ll say is, traditional, classic style of a lecture class where we show up and we have to effectively spend the first day raising the bar for everybody so that day two, we can actually do some application work where we can challenge their knowledge. That is tough, because with the gambit of not only backgrounds, but also just experience levels in this class, I can tell you that any given week, if I were to do that, I’d be boring, probably about a third to half the class, because they already know about the systems, they’ve been through the courses, they work in the field, whatever it may be. So that is kind of the downside of that approach, and I’ll be honest, the textbook we had been using for this, which I think is a fantastic textbook, if… here’s the big if… if you have some anatomy and physiology under your belt. If you don’t, it’s a lot to swallow, like it is a thick textbook. It’s phenomenal, and it doesn’t adapt. It’s a textbook. So that was really the core reason why I went down this path, was I’ve been working with artificial intelligence chatbots since 2015 which was pre all of what we have now, and back then, it was a lot of work. [LAUGHTER] It was tough work to actually get them to where we wanted them to be. So I’ve been going and doing this for quite some time, and ever since openAI kind of broke the teaching world in November of 2022 it’s been really fun to start to begin to play and see where are these capacities going. And suddenly we’re at this place where we can use this tool that our students can access for free to give them this individualized approach. So my hope is going into this term, that what this will do is truly meet the student where they’re at, if they’re that student who has just one prior biology I course, no anatomy, and physiology, it’s going to spend more time going through the anatomy that they need to know to be able to comprehend the diseases and the processes that we actually care about in this class.
John: Now I have to say this, if the students do not have any anatomy and physiology under their belts, they’re probably a bot already. [LAUGHTER] But moving on, one of the things I noted in looking through some of the modules that you’ve created is that you put in suggested times. And this is an approach that I know Betsy Barre has suggested in terms of a couple of variants of student workload calculators that she’s created. And we’ll include a link to our podcast with her about that. Could you talk a little bit about why you’ve included that and how you came up with the estimates of how long students are likely to take with each of these activities?
Tim: Yeah, absolutely. So I am a big fan of providing estimates or ranges with the students. Personally, whenever I build a course or rebuild a course, I use the Wake Forest workload calculator that they have on their website. I love it. I think it’s fantastic as a way to just get a general scoping. And this also comes from… I have to think here… I believe at this point it’ll change after 5:30pm today, but at this point, I’ve taught 184 sections of courses, and this has been consistent feedback I’ve had from the students I’ve taught, is it’s really helpful. When I look at the list of things to do, if there are like numbers beside it, that even if they’re not 100% right, they give me a way to kind of calibrate my brain. And so I have some idea about how to schedule out my week. I don’t know about you, John, but our students here, just because Flagstaff, if they’re residential, it’s just an expensive place to live. They’re not only full time as a student, they’re working two or three jobs on top of that. So being able to tell, like, where should I spend my time, what should I do first, is really important to them. So the estimates in this I kind of went and derived a couple ways. The first way was I went through and tried to turn my beginner mindset back on. It’s a little bit harder when you spend a lot of time in the field, but I tried to go backwards and work through this and get a feeling for how many questions do I need to ask if I’m just that average student who maybe has done anatomy and physiology I but hasn’t gone further, which is kind of the bar I generally see as an average in this class, and then I will fully admit, I have some unpaid help, called family members, [LAUGHTER] who are more than willing to go and jump in and just like dive into it and go and tell me what worked, what didn’t work. They’re all individuals who don’t have the background, so they represent that one extreme on the far end of their really having to learn everything. So that’s the way I got this rough estimate for what I’m starting with this term. And then one of the things I’ll do is, this term, as they work through the portfolios, I am actually asking for them to report back as they go and turn into each one about approximately how much time did you spend on each one, and so that I can better calibrate this tool as I move forward. And so we’re on a grand adventure.
Rebecca: I had some activities that I did that with students, and had them kind of mark their time and track their time, and I think it was just as interesting for me as it was for them to understand how they spent their time, or where they might spend more time than they thought. I can also see how, having times broken apart, even if they’re not 100% accurate for each individual student, it does give you the idea that you’re going to spend more time on this activity than this activity. This is maybe more important, and therefore I want you to spend more time on it. And it’s a way of conveying some of that prioritization that needs to happen, that students have a difficulty doing if they don’t have expertise in the subject.
Tim: Yeah, and I’ll say as well, I know, because I have these students in class every term, and I love them, but there will be some of them that will spend way too much time on one part, it’s the kid who’s clearly gone into med school, will do great as a physician, or whatever they go and pick, and hopefully this helps them keep on track where they’re not spending five hours in the first bit that should be 15 minutes, and then they panic about the rest of the thing.
John: Yeah, those relative weights are important just in terms of showing how much priority students should place on each.
Tim: Absolutely.
John: We know that active learning approaches, as you’re planning for this course, tend to result in increased learning by students and longer-term knowledge retention and more transfer ability. Yet, when students are asked about how much they feel they’ve learned when they’ve been using active learning, they generally report that they learn more in lecture courses because they feel that they’re not getting as much because they’re struggling with things and any gaps in their knowledge is becoming transparent, while if they’re sitting in a lecture class, they can sit there and nod and smile and everything makes a lot of sense. How are you going to sell active learning to the students?
Tim: That is great. And to be frank, you bring up an item here that is one of my favorite, just bizarre oddities, that I get to explain to my classes. So I have a couple approaches on this one, the first one is on day one, which, as we record, this is a couple hours away, actually, this is one of the first things I actually go and bring up, is to explain, this is not a lecture class. We’re not doing PowerPoint slide decks the whole class. Here’s why. And I explain all these points about the fact that active learning actually does make you learn more and, more importantly, helps you develop these skills that you’ll actually need to make yourself career ready. And that’s really important, and it feels uncomfortable, because you’re going to get it exposed, you’re going to learn what you know you know and what you don’t know that you don’t know [LAUGHTER] and that can be frustrating. It can be anxiety inducing. So I think the first bit is just calling that out, bringing it up, and just acknowledging it from the start. So I think that is part one. Part two is I have built in, and this is an item I actually learned from some fellow faculty at a conference about a year and a half ago. I actually have required work at the end of each week, which is a very short self-reflection that they have to do. And it’s 10 questions, and it includes things around this area, about like, preparation for class, what’d you learn? What you feel like you had a hard time with? …all of that, and I have seen that with just even holding them, of course, the same, that inclusion, the feedback has been phenomenal in that they really enjoy being effectively forced to pause after they’re done with everything and really think about what did they do this week, and then how do I improve for next week? And then I do think the third and final bit, which I realize I might be uncorking a can of worms here on you, John and Rebecca, but I use ungrading for all of the courses I teach, and in fact, for this particular course, I use a contract grading style. And so I do think that that is one major component, is utilizing that style that supports this active learning, where they know that they’re in this effectively safe space to work in, where mistakes are expected, and I’m not as worried about the mistakes. I’m more worried about the mistake I see you make 15 times in a row and not learn. So being able to get that feedback and learn in real time is really the key. And when they feel safe about their grade, I found that they’re much more willing to take risks.
Rebecca: That’s a lot to unpack on that first day.
Tim: Yeah it Is. It’s a big first day. And really, I’ll be honest, it’s the first week. It’s not really the first day, because as much as I would love to dive into how do we diagnose disease on the first day, they haven’t done anything yet.[LAUGHTER] So we can’t do that yet. And so it’s really the first week, I should say.
Rebecca: Can you talk a little bit about the Gemini Gem that you created, that students are interacting with, maybe a little bit more about what their process looks like, how you’re going to coach students around hallucinations, what’s it allowed to do when it’s interacting with students, and what other kind of constraints and guardrails you have in place?
Tim: Absolutely. So Gemini Gems, just for those folks who may not know, this is effectively a, let’s say it’s a tailored version of Gemini that we can instruct to behave in certain ways, or we can give certain knowledge background to that allows us to make a customized chatbot without having to go through the hassle of fully training your own chatbot. So this particular Gem was a bit of a journey over the last approximately three months, where I abstractly played with a range of different models, and for my own work and myself, I work around not only the Gemini bots, but also ChatGPT and Claude, just being like our big three and occasionally Llama, but I don’t do a lot in there. So the creation of the Gem really came about when I went and sat down and said, Okay, if I were able to spend time with every single student, one on one, how would I approach tutoring them? Because that would be our dream. They would learn so much, and there’s just no way, unless I can clone myself a bunch of times. There’s just no way. And I came to kind of three broad, I’ll say, pedagogical points I wanted the tutor to do. The first one being Socratic style. So I don’t want it to just go and lecture. All of the students I’ve taught for years and years now have been very clear. They don’t like that. They want to be involved. So Socratic style. So we’re going to ask a question. I might give you a little bit of a knowledge point, and then we’re going to expand on that, but I’m going to ask you to really use your brain and engage. Point two is that we want to assess prior knowledge and learning. So does Rebecca know about cardiac anatomy and valves, or do we need to kind of back it up and maybe go and cover the basics. So when we dive into a new portfolio, that’s really the first thing it does is to go and ask you a question related to where we’re about to dive into. So again, the heart is my jam. I’ll be very honest. That’s what I do a lot of work in. And so if we’re talking about cardiac disease this week, we’re going to assess, do you actually know about the heart. How much do you know? Is this enough for us to actually talk about disease or not? And if it’s not, let’s back it up and start there, and then go for it. And then the final one is that idea of the zone of proximal development, that idea that ideally we want to be asking a question that’s they’re getting about 80% correct, and so they’re encouraged, but not overconfident, because if they’re getting 100% correct, they think they know this and they really know about half of that. So those were the three bits I began with, and from there, I built out this prompt. The things it is allowed to do, it’s allowed to act in these three ways, and it’s allowed quite a bit of freedom to be in this encouraging form of a tutor that supports work and tells the student when they’re wrong. Because I think all three of us have probably engaged with a bot, and I know that Gemini can be one of the more challenging ones, where it cheers you on, even though it’s blatantly wrong. [LAUGHTER] We don’t want that, so it is encouraged to constructively criticize, I’ll say, when the student is wrong and help them correct that. What it’s not allowed to do, though, is also really important. There’s a whole component to my system prompt that gives it a rule set of what it can’t do. It’s not allowed to just fill out the file for them. It’s not allowed to write their answer for them either. It can help critique their work that they’re going and putting in to kind of help them improve it, but it’s not allowed to just go and do that for them. Those are the guardrails in place, broadly, in this one. And then, for this particular class, I think you also asked about things like hallucinations and background knowledge. I’ll start with the latter. So background knowledge, given the fact that we’ve been studying human disease for quite some years at this point, to go and say it briefly, like at least 100, I found that when I played with this by giving it some RAG files, so some files it can pull from, it actually slowed the bot down and didn’t improve the answers. Because realistically, when we’re talking about human problems, sites like Mayo Clinic, Medscape, all these free sites are already included in the build of the AI, so it already has all that. So what it really needs is more fine tuning to make sure it’s focused on, which, again, is a guardrail, focused on accepted knowledge in this realm from reputable sources, versus trying to give it a bunch of specific files that it then has to go through and search and find what it’s looking for. Now, I will say on the flip side, I have a different course that’s exercise considerations for special populations. So this is a little bit more of my background, exercise physiology wise. How do we do activity with a cardiac patient or a cancer patient or a child who has autism spectrum level three. And in this one, I did provide files because I found that especially with a topic like autism, there’s just so much out there that it can inadvertently get onto the wrong things, that it was better to give it position statements from major fields and bodies to go and pull from to make sure it stays locked in on where I want it to go. So that’s effectively the building of this bot. I have found that I can generally use the baseline system prompt around how this bot behaves and then add in some of the details I want specific to a course to adapt it fairly quickly. Finally, hallucinations. And so I got to ask, what’s like a favorite for you that you’ve experienced around a bot hallucinating a fun thing for you.
Rebecca: I don’t know if it’s fun, but something I’ve seen a lot is hallucinated sources and students claiming that they really do exist. [LAUGHTER]
Tim: My favorite was… now, this was back in 2023, so it has improved, I will say that… But in class, asked it for a weight training plan for a adult who was 85, had never worked out in their life and just wanted to play with their grandkids, which was a example form of a client for that class. And it gave them Olympic lifts on day one. [LAUGHTER] It was like, we’re doing clean and power jerks, like, what are you doing? No, absolutely not. So hallucinations, as either or both of you may have seen, openAI released a white paper at the end of last year where they supported that currently, mathematically, hallucinations are going to happen, period. It’s not a thing that can be fully wiped out, and that’s just the reality we’re in. So what I actually do is they work through the portfolio, then their task two behind that is, by the end of the week, we are going covering that working content, I actually give them my key, and they’re in charge of actually reading through this key and going saying, were there any points where my answers weren’t quite correct? And I actually view that as a valuable skill, because we’re working on going and teaching them that hallucinations exist. Bias exists in these things as of right now. They always will. Hopefully, maybe there’s a way to wipe that out in the future. Right now, it doesn’t seem like there really is. So we’re going to not only use it for learning, but then we’re going to check ourselves against a known source to see where might it have led you astray. And I’ll be honest, that is one of the big unknowns, because, yeah, I’ve done some testing within a small group, but once we roll it out in this semester, it’s going to be north of 100 students who are going to go and do this. We’re going to see what is the actual rate of students having incorrect answers. If it becomes too great, then we have some tuning we need to do on the spot.
John: I hope that you’ve asked the bot to ignore anything coming from the CDC since January of 2025. But going back to the issue of assessing student work. You mentioned you’re using ungrading, but yet you still do have to assign grades, typically at midterm and at the end, but you do have students reflecting each week on what they’ve learned and their progress. So how are you connecting their assessments into those grades? And how often are you doing that?
Tim: Yeah, there’s a couple things I do, so starting with the smaller items in class, let’s pretend like we’re about to walk into week two. So you’ve done the week two portfolio. The moment I go and hand that in, I can immediately get to the key, which is the goal is they can go and get to it right away and see, were there any problems there? And now we’re in class. The first thing we do every week, day one in class is we start, they get into their groups that I pre assign. And to be very honest, until week six, it’s just random. I want them to work with a bunch of people in that class. So they get into these preset groups, and the first thing we do is a tRAT or team readiness assessment test. Now I’ll kind of pause here, because I know it’s a mixture here, John, I’m going seeing a nod and a smile. I feel like you’ve used this. Is that right?
John: I haven’t used it myself, but I do know how it’s used in team-based learning.
Tim: And Rebecca, is that a thing you’re aware of, or would you like me to kind of walk through like, what is a tRAT?
Rebecca: I think for our audience, we need to walk through.
Tim: Awesome. So a tRAT is probably one of my favorite tools for in-person classes, because I effectively get to trick my students into taking a quiz in class that they like taking, which is quite an experience. So this is a multiple choice quiz that you can use these cards that are pre-keyed. I will admit that I’ve actually moved to running a Google script on this. And the idea is basically they work as a small group. So I do groups of three or four, no larger than four in my classes, and what they have to do is, as a group, they go and decide, hey, for question one, we think the right choice is B, and they go and click on it, and if it’s wrong, it will go and turn red and say, try again. So they have to reason their way through and every time I’m wrong. I’m reducing the amount of points I could earn for that one. So because I use four choices in mine, if I get it right on the first thing we choose, it’s worth four points. If I don’t, it goes down to two and then one and then zero, because if you clicked on all four, you truly have no idea what was right or wrong there. Now for my classes, for this term, because I want them focused on their knowledge, and what do they know, and what do they not know? All that they have to do is report what they got, and if they’re there in class and do it, they get marked as all done with that. With that, I know I’ve heard feedback from other faculty being like, “Well, if that grade doesn’t go in the book, don’t they just not try?” And I actually go and say, like, “No, that’s actually the opposite of what I see is, they know how they did, they don’t like not doing well [LAUGHTER] in the class, especially if they spent all this time engaging.” So what they do is, I see from effectively week 2 to week 14, the grades just keep increasing, week over week over week. And what I actually do with these is, instead of just regurgitating what they just learned through the portfolio, we actually take one step more advanced, and I have 15 questions organized, usually around anywhere between four to six major conditions we’re going to cover. And we ask questions that are more advanced and more case application work, where if you don’t understand the background, you’re not going to get this right. And because it’s forcing them to do peer-to-peer engagement and reason through what is right or wrong, it requires them to really assess their own work and knowledge. So that’s a bit of it is, in class that goes and gives me a timestamp, because every single attempt I see live… that goes back to a Google sheet. So I see everything, I can see where we are right on the first attempt, where are we not. Where might we need to refresh on day two, and then the really big bulk of it is around that what happens after the tRAT? And what actually occurs in my class after that is we’ll spend that last hour of that first day and then an hour fifteen on our day two doing some quite advanced application work. So as an example, one week when we talk about pulmonary conditions, they go straight from the tRAT into learning what a SOAP note is. So, for those who don’t know, this is a way that we write a note in more of the clinical medical field. So they learn about this way of writing notes, and then they, as a team, actually work with a bot that I will assign them that acts as a patient, and they have to produce a SOAP note for that that they then have to present to the class on day two. So it’s all, can they pull out the right information? I f they think it’s problem A, they think it’s pneumonia, what other questions do you need to ask about that? And that’s our weekly work. And all of this at the really end of the term leads up to the culminating project in our class, which is three parts. For this class, this is where I’m really assessing them on what do they know? And they can revise and improve. They pick a disease that exists today. So as much as smallpox is fascinating, it doesn’t exist, except for in labs and hopefully never out in our globe again. And so they pick a thing that they find intriguing. The first bit is they have to do research and write me a historical overview of this disease and how it has impacted our health over time, including, how has it affected our clinical past, how has it affected our public health past, our policies, all of that stuff. So it’s this really overview, big scale idea. Number two, they go and take what they just went and wrote there and turn it into fact sheets. Now a fact sheet, I guarantee both of you have seen before, because if you’ve been into a physician, they have those things like: “Get the flu shot, now. Here’s why.” That’s a fact sheet. So they have to write one about their thing that they picked for a general adult, one for a physician, and one for a person who might be in Congress and might be making policy. So it requires them to take this knowledge and turn it and go and say, “What does this general adult need to know? What does maybe a physician need? What does a policy maker need?” And then the last of it is, and we’re ramping up into this, is they’ll actually give a presentation in week 15 of our term, where they have to propose a potential public health program that would help within a certain group of people for this thing and improve their health, which requires them to really thoroughly not only understand the disease, the processes behind but also the populations affected. How might we reach those groups? How do we help them, like, what are they lacking? And then, how would we actually go and reach them? And for this group, that’s usually their first time they’ve ever done this, so that’s a big ask, but they have the knowledge they can do it successfully on that. So really, a lot of it is around the projects, but everything builds up to those projects.
Rebecca: So it sounds like, with all the project-based learning that you have in here, you’ve certainly been thinking a bit about student use of AI and its potentials for cognitive offloading and academic integrity that we know come up in many conversations around AI. Can you talk a little bit more about the reasons why you chose some things and how that might relate to academic integrity issues?
Tim: Absolutely. So I think this is the core of a conversation we could have for hours on here. I have students every term who it’s very clear that a paper and assignment was written by AI. I don’t think that’s going away anytime soon. And [LAUGHTER]] the reality as well is there was, and I would have to go find it again. But there’s been quite a bit of work that’s shown that the majority of employers are expecting them to walk out of a college with some generative AI skills. So we need to be going and teaching this. And part of that is we need exposure. So for myself, I think there’s a couple parts to this question. The cognitive offloading is an item that, again, I do address in week one or week two, just kind of, depending on how week one rolls about just having kind of a very open discussion at the start of a class for about five minutes. About these are the risks if you, for example, try to acquire foundational knowledge and you just offload that to the AI writing the assignment for me. These are the risks that are run, and here’s why I don’t want you to do that. This bot that I am getting you to work with is specifically designed to force you to learn and think and then actively engage in this to help prevent that. So that’s the first bit. The second bit as well is we do actually go and talk about throughout a class like this, we go into a little bit, and I will fold this in maybe the first five minutes, kind of threaded throughout the term, we go and talk about more of this ethical or philosophical component with AI usage, because it goes beyond just things like power and water that is used for going and training these bots. And we do go and talk about that, but we’re beyond that here, and we go and talk about things like, “Well, what is the purpose of learning? When do we use these as an enhancement versus using it in a way that’s going to go and detriment your learning and your skill development? How do we avoid that?” And I’ll be honest, this is not the first term I’ve gone and spoken about these. I’ve done this for a couple terms now. And the feedback I’ve heard, which I suspect both of you will have heard if you have gone and done this before, is that students actually really appreciate it, because a lot of our kids, especially right now, they were in high school during the rapid pandemic lockdown era, and then maybe hybrid, and then maybe [LAUGHTER] back into lockdown. And what I’ve heard from them is they were threatened, and they were told by a lot of the folks in high school, and then moving into being freshman and sophomore, “If you use this, I’ll fail you out of the class, you’ll get expelled.” And so they’re afraid to admit any type of use. And nobody’s talked with them about, how do we develop this as a tool for your toolkit versus replacing your brain. And once we actually get into that, then we can actually explore this region in a much more effective way. So I think we need to have an open talk about this, and then as we build out parts of the class providing the guidance they need. So for example, for the paper that we just spoke about, that historical paper, they’re allowed to use an AI, and I have this built right into that. I’m fine with them if they want to go and use it for brainstorming, for helping them outline the paper, feedback on their own work, feedback on the paper. And I want to hear their voice. I want to hear their writing. So it’s not allowed to write the paper for them. I want them to write it. So I think it’s both the education and then being very clear about what you want them to do or not do, and then why.
John: And given the nature of the assignment, they’re already seeing how AI can be useful in assisting them in various ways that can carry on into their future careers. And the ungrading aspect of it also takes a lot of that pressure of grades off, allowing them to focus on learning. So, those are approaches I’ve recommended to many people trying to do these things. If we can show students how AI can be useful, and if maybe we shift their focus from getting the highest grade to learning the most, it can have an impact.
Tim: Yeah, well, and that, and I’ll go throw out a third one here, building them a box and allowing them the freedom to explore in that box. So I’ve told them what parts they need in the paper, but I’m allowing them to pick a disease that they actually want to research out, and that is a huge help, because when they want to do the work, I’ve had some phenomenal work done where I read it, and I’m like, man, you’re a couple reviews away from being able to publish this as like an undergraduate, like this is phenomenal.
John: That can really tap into intrinsic motivation. I know when I give students freedom in the choice of their projects or topics, they get so much more engaged than if they’re given a list of things they have to do.
Tim: Yeah, totally.
Rebecca: There’s a lot of steps week to week. There’s a lot of things that students need to do. In my experience, people don’t always read all the instructions [LAUGHTER] and maybe don’t follow through in the ways that we’re expecting them to. How are you hoping to prevent some of this? Especially because there’s a lot of steps in “this unlocks that” that can prevent someone from making progress during the week.
Tim: Yeah. So first one is, I have, unsurprisingly here, I’ll say I do have very clear instructions on like, what to do each week. And as you just said, some students just don’t read that. And the first thing that they do is, “oh my goodness, I can’t see the week,” email the professor. So the first bit is, I have learned how much instruction is enough versus how much is too much, because if it’s just pages and pages, they just won’t read it. So how to be succinct there? Part two is, for example, for the first portfolio, we’re going to actually start that in class. So that’s our day. We’re going to actually spend about half the class, and we’re going to sit there and work on it in class. So I’m available right then and there, and I make sure that anytime we have something new happening in a course, and this is the exact same in person or in an online course, is that I, at the start of class, I’m very, very clear both of the days about this is exactly what you need to do. And yes, that will not catch 100%. I still get a student or two out of 40 who are like, “Oh my goodness, it won’t open up. What am I doing wrong?” And I just have to go, remember to turn in your portfolio and that will unlock over the weekend they’re like, “Oh yeah, I recall that now.” So that has been kind of the path I found that works well, is to introduce complex things in class, including the projects, allow some free time where I can help them immediately, and then follow up with regular reminders of what to do.
John: Northern Arizona University, as Oswego does, has a site license for the use of Gemini. Would this work as well if all students didn’t have the same equitable access to a platform?
Tim: Yeah, that’s a big question. And in fact, I’ll say to throw a complexity here, we not only have the Gemini, we’re a Google, and we also have Copilot. I have no idea why, but we do. [LAUGHTER] So, we have lots of fun stuff. Without that, I think that even if you were to use the Gemini free version, that still gives you sufficient usage and space to be able to do a thing like this. The big asterisks I throw on there is making sure that we’re 100% transparent with our students about the fact of, “Hey, we don’t have a license. We’re going to do this. We’re going to do it through the Gemini bot, because the context window… for those of you who maybe that’s a new phrase, that’s basically the memory like in quotes for the bot… is gigantic, and the usage terms for the free tier are quite large enough to do this task. That anything you put into this bot, they could use it to train so don’t put anything that’s personal information into this bot. And I think that is a very good thing that we just need to teach in general, because there are a lot of students I teach who, one, they haven’t been told that they actually have this Gemini license for Ed that we pay for and that it’s all private. They’re going and using the ChatGPT free version, and they have no idea that they’re training on their data, unless they go to, like, flip off like a switch. And so that’s the first one, is we need to go and explain that, because there are students who, once they go and learn that are like, “oh my goodness, I put some very private stuff into here. I had no idea.” And then also thinking about the use in the class, for this class, for this purpose, we’re not asking them to reflect on anything. It’s straight disease and some biology learning. There’s nothing there that should put any personal information at risk. So I think it is 100% doable with the free license if I don’t have it. I think you just have to pick your bot wisely, because I’m a Claude person. I love Claude, and their free tier is very restrictive on the amount of use you get each day, so that’s not a good pick for this.
Rebecca: So we mentioned at the top some of the other ways that you’re using AI in your research. Can you talk a little bit about what that work looks like?
Tim: Yeah, I’ll try to be brief here. So I am a researcher on what’s called the ASD3 project, which is a joint project between the Oregon Health and Science U. and our institution. We have a PI here that I work under, and under that I work on the machine learning and deep learning, I’ll say, arm of the project. This is a multi-million dollar piece of work that looks at better understanding the autism experience for children, specifically around the disparities in the diagnosis and access of care. So a lot of data work. We work on several big code sets, so my work is mainly around using these advanced models to better understand where are these present, and how do we address them? So that’s that work. On the tribal health part of it. This is actually what I am planning on doing for my own doctoral research, is around trying to expand the availability of, specifically, heart care. So the cardiac rehab that I am trained in working on to individuals in a tribal space. The reason for this is that, based on some research we have, not only is heart health a major health burden within this space, but the relative risk of death from a heart-related problem in American Indians is somewhere around 53% higher than the average white adult’s, which is shockingly high. It’s the highest of any group. So, within this space, we also know that rehab is a thing that if we can get people into it, it dramatically drops the rate of a first event being like a heart attack, or if they’ve had their first one, their next event. But the problem is this, this is usually done in a hospital. And if you look at Navajo Nation, this is an area the size of West Virginia, they only have 13 hospitals total in that entire space. It’s very difficult to get to this, especially if you’re working full time, especially if you happen to be a farmer or you ranch or do both. So it can just be non feasible. So my work is focused around developing the foundational knowledge that I’ll take forward after I’m done, into the actual building of a generative AI that can supply this as a service within this space, and that is based on a very engaged approach, where we are working with folks from this space to help drive what does this AI look like? How does it engage? What do we do with cultural adaptation work? Because this is not my lived experience. It’s where I have knowledge, but it’s not my experience. It’s a different form of, a culture, a background, than what I am. So I am working on working with the tribes to be able to better drive what does this AI look like that we eventually build? How does it engage? And so that we’re not trying to walk in and propose a thing that doesn’t actually work because we don’t know what needs to be done yet. And so that’s, briefly speaking, the forms of AI that I do research on.
John: Some very valuable areas of research.
Tim: It’s exciting and frustrating at the same time. [LAUGHTER]
John: So we always end with the question, what’s next?
Tim: Yeah, in two hours, I’m going to go and see how this learning portfolio lands. That’s really what’s next for me is in two hours, we’re gonna dive into this for the first time for the entire class, and it’s no longer a trial. It is on the ground running. And yeah, I would love to do like a follow up, maybe in the summer or the fall, and we’ll actually have some figures and data and student feedback on how did the portfolios go? How did they change the class?
John: That would be great, and we’re looking forward to that conversation, so we’ll keep in touch.
Tim: Yeah, for sure. And I would just like to say, I do appreciate the time to chat, because I’m very excited about what we could do with AI in our space,
Rebecca: And it sounds like you’re finding ways to use it in all your spaces.
Tim: Absolutely.
Rebecca: So thanks for joining us. We appreciate your time and expertise.
Tim: And thank you, both of you.
John: Thank you.
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John: If you’ve enjoyed this podcast, please subscribe and leave a review on Apple Podcasts 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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