Instructional Practice

• Provide rubrics and assessment descriptions that make clear your expectations for AI-use. If no use is to be allowed, then explain your position and student responsibilities, making reference to academic integrity and the Student Code of Behaviour.
• Limit students to using provided course materials and resources. Restricting access in this way may reduce the chance students can use AI tools to complete course tasks and assessments.
• Ask students to write in class (pen, paper).
  • In-class writing may not be appropriate for all students. Anticipate and proactively design for the presence of students who will succeed more with accommodations
  • Prepare alternative assessments and assignments in advance
• Ask students to collaborate on how the class can, should, and should not use AI. Form students into groups. Set a schedule, so students can brainstorm, make proposals, debate/discuss, weigh strengths/weaknesses, and build a collaborative proposal or plan for the course.
• Students can submit academic work via Google Doc/Google Slides/Google Sheets/Google Site where the instructor is added as an editor (instructor can view the document history).
  • This has the added benefit of providing greater feedback opportunities for both instructor(s) and students.

AIM: Use Generative AI to help communicate the writing process in steps.

SUMMARY: Students often write their essays the night before the due date, but I want them to engage in a longer, more careful developmental process. I could input the following prompt into Bing: “I want students to write an essay on [Subject], so can you give me the steps to achieve this goal?”

COURSE CONTEXT: This type of prompt can be used for assignments that require students to work in stages.

AN EXAMPLE DIALOGUE: Write an Essay about Smart Cities using Microsoft's Bing

INSTRUCTOR TAKE-AWAYS: As you can see, Microsoft’s search engine chatbot, Bing, provides a series of steps that can serve as a guide to provide students or as a list that you can modify to best suit your class.

By employing their own approaches and experiences with essay writing and instruction, instructors need to critically assess these steps and augment accordingly. For instance, if the steps are too simplistic or if there are missing steps (such as the importance of factoring in stress management, time/work management, brainstorming techniques,and so on), then instructors can add those steps.

Instructors can also ask students to collaborate on this list and add points that relate to their own essay writing practice, so by the deadline of the essay, the entire class has a series of steps that best encapsulates their real-world essay writing process.

Bing, powered by OpenAI’s LLM, GPT-4, is able to actively search the Internet, and provide up-to-date links, as well as generated text and image outputs. You can use these qualities to your advantage with careful prompt construction. To improve the response from Bing, you can begin by asking Bing to research a topic or specific subject to help Bing produce better results. For example, if we want to develop a project on Smart Cities, then you can ask Bing to generate specific output based on your prompt specifics. For example, you could revise a basic prompt (advise students on how to write an essay about Smart Cities) into a more complex prompt: “Bing, please research Smart Cities. Also, research good essay writing. Now, here is my task for you: I want students to write an argumentative essay about Smart Cities, so can you give me the steps that can guide students to achieve this goal?”

Notice that this revised prompt consists of three requests from Bing, so Bing is aware that it must research Smart Cities and good essay writing before responding to your specific task request (advising students on how to write an essay about Smart Cities).

AIM: The assignment has several aims: 1) to evaluate students’ understandings of the Socratic dialogue; 2) to assess students’ ability to imitate the style of dialogue as they explore a topic of their choosing through discussion with an historical personage; and 3) to evaluate the students’ ability to frame and critically assess the dialogue through a well-crafted introduction or epilogue.

SUMMARY: Imagine you can enter conversation with one of the historical characters you have been learning about. For example, imagine that you could have a dialogue with Petrarch or Adriano Olivetti: what would you talk about?

In this assignment, you will be asked to develop a dialogue with at least one historic Italian character about one of the issues raised in the course. You can use a chatbot like Character.AI as an interlocutor, or you can use an AI system like ChatGPT to generate possible responses and then write both sides of the dialogue yourself. The overall assignment should be between 2500 to 5000 words long. Without using AI, you should include an introduction or epilogue where you reflect on the dialogue and what you were trying to achieve (which is included in the word count.) You can submit it as a PDF or Microsoft Word document though eClass.

COURSE CONTEXT: An assignment given to an interdisciplinary class, INT D 225: Complexity, Creativity and Critical Thinking, that the instructor taught in Cortona, Italy. The instructor specifically asked students to use an AI chatbot to complete the assignment.

Students were asked in the first week of class to read part of a dialogue by Petrarch and discuss it. Then, the instructor and students, together, explore how successful dialogues work. The instructor also carefully explains how students might begin to plot a dialogue of their own before assigning the task to students. 

INSTRUCTOR TAKEAWAYS: Student dialogues will be assessed on these lines:

• Does the dialogue deal with an issue in a coherent and interesting way?
• Do the characters represent different positions on the issue discussed? Are they believable characters or puppets? Are they historically interesting?
• Is there any drama to the dialogue? Do the characters disagree or challenge each other in interesting ways?

Instructors can also ask students to collaborate on articulating a list of traits of a strong Socratic dialogue, a list of recommended questions (or questions types) to encourage quality Socratic interaction, and/or a list of prompts that help facilitate the AI dialogue.

• Quick Prompt 1 (for Instructors): Provide guidance to students who are struggling to meet expectations (inspired by CESE NSW “What Works Best in Practice”).

  • Potential Prompt: Provide a set of specific and actionable steps for a struggling student in a university Calculus course to improve their performance.
    • Dive deeper: Based on the previous prompt, please indicate actionable study strategies.

• Quick Prompt 2 (for Instructors): Help students prepare for class by generating questions to check for student understanding (inspired by CESE NSW “What Works Best in Practice”). I like to ask more questions than I want to use. That way I can pick from the best questions. For example, If I wanted 5 quiz questions I would ask ChatGPT to produce 10 questions.

  • Potential Prompt: Write 10 multiple choice questions on degrees of freedom for a pre-class assessment in a university level statistics course.

• Quick Prompt 3 (for Students): Language Learning Practice: Instructors ask students to practice their language skills routinely by engaging in conversations with ChatGPT in the target language for a certain amount of time (for instance, 15 minutes a day).

  • Potential Prompt: Can you help me practice my [Insert Language] language skills?
  • Example Prompt 1: Can you help me practice my French language skills?
  • Example Prompt 2: Can you help me practice my English language skills?

• Quick Prompt 4 (for Students): Formative Feedback: As students develop their projects in stages, students utilize ChatGPT for feedback. Students keep track of such feedback. Along with submitting the course project, students reflect on the feedback by evaluating the feedback they are given and developing a final report explaining how much they learned from their interaction with AI as a project-development aid.

  • Potential Prompt: Can you provide feedback for a draft of my writing work?

• Quick Prompt 5 (for Students): Grammar, Punctuation, and Clarity Study Feedback: Students write paragraphs each week linked to course material (such as summarizing the week’s in-class lectures, discussions, readings, or viewings). Students submit their paragraphs to ChatGPT for grammar and punctuation feedback. This work can lead into a summative task which asks students to write and proofread a paragraph. 

  • Potential Prompt: Can you provide grammar and punctuation feedback for my paragraph?

• Quick Prompt 6 (for Students): Converse with a Historical Figure: Ask students (individually or in groups) to engage with historical figures relevant to the course content, so students can get a sense of how that historical figure engages with certain questions, subjects, or situations. Students can then relate key aspects of their exchange to the rest of the class. Students can use their interview to inform an essay. Or, students can question, critique, or evaluate the viability of their interview and justify their assessments with reasoned arguments.

  • Potential Prompt: Can you role play as [identify historical figure]?

ChatGPT is effective for working on basic to intermediate programming tasks. ChatGPT is able to generate usable testing data, give hints for debugging problems, and create reasonable quality practice problems. The tool can also help students who are new to coding because ChatGPT explains code. ChatGPT is patient! It will respond to as many follow-up questions as are needed until the student is able to understand the problem.

A chatbot generates output that can and should be questioned and assessed, so ChatGPT (or other AI) can be harnessed in ways to help students build their critical evaluation skills. For instance, use chatbot to create a model writing sample for students to evaluate. The instructor should have a good sense of the “level” of the chatbot-created sample (such as a B-grade or C-grade or D-grade paper). Students review and identify problems and issues (factual accuracy, sourcing, fabrications, etc.) with the output (the writing sample). Students research and then revise and rewrite the sample to improve on the chatbot’s writing model. Finally, students reflect on their learning.

(Artist in Studio Working in Partnership with AI - A futuristic digital illustration representing an Artist in studio working in partnership with AI to create artistic works. This image was generated using Stable Diffusion Online (https://stablediffusionweb.com/#demo).

AI can be used to generate art. Have students use different AI Art generators to produce artistic works. Then, lead a discussion on AI art. You can discuss the ethics, the similarities to non-AI art, the differences from non-AI art, and so on. A discussion such as this is a chance for instructors and students to contemplate the implications of AI art for society as a whole. Questions surrounding “authorship,” ownership (of art), originality, intertextuality, and collage can lead to invigorating discussion, debate, and reflection. Moreover, such discussions help both instructors and students see how they all, collectively, function as important contributors to how the world makes sense of AI art and defines or re-defines art and artistry. Finally, ask students to reflect on their AI art and the class discussion of AI art. What is this new aesthetic? What is actually happening to your images? What is the potential impact on art, artists, and the artworld? How students understand, integrate (or not integrate), and engage with the emerging AI aesthetic will influence how societies make sense of and engage with AI art.

Before AI, you may have built several complementary and supplemental resources yourself. Now you can do that with the help of AI. For instance, instead of building a resource on your own, collaborate with AI.