Teaching and Generative Artificial Intelligence like ChatGPT

Four square images of a classroom in a surrealist style

Generated by DALL-E 2. Depictions of a teacher and classroom in a surrealist style.

ChatGPT was built by OpenAI, the San Francisco A.I. company that is also responsible for tools like GPT-3 and DALL-E 2, the breakthrough image generator that came out in 2022. Prior to the advent of ChatGPT, people were experiencing increasingly human-like support when they interacted with A.I. support chatbots on corporate websites. However, these couldn't help students with homework or assist faculty in building rubrics. In contrast, ChatGPT, Microsoft's Bing, and Google's Bard, three of the most accessible generative A.I.'s currently, will do all this and much more.

Join the A.I. Learning Community

This CTT resource introduces faculty to A.I. and provides information about common questions around policies and adapting instruction. We encourage faculty at UNL to contact us at ctt@unl.edu if they would like to explore the capabilities of ChatGPT, Bard, or Bing without creating accounts.

A.I. Update

Oct 17 | CTT launches AI Exchange

AI Exchange is a blog aiming to support discussion at UNL about the use of AI in teaching and learning. It will contain articles, essays, tutorials, as well as article summaries and reviews.

This month we’re kicking off the blog with “Questions Around the Ethical Use of AI in the Classroom,” an article by Rachel Azima and Amy Ort. Additionally, Nate Pindell shares the process and prompts he used with ChatGPT to generate a rubric. He also outlines how he used ChatGPT to quickly create a useful resource that he was unable to find online, and which would have taken a fair amount of time to create from scratch.

Aug 10 | Increasing access and improving user interfaces

August kicks off with significant updates and announcements in A.I. Most notable are OpenAI’s prompt assist tools that will help faculty and students make more effective use of ChatGPT by guiding queries, suggesting follow-up questions, and offering keyboard shortcuts for power users. Additionally, OpenAI has made ChatGPT4 the default for paid users and suspended its A.I. detection tool used to detect ChatGPT generated content for being unreliable. The company plans to revise and re-release.

Other developments include the rapid release of new A.I.s and their widening availability. LLAMA 2, a chatbot for simple requests and conversations, has been released by Meta AI, is available for research, and commercial use. Other companies' embrace of A.I., such as Adobe and Autodesk, point to further specialization and integration with the applications students and faculty use daily. Faculty may begin to see more news of discipline specific A.I.’s in coming months.

Quick Start Resources

Developing Course Policies
Specific Examples of using A.I. as part of teaching
D’Agostino, S. (2023, January 12). ChatGPT Advice Academics Can Use Now. Inside Higher Ed.
A more extensive article in which 11 academics propose ideas for “harnessing the potential and averting the risks” of AI technology in the classroom.
Mills, A. (n.d.). AI Text Generators: Sources to Stimulate Discussion among Teachers. Google Docs.
A large collection of resources and articles sorted into several categories among which are “Sample Academic Integrity Statements about Text Generators” and “Student Perspectives and Marketing to Students” along with “Understanding AI Text Generators/Large Language Models.”