Teaching and Generative Artificial Intelligence

Students in class outside by the sculpture, Breach by Roxy Paine. City Campus. October 28, 2020. Photo by Craig Chandler / University Communication.

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 ChatGPT4 or other AIs without creating accounts.

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.”

AI News and Updates

Integrating AI in the Classroom - Workshop Recording Available

OCT 18 | This week the CTT hosted the Integrating AI in the Classroom workshop.  The session was facilitated by Senior Instructional Designer Brian Wilson. 

Prompt Library for Teaching & Learning

Ethan Mollick and Lilach Mollick have created a collection of prompts that can aid instructors and students. These are extensive prompts worth reading to better understand the capacity of AI to perform more sophisticated work, as well as the knowledge and expertise needed to create such a prompt.

Classroom examples added to AI Exchange

In these classroom examples, Brian Wilson explains how he uses ChatGPT to help him manage lively discussions while Samantha Fairclough shows the many AI tools she is trying in her entrepreneurship courses, and Erin Bauer outlines her assignment where students collaborate with AI to critique a journal article.

AI and Information Literacy Canvas module available to UNL instructors

A new module, “AI and Information Literacy” is now available in the Canvas Commons. This module is written for students to help them learn about AI tools such as ChatGPT, Bing AI, and DALL-E and strategies for evaluating and citing the outputs created by them. Insert this module into your course and use it as-is or modify it to suit your teaching and learning goals and course policies. Content includes short videos, reading, completing short quizzes, and activities.

Once completed, students will be able to evaluate how to use AI-based tools responsibly in their academic work. Learning outcomes include:

  1. Explain generally how AI-based tools work as well as their benefits and risks
  2. Recognize when AI gives inaccurate or misleading answers, and fact-check AI output
  3. Cite AI-generated work
  4. Begin exploring creative ways to use these tools

This CC-licensed module was adapted by the UNL Libraries and the CTT and originally created by the University of Maryland.

To add the module to your course, search the Commons for “AI and information literacy” and select “Import/Download”.

Questions?

Contact Melissa Gomis (melissa.gomis@unl.edu) or an instructional designer assigned to your college.

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.

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.