Teaching with AI
AI strategies to support all your teaching needs and take your classroom dynamics to a new level.
HOW AI HAS TRANSFORMED YOUR ASSIGNMENTS (WHETHER YOU USE IT OR NOT)
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Artificial Intelligence (AI) has brought about a sudden revolution in the world of education. In some cases, this transformation has rendered traditional evaluation tools less effective, and perhaps, obsolete.
Even if you haven't incorporated AI tools into your teaching methodologies, your students are tackling coursework differently already.
In response to these changes, it is recommended that you:
Take for granted the proficiency of students in utilizing AI tools.
Provide explicit instructions regarding the appropriate use of AI tools.
This shift is most evident in take-home assignments. Assignments well-suited to the new AI context typically fall into one of these two categories:
1. AI-PROOF ASSIGNMENTS: The design and structure of these assignments are such that they inherently restrict the effectiveness of AI tools.
2. AI-INTEGRATED ASSIGNMENTS: These assignments are structured to include the use of AI as an integral part of their completion process.
However, there exists a third category of assignments, that we may call AI-INCOMPATIBLE ASSIGNMENTS. These are traditional assignments where the use of AI tools is prohibited by the professor, as this would undermine the intended purpose of the exercise.
It's important to recognize that currently no reliable proctoring tools can prevent or detect the use of AI by students, and it remains uncertain if there ever will be. This entials that accurate detection of AI use in AI-Incompatible assignments is not a possibility at this time, especially, if completed at home, as in-person proctoring is not an option in that case.
Consequently, faculty members are advised to reconsider and possibly re-structure these AI-Incompatible assignments into AI-proof or AI-integrated formats.
We are here to assist you in reorienting your assignments to align with your learning objectives! Please contact us at learning.innovation@ie.edu to schedule an office hours meeting on Zoom.
AI-GENERATED QUESTION BANKS IN BLACKBOARD
Good news! AI technology is now integrated into Blackboard. This is called AI Design Assistant and it will incorporate a number of AI options into some of the menus you are currently navegating in your course sites on Blackboard.
The most powerful innovation is the ability to generate automatically Question Banks based on the contents uploaded to your course.
In the example below, we start by clicking on Create and then Create Item / Document.
We will call this document 'Aesthetic Judgement', as this is intended for a philosophy course on that subject. The text where our Question Banks will be extracted is drawn from an online encyclopedia accessible through IE Library.
Next, we pasted the text into the text box editor, like in the image below.
Note that, at this moment, you cannot generate AI questions out of pdfs or materials in other formats uploaded to your Blackboard course; you need to paste the contents as text into a Blackboard document created for that purpose, as shown in the previous example.
Now, save the document and AI will allow us to generate questions in multiple formats and levels of complexity based on the information provided. Question banks can be later reused in course tests, assignments or even weekly quizzes to track that your students are keeping up with the readings.
Watch Blackboard AI Design Assistant in action in this video! ↓
Finally, to access your Question Banks at any time, click on the icon on the left menu of the course
Important: as with any AI auto-generated contents, review your questions before making them visible
USING AI TO DRAFT A LESSON PLAN
AI tools enable users to create lesson plans so you distribute evenly the contents of your session. This will also ensure you allocate time for for students' participation in a more controlled way.
The example shown in the video below we used the following prompt:
You are teaching an undergraduate course on International Relations divided into 15 sessions, each of them about 80 minutes long; session 4 is devoted to the European Union, its origins, development, structure and legal and institutional instruments;
Students have only an introductory knowledge of International Relations, mainly their history and I World War and II World War and early Cold War phases.
Create a lesson plan for Session 4; break down all the issues we should be discussing during that 80-minute session, including a few breaks for students participation and Q&A.
No sentences, only bullet points.
DESIGNING ASSIGNMENTS WITH AI
Designing assignments with AI is pretty simple. Remember as always that, the richer the information you give to the system, the better the results will be. The prompt on the left, for instance, details exhaustively all the different parameters ChatGPT-4 needs to consider in order to elaborate an assignment (right image).
AI is also great for introducing interactive activities in your courses! You only need to request the system to adopt a specific persona, depending on the activity you design. The following examples, provided by IE Professor Daniel Fernández-Kranz, show two complementary scenarios that you can incorporate into your teaching.
The first one is a ROLE-PLAY experiment, where AI is used to facilitate a stimulating debate showcasing contrasting viewpoints between Argentinian politicians Millei and Massa on economics.
The prompts below, on the other hand, illustrate AI's capacity to create SIMULATION GAMES with the participation of invented personae:
Prompt 1: Simulate the impact of your monetary policy decisions
Prompt 2: Debate with a workers’ union leader about the minimum wage
GENERATE RUBRICS EASILY WITH AI
AI is an effective instrument for developing grading rubrics tailored to the specific topic and characteristics of your course.
In this case, we provided ChatGPT-4 with a list of Learning Objectives for a course and asked the system to create a rubric based on them to assess a hypothetical class presentation.
Here is ChatGPT-4's response (shown in full in the video at the bottom):
It not only generated the rubric but also suggested a weighted grading scale for the presentation:
ACADEMIC INTEGRITY IN THE AGE OF AI
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The rise of AI technologies has posed significant challenges to academic integrity.
As time has passed since the explosion of AI in late 2022, it has become increasingly evident that the development of foolproof AI detectors is becoming less likely in the near future. Even OpenAI had to shut down its own detector due to "low accuracy." This becomes even more challenging when human intervention further refines the content, rendering traditional detection methods almost obsolete.
However, our primary goal should not be to passively wait for new detection technologies to catch up with AI advancements. Instead, we should focus on two key objectives:
→ Cultivating educational values that highlight and promote the significance of academic honesty.
→ Designing assignments, projects, and exams that prioritize sustained effort throughout the learning process, rather than solely concentrating on the delivery of a final product (such as an essay, a paper, a project, and so on.)
While one straightforward approach is to restrict access to AI technology with the tools available at IE, such as SMOWL and RESPONDUS a more ambitious aim is to design assignments that inherently defy AI usage. Once accomplished, this would render the use of AI either inconsequential to the assignment's objectives or, if AI is permitted, ensure that its utilization enriches the educational experience of students, rather than impoverishing it.
Here are some valuable recommendations:
AI doesn't have to be utilized all the time, much like a delicious ingredient doesn't need to be present in every recipe. It's perfectly acceptable to limit its use in selected sessions and switch to 'offline mode' when advised.
Stay vigilant for inconsistencies in content, as chatbots may not be aware of the materials covered in your course. Additionally, AI responses often tend to sound somewhat mechanical and verbose, although this is gradually improving as technology advances.
Utilize exam review sessions to your advantage as a professor, you can make use of them too! In case of doubt, don't hesitate to call in a student to assess their ability to support the arguments presented in their work. It's a good practice to inform students in advance that this possibility exists.
If AI is to be incorporated proactively in your course, design cumulative work that allows you to track students' progress under your guidance. Additionally, consider formal presentations of findings to ensure that students truly absorb the knowledge, regardless of the sources they utilized along the way.
AI AND DATA PROTECTION
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As faculty members, it's paramount to recognize the potential risks associated with Artificial Intelligence when it comes to data privacy. This is important specifically due to one particularity of most AI systems: whenever you submit data, the information can be stored and resurface at a later point in a transformed or aggregated form, thus influencing the system's interactions with other unknown users.
For this reason, be always aware of the ethical risks posed by AI and adhere to privacy laws, including GDPR or FERPA. Ensure that any AI application you use is transparent in its data usage policies and complies with legal standards. And, crucially, refrain from including personal data about yourself, your students, or any confidential details about IE University’s structure and operations in your prompts.
Promoting a culture of data responsibility and being vigilant about potential data misuse or breaches is essential at IE, and the only path to balance AI's benefits with the protection of the privacy rights of the institution, students and staff.
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