AI in Higher Ed: Using What We Already Know About Good Teaching Practices

How is AI at the moment utilized in larger schooling? As of fall 2023, we’re nonetheless in the early levels of determining what AI integration means for larger ed. In some school rooms, resembling my very own, we speak about what AI can and might’t do. We have a look at examples of output from massive language fashions (LLMs) and critique how properly it did with the responses. Next semester, my college students will spend time working with immediate writing, reflecting on LLM output and reflecting on when data and studying matter versus when human-AI hybrid writing is smart. For many college, that final query is inflicting essentially the most friction round campuses.

How the previous influences the current

Instructors throughout the disciplines query how and the place their college students will use AI. Will college students offload the conversion of information into studying, or will college students nonetheless be motivated to spend time combating ideas and gaining deep understanding of subjects? While I see that as a worthwhile query, I additionally replicate alone childhood. I grew up with card catalogs and encyclopedias. It was an enormous deal to have your personal set of encyclopedias at house! We discovered what we may from the books we had entry to and memorized information to regurgitate on assessments. This was the epitome of information and studying earlier than the web turned extensively obtainable. Now, if my little one asks me a query about something, we will Google it on my cellphone from wherever we occur to be. Telling a scholar to go to the library to entry a bodily copy of one thing is the outlier as an alternative of the norm.

Thinking about how data manufacturing and data holding have shifted in only a few many years, I feel there are classes to be discovered for larger ed. How we strategy our topics in the face of AI will each radically and in addition barely change. For instructors who’ve had the chance to take part in pedagogy studying teams, there could also be lots of overlap in what they already learn about educating and what modifications AI would possibly convey to the classroom. Here are some examples:

• Many individuals are simply now coming to the concept of the flipped classroom to have college students grapple extra deeply with ideas earlier than turning to AI for assist. But the concept of the flipped classroom is credited to Jonathan Bergman and Aaron Sams in 2006.
• Another pedagogy mannequin that instructors make use of is the idea of transformative learning, which offers college students with a disorienting dilemma of some form after which walks them by way of the method of exploration and reflection to see if/how college students have been modified in a way by way of publicity to this new idea. Jack Mezirow is credited with developing this concept in the 1970s.
• The idea of Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL) is one other one which instructors would possibly profit from eager about. In exploring SoTL projects, instructors take time to interrogate a educating observe of their very own and see if it actually works or if it really works the best way that they assume it does. The origins of SoTL will be traced again to Ernest L. Boyer’s 1990 e book Scholarship Reconsidered: Priorities of the Professoriate.
• I additionally discover worth in prioritizing process over product, which will be credited to Säljö in 1979. This idea takes away from college students the stress and burden of the “three tests and a final” or “three papers and a final” mannequin that appears to have taken maintain in many locations and as an alternative focuses on how college students get to the ultimate product. There is worth and studying to be gained in the journey and never simply the vacation spot. Many different pedagogical theories have stood the take a look at of time, however these deeply impression how I strategy my school rooms.

Using pedagogical theories to strategy educating with AI

So why is that this gaze backward after we are speaking about the way forward for AI in larger ed? It is a reminder each that what was previous is new once more and that many people have already got no less than just a few instruments in our pedagogy toolboxes to deal with the modifications that AI will convey to our approaches to educating.

When I take into consideration the theories introduced above, I take into consideration how I’ve structured and restructured my classroom over time. At one level, I utterly eliminated studying responses as a result of they weren’t working for me. Now they’re again, however not as a product wholly unto themselves. Instead, they kind the premise for our classroom dialogue in the next assembly. Can college students use AI to write down their responses? Yes, fairly simply, which is why they aren’t the one measure of understanding and why we’ve got class discussions as properly. Students flip in their studying responses earlier than class, then get into small teams in class to debate the studying. After that, we come collectively as a big group and talk about the studying. The studying responses are additionally low-stakes factors worth, taking the strain off college students to cheat. And, should you needed so as to add some transformative studying inquiries to the studying responses, you can get even deeper into what the readings meant to the scholars.