15 Quotes about Teaching & AI

While it’s not necessary in every discipline, there are certain ones — like computer science or writing — where colleges will need to prepare their students for a future with AI in it. Chronicle of Higher Ed 

The advice that I gave to faculty was that you need to be trying this out. You need to at least be conversant in what your students are able to do, and think about your assignments and what this tool enables. What policies or what guidance are you gonna give students in terms of whether they are allowed to use it? In what way would you be allowed to use it? MIT Tech Review

There’s more of a danger in not teaching students how to use AI. If they’re not being taught under the mentorship of scholars and experts, they may be using it in ways that are either inappropriate or not factual or unethical. Chronicle of Higher Ed 

I am no less human because I received help in thinking about things. All AI is, when understood, is a little help, a guide on the road to insight. I hope we continue to teach our students, using all tools available, and not deter them from the pursuit of knowledge and experience. Washington Post

If you’re teaching, you need to realize that the world has AI now. And so students need to be prepared for a world where this is going to be integrated in industries in different ways. MIT Tech Review

Learning how to engineer prompts is likely to be a transitional skill. Soon more sophisticated programs with specialized uses will be on the market. Faculty members would be better off focusing less on prompt engineering and more on determining the problems they would like to solve. Chronicle of Higher Ed

Bruno Ribeiro, an associate professor of computer science at Purdue, gives students unique coding problems that seem simple on the surface but have slight variations that often trip AI up. He then has students identify where the program went wrong and fix the code. Chronicle of Higher Ed

Students can, for instance, analyze a conversation with ChatGPT as an assignment and identify signs of fabrication, biases, inaccuracies, or shallow reasoning. Or faculty members can have students use AI to write a first draft of an essay and show what they might change. Or instructors could include AI as a contributor to group discussions. Chronicle of Higher Ed

Some professors think we should carry on as before, assigning take-home essays but writing ever-more-artful questions that GPT-4 or some other form of AI can’t answer. I’m dubious whether that can be done. Even if it could, I’m not interested in making my questions elusive enough to outsmart a machine. At a certain point, it risks demanding too much of the students: expecting a superhuman effort on their part, just for the sake of proving their humanity. Chronicle of Higher Ed

Something has gone very wrong when the advent of a machine that can produce merely competent essays is causing intelligent and committed educators to give up on assigning substantial student papers, which, as Robin acknowledges, are central to the educational enterprise as we have long conceived it. Chronicle of Higher Ed

A survey of students in grades 6-12, released by the nonpartisan think tank Center for Democracy & Technology, found that students with special needs are more likely than their peers to use generative AI and be disciplined for doing so. Center for Democracy & Technology

Some professors think that it’s the pressure and “high stakes” of our grading and assessment regimes that produce those feelings of discomfort in our students. I think it’s intrinsic to the work, if you’re doing it right. Our goal shouldn’t be to eliminate this discomfort. We need to teach students that it’s part of the process, and develop strategies for coping with it. Chronicle of Higher Ed 

Bridging the gap, and easing fears, will lie in getting educators acquainted with AI — a training need underscored by the fact that 96 percent of the 1,000 educators said they have not received professional development on the topic. Schools have recognized these needs, although training of generative AI specifically is still nascent. EdSerge

As teachers grapple with these big questions about what AI means for their profession, they need to have access to frequent training about it. “You need to give teachers time to experiment with it, and preferably learn in small cohorts, where they can share what they’re discovering.” EdSurge

Like a dishwasher or a vacuum cleaner, ChatGPT automates drudgery so we can focus on something more important. The promise of AI is, that by freeing us from the values of mere competence, we can focus more intentionally on cultivating distinctively human values. Chronicle of Higher Ed