Students. Professors. Ethics. Artificial intelligence is increasingly changing every aspect of the classroom at the University of Connecticut.
Brad Tuttle, an assistant professor in the Department of Journalism, said that, since the rise of ChatGPT, higher education has changed its view of AI.
“In a very short amount of time, the approach from higher ed has shifted quite a bit from going ‘the sky is falling’ to this is an exciting new technology that we want to be in the forefront of,” said Tuttle.
Tina Huey, the associate director of faculty development at the Center for Excellence in Teaching and Learning, has been leading workshops teaching faculty how AI can both benefit and harm their courses.
“The biggest risk, I think, of not incorporating it [AI] into our teaching is that it is making ourselves a little bit irrelevant,” said Huey.
Huey said AI is a helpful tool because it can cater to each student while a professor has an entire class of students.
“It’s very time-consuming to create teaching materials that can meet every student’s need, right?” said Huey. “And activate all the prior knowledge that you know your students will have, but that is exactly a strength of a chatbot.”
Tuttle also stresses the benefits of this one-to-one learning.
“With the help of AI, everyone can have their own customized lesson plan, their own customized tutor in their pocket, on their screen, available to them 24/7,” said Tuttle.
Huey, who has taught writing at UConn for 13 years, said she has her students use Microsoft Copilot to discover its limits and biases, and how its writing differs from humans. She said she wants her students to compare and contrast material they read to Copilot’s paraphrased version and ask themselves if anything got lost in the translation.
Tuttle said he doesn’t promote or ban AI use in his class, but he wants transparency.
“I want you to tell me how you used it, in what circumstance and I want you to evaluate it critically as opposed to using AI to get some response and then cutting and pasting it and passing it off as your own,” he said.
Tuttle said the best time to use AI is as a starting point or when one is familiar with an area, but to always be skeptical of results.
“It becomes like this magic button that they press to skip the entire process of learning about something and the results that they get, they often look pretty good,” said Tuttle. “They are often stated very confidently and yet because the students are so unfamiliar with the topic, the student is going to have no idea that the results were flawed.”
Jennifer Nevill, a second-semester journalism major at UConn, said she mainly uses AI in classes where she is unfamiliar with the material to brainstorm ideas when she is stuck. She said there are ways it can be used ethically and unethically by students.
“It can help if it’s used properly, but I think a lot of times people just use it as a shortcut,” said Nevill. “So I feel like it depends on their motives.”
Tuttle recommends that professors try to create assignments that involve creativity and trial and error, making it harder for AI to provide a response.
Stephen Stifano, a professor in the Department of Communication, does exactly this. Stifano said he does not use AI in his classroom, preferring to build assignments himself so he knows exactly what is being taught and learned.
“I try to measure process and to measure how students are developing and working through things and what students can do with original work,” said Stifano. “I’ve had to think very intentionally about shifting assignments or shifting rubrics on existing assignments to make sure that’s being captured.”
Stifano said he can see both sides to using AI in the classroom.
“I think a lot of the pros are having another potential voice in the teaching and learning experience,” said Stifano. “The cons are that it has created a number of spaces where traditional methods of assessing student learning are kind of rendered invalid.”
He said that if students are unethically using AI, then they won’t be able to obtain skills that set them apart.
“So students, I think the line is when you’re using it to take advantage of assignments and not putting in the thought work and it’s leaving you unprepared to master the subject area,” said Stifano.