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AI and Teaching

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OK, but what did this professor respond? How does he explain the need to do these assignments without AI?

As for the “students complained” part, yes, students complain. They also breathe. How is this interesting?

Instead of this directionless moaning, people could talk about how they change their teaching as a result of AI. How did the professor change his assignments? What new learning goals did he formulate?

Yes, we’ll have to adjust our teaching in response to AI. Let’s maybe discuss that instead of expressing shock that reality exists.

7 responses to “AI and Teaching”

  1. Stringer Bell Avatar
    Stringer Bell

    Can you talk about how you’ve changed your teaching as a result of this development?

    It’s funny, the class I taught last year is fairly mathematical but nobody seems to have cheated on the homework problem sets. Students who didn’t understand the problems left a blank space. There were many incorrect solutions too, some of them grossly so. Which any of their friends (or chatgpt) would’ve picked up on, had they consulted anyone or anything other than themselves. After reading these doom and gloom accounts of the state of academia, I’m feeling quite proud that my students preferred to get a zero on their homework problems rather than cheat using AI.

    They did use AI in their final reports. The level of sophistication in the writing was just not believable, given what I knew about them from my interactions in class. One girl requested her midterm exam to be in Chinese (she said a simple google translate would work, and I didn’t need to make any more effort than that) and I was fine with that. Her final project report seemed to have been written by Shakespeare lol.

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  2. Avatar
    Anonymous

    What I do, and it is unoriginal: individual oral exams (discussions) and in-class written tasks, with a surprise topic every time, base on readings and class discussions. More or less the same evaluations in language courses. My new elementary SP course will be taught online, but with minimal online resources, even with a regular non-digital textbook, and with discussions as evaluations. Needless today that students run to take other classes.

    Do you have other ideas?

    Ol.

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  3. cliff arroyo Avatar
    cliff arroyo

    “how they change their teaching as a result of AI”

    Most of what I do doesn’t lend itself to AI… but I’ve stopped a certain kind of take home assignment (actually stopped that during covid forced remote teaching and never took it up again….).

    I concentrate on in class tasks and discussions (nb it’s very, very, very hard to get Polish students to actively ask questions, it’s not encouraged at any stage of education they go through previously).

    The take home things they do have to do require dialogue with me too.

    On the other hand, most Polish colleagues either don’t realize how much it can be (or is being) used. I was on a administrative committee and in one meeting the topic of students using AI came and they were wanting to use online (AI?) sources to detect if student work was being done by AI…. and they spent a lot of time discussing what kind of punishments should be used… (head to desk).

    I volunteered that AI style is pretty easy to recognize and got looked at as if I’d announced I had just arrived from Mars…

    These are the same people who don’t realize that students we get now are fundamentally different from students 20 years ago (not to mention when they were students) and they consistently make predictions about student behavior or make decisions for students based on information that’s decades out of date (despite almost daily contact with students)…. “the hands fall” as they say here.

    Mostly I just don’t stress about it by remembering: I can’t learn for the students they have to do that themselves and if they’re that committed to not learning then there’s not much I can do. My job isn’t to hector them or force them to study but to give them information on _how_ to study and learn which includes learning how to make decisions about how reliable sources are. If they don’t realize AI is not that reliable then… the future will be interesting.

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    1. Clarissa Avatar
      Clarissa

      I also do a lot more oral graded work. Students write essays at the lab during class time, and I see the entire process. There’s no more take home writing but it would be useless anyway. Writing doesn’t work without constant supervision. I haven’t done any take-home writing for many years, so it’s not even AI.

      We should ask ourselves why we are teaching skills that the AI can do. For example, compositions on generic topics. Why are they necessary?

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  4. Avatar
    Anonymous

    What a load of absolute nonsense. While it wasn’t an AI, when I was in 6th Grade my math teacher Mrs. Taylor demanded that we be able to do all the calculations in class by hand or in our head without using a calculator.

    The students in my class told her why can’t we use a calculator. She told us we might not always have one available and thus needed to know how to do this off hand.

    Ironically years later I now work in an industry where we do a lot of math. Calculators are everywhere including in our pockets (cellphones), but the amount of math we tend to do by hand or by rough estimation in our heads is a surprising amount. So as it turns out she was wrong, but correct at the same time.

    These students have a lot of legitimate grievances towards the education system. This is not one of those. Also my personal opinion, using an AI to write your essays for you should be considered cheating as you weren’t doing the work. Having it look up info or help come up with ideas, heck even using it to proofread are all fine, but going by the article they were wanting it to do the work for them.

    • – W

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    1. Clarissa Avatar
      Clarissa

      The professor is not doing his job if he assigns the kind of generic essay topics that can be written by AI. The essays I assign no AI can do because they are specific to my course material. And you have to do the assigned readings.

      This is a problem of lazy professors who want to assign the same shallow crap for decades. In my experience, that’s 80% of professors.

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    2. random reader Avatar
      random reader

      Last year, I had a student complaining to me why I am still giving in class exams that require memorization in the age of AI. The problem is that when you are learning about any field, there are basic building blocks that have to be memorized and easily recalled. Without mastering those building blocks, no amount of information (no matter how easily available) will help. Actually, the complaint looks exactly the same to me as when we were complaining to our professors a couple of decades ago that memorization of the material is not necessary because you can always look it up in a textbook.

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