The four E’s of how Higher Education should be reacting to Generative AI
Concurrent Session 7
Brief Abstract
How should higher education be reacting to generative AI? In considering this question as the chief digital learning officer at a community college, the presenter has framed their thoughts into four buckets, or rather, four E’s. Come explore this framework and share best practices from your own institution.
Extended Abstract
How should higher education be reacting to generative AI? In considering this question as the chief digital learning officer at a community college, the presenter has framed their thoughts into four buckets, or rather, four E’s. Come explore this framework and share best practices from your own institution.
- Empowering our faculty with tools to make informed decisions
- Enhancing or rethinking traditional assessments
- Educating our faculty and students on how to use AI ethically and appropriately
- Embracing generative AI in teaching, and to boost instructor productivity
The first two Es are reactive and focus on promoting academic integrity in an age of artificial intelligence. The latter two Es are proactive and focus on preparing students for future careers where generative AI promises to be commonplace.
Nearpod will be used to engage the audience and to crowdsource ideas through digital “collaborate boards”, between each of the four sections in this presentation.
Empowering our faculty with tools to make informed decisions
There are varying opinions on the use of online plagiarism detection tools, remote proctoring, browser lockdown and identity verification solutions, as tools to combat cheating with generative AI. The presenter believes in empowering faculty with the technological infrastructure needed to promote academic integrity as they see fit, allowing instructors to make their own decisions on whether to use the technologies, and how to interpret or act on the results. However, tools like these are just a band-aid on the problem and should not be viewed as the solution.
Enhancing or rethinking traditional assessments
A more sustainable solution to combatting the use of generative AI for cheating is to rethink our curriculum. Can we update our assignments to require active learning, original research, timely issues, hands-on projects, or localized knowledge? Can we ask students to create something rather than to respond? Rather than a traditional test or essay, can we ask students to record a video presentation? Could they create a podcast, infographic, or screencast; or demonstrate their learning in a different way altogether? The assessment strategies employed here will look different in every discipline and really every course, but ultimately, developing creative and authentic assessments will promote a deeper level of engagement and understanding, while simultaneously discouraging academic misconduct.
Educating our faculty and students on how to use AI ethically and appropriately
The first two Es focused on ways to combat cheating with generative AI, recognizing that this topic is currently on many of our minds. However, the presenter’s belief is that we should be embracing AI in higher education, and our focus should be on educating students on how to use these tools responsibly. Without a doubt, generative AI will be part of our students' future careers. We need to educate our faculty on how to integrate AI into the curriculum, so they in turn can provide opportunities to our students to learn how to use these tools. With this in mind, it’s also important that we update academic integrity policies and create syllabi statements to make it clear to students what our expectations are.
Embracing generative AI in teaching, and to boost instructor productivity
We see major companies like Microsoft and Google investing billions into the future of generative AI, and it will soon be built into the productivity applications that most of us use daily. The EdTech market is moving just as quickly to develop tools for researching, teaching, and learning with AI, and we have currently only scratched the surface, as the technology promises to evolve rapidly over the next few years. As educators we should be leading by example, by ethically embracing generative AI technologies to improve our own processes and workflows. Administrators, instructional designers, librarians, faculty, and other higher education professionals alike, can all find opportunities to save time and boost productivity with these tools.