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Artificial Intelligence for Faculty: Using AI in the Classoom

 AI in The Classroomuniversity classroom

Where to start? Below are links that can help instructors think about how to adapt AI in the classroom by exploring various use cases and examples, when to employ LLMs in the classroom and when not to,  and teaching students about the transparent, ethical and responsible use of AI  in academic research. _________________________________________

Chatbots and Pedagogy

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Assignment Considerations

Before assigning students to work on projects involving AI chatbots, make sure to review the privacy policy of the tool(s) you've selected. Also consider what benefit you may be providing the developer by requiring your students to conduct free labor to improve the tool's algorithm.

Some of the information below is from "ChatGPT & Education" by Torrey Trust, Ph.D., and is licensed under CC BY NC 4.0

ChatGPT Privacy Policy

OpenAI (the company that designed ChatGPT) collects data from ChatGPT users.

  •     The privacy policy states that this data can be shared with third-party vendors, law enforcement, affiliates, and other users.
  • Do not provide a student’s full name and associated class grade to ChatGPT to write emails, this is a potential FERPA violation (in the United States) for sharing a student’s educational record (with OpenAI) without their permission. Read more about FERPA at WVC.
  •     This tool should not be used by children under 13 (data collection from children under 13 violates the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Rule - COPPA).
  • You can change your ChatGPT Settings to not train the model on the content you provide. But this is not the default.The default is to collect everything you or your students enter.
  • You can have your account removed.

TIP: Before asking your students to use ChatGPT or any other generative AI tool, please read over the privacy policy with them and allow them to opt out if they do not feel comfortable having their data collected and shared as outlined in the policy.

ChatGPT & Free Labor

Asking students to use ChatGPT provides free labor to OpenAI. ChatGPT is in its infancy and has been released as a free research preview (OpenAI, 2022). It will continue to become a more intelligent form of artificial intelligence… with the help of users who provide feedback to the responses it generates.

A blog post from Autumm Caines (2022), Instructional Designer at the University of Michigan – Dearborn, outlines a few tips to mitigate this free labor, including:

  • Not asking students to create ChatGPT accounts and instead doing instructor demos;
  • Encouraging students to use burner email accounts (to reduce personal data collection) if they choose to use the tool;
  • Using one shared class login.

Caines includes some interesting thoughts on students working themselves out of future jobs by using ChatGPT. We currently cannot find research to support this.

Source: Source: "Chatbots and Critical Pedagogy" by Kristen Palmer, Butler University is licensed under CC BY-NC 4.0

 

Please see AI and Ethical Concerns for further information on this topic.