The rapid advance of artificial intelligence in the world of higher education has continued with the report that Harvard University has plans to use an AI chatbot as part of its introductory computer science course. The bot is designed to help students understand code and improve it, as well as to answer common basic questions, freeing up teaching assistants and professors to deal with more complex concerns.
Some believe that it’s a first step toward a reimagining of the role of human instructors.
Dr. Ivory Toldson, professor of counseling psychology at Howard University and national director of education innovation and research for the NAACP
The technology is already making an impact in the classroom aside from applications like chatbots, according to Dr. Trey Conatser, director of the Center for the Enhancement of Learning and Teaching at the University of Kentucky, and a member of the school’s ADVANCE committee, which studies the opportunities and challenges of AI in university settings.
Professors in creative fields, like writing, have found ways to incorporate AI into their teaching, cleverly taking advantage of the technology’s limitations. Some, for example, are having students use tools like ChatGPT to respond to prompts and then having them analyze the flaws in the bot’s responses.
“It can show students that the writing is mechanically pretty correct and stylistically pretty clean, [but] there’s lots of different choices we can make when we’re writing, and a lot of that might fall through the cracks for some of these platforms,” said Conatser. “So, the students learn a little bit about how you can strategize as a writer, and they learn about how you can make different moves in your writing that respond to specific needs.”
Others are teaching information literacy by having students fact-check bots’ responses to research questions.
